City of Fear (1959)

February 1959 release date (1958 copyright date)

Directed by Irving Lerner

Screenplay by Robert Dillon, Steven Ritch

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Edited by Robert Lawrence

Cinematography by Lucien Ballard

Vince Edwards as Vince Ryker

Lyle Talbot as Chief Jensen

John Archer as Lt. Mark Richards

Steven Ritch as Dr. John Wallace

Patricia Blair as June Marlowe

Kelly Thordsen as Detective Sgt. Hank Johnson

Joseph Mell as Eddie Crown

Sherwood Price as Pete Hallon

Kathie (“Cathy”) Browne as Jeannie

Tony Lawrence as the sailor

Jean Harvey as the motel operator

Michael Mark as the restaurant proprietor

Distributed by Columbia Pictures Corporation

It has happened again. I have seen another film noir with a contemporary theme: fear of nuclear radiation and radiation poisoning. The current buildup of tensions with North Korea—and perhaps now Russia—have many in the United States worried about the possibility of nuclear attack and looking forward to the planned summit between North Korea and the United States. City of Fear plays on a similar theme in 1959 in the post–World War II world, when the United States was locked in a cold war and U.S. citizens feared nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. (If you are an ex-Russian spy today, you might also be worried about nerve agent attacks.)

The other two films noir with contemporary themes that I have seen recently are The Glass Wall (immigration and refugees) and The Killer That Stalked New York (disease epidemic). Click on each film title to see my separate posts on each film.

City of Fear starts with progressive, frenetic music, complete with (dare I say it!) beatnik-style bongos. An ambulance travels down a country road, with day-for-night photography. Two men are in the front seat. The man in the passenger seat complains of being sick. Vince Ryker (played by Vince Edwards) is the driver. The two men are escaping from prison, which becomes clear a bit later. Viewers learn that Vince has killed someone with a knife. The two men in the ambulance argue because the man in the passenger is getting sicker and sicker. During the course of their argument, the man in the passenger seat is killed accidently by Vince. Vince decides to pull over another car using the ambulance’s siren. The last shot before the film cuts to the credits is of Vince leaning into the driver’s side window.

After the credits, Vince Ryker is driving the car that he pulled over and he has assumed the car owner’s identity. He has no trouble answering all the police officer’s questions when he is stopped at a police roadblock. Vince is desperate to get away for several reasons: murder, prison escape, and the metal canister in his possession. He believes that it contains heroin and is thus his ticket to freedom. (How he managed to obtain a canister of heroin is a detail that I cannot remember right now, but I’ll just have to see City of Fear again.)

The film cuts to a scene in a police department with men talking about another man having the lives of 3 million people in his hands. The three men are Lieutenant Mark Richards, Chief Jensen, and Detective Sargent Hank Johnson. A fourth man, Dr. John Wallace, comes to see Lieutenant Mark Richards. The doctor explains to the lieutenant that Vince doesn’t have a container of heroin, as Vince believes. He has a container of cobalt-60 in granular form. It is a radioactive substance. Within eighty-four hours of contamination via contact with such a substance, a person is dead. The container is not made of lead, which would have provided protection; it is made of steel, which is porous for cobalt-60. The symptoms described by Dr. Wallace in City of Fear match pretty closely the symptoms described by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although the script emphasizes the visual symptoms that are easiest for an actor to portray on film.

For more information about cobalt-60, click on each of the following list items:

◊ Wikipedia

◊ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States

(This blog post about City of Fear contains spoilers.)

The film juxtaposes the desperate hunt for Vince and Vince’s attempts to profit from what he thinks is valuable heroin. June Marlowe, Vince’s girlfriend, meets him at the motel where he is staying after his prison escape. It’s not clear why June is attracted to Vince. She doesn’t seem to have any clear goals of her own, except to be with Vince (and it was probably perfectly acceptable to have only this one goal in 1959). Here is part of their conversation:

• Vince: “What do you think I am, some kind of animal or something? Don’t you think I know what’s good in life and what’s bad? I know what’s good. So do you, and you want it as bad as I do.”

• June: “Whatever you say, Vince.”

• Vince: “I’m not an animal. I’m a person. I want things, especially you.”

Viewers know that Vince is a killer, that he probably defines good and bad differently than a lot of people, and that he defines them both in terms of money and wealth. His girlfriend June is also a “thing” that he wants. But none of these details seem to bother June in the least. She remains loyal to Vince until radiation sickness, contracted through her own exposure to the canister that Vince carries around with him and to Vince himself, finally convinces her that her own life is now at stake.

The ending is very much of its period and makes the film seem a bit more dated than it would ordinarily. Today, Ryker’s body and the canister would be cordoned off, and no one without a hazmat suit would be able to get close to him! But the desperation for financial freedom and for a life without fear will always be relevant, I believe, and that relevancy is what fascinates me about City of Fear and film noir in general.