He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands.
It's not that unusual for a film noir to be influenced by ones that came before it, but 1959's City of Fear is pretty much a straight-up replay of 1950's Panic in the Streets crossed with 1955's Kiss Me Deadly, substituting a radioactive substance for the pneumonic plague. Unlike Kiss Me Deadly, though, City of Fear's "great whatsit" is given a name -- Cobalt-60 -- and ultimately, the treatment of it is much less explosive.
Coming in at a lean 75 minutes, the film re-teams director Irving Lerner with his Murder by Contract star Vince Edwards, who plays an escaped convict who busts out of San Quentin with a canister containing what he believes is a pound of pure heroin (which he expects to get a million dollars for), but it turns out to be hot for a completely different reason -- and that reason is slowly killing him. Not wishing to cause a panic, Los Angeles police chief Lyle Talbot and lieutenant John Archer call in radiology expert Steven Ritch (who co-wrote the script with Robert Dillon) to see if his squad of elite Geiger counter jockeys can smoke Edwards out before the general public has to be informed of the terrible danger they're in.
In addition to recalling Panic in the Streets and Kiss Me Deadly, City of Fear also prefigures Repo Man with its story of an outsider ferrying something around Los Angeles that is fatal to most anybody who comes into contact with it. For Edwards, that includes his fiercely protective fiancée (Patricia Blair), his former boss/main supplier (Joseph Mell), and a petty hoodlum (Sherwood Price) who picks the wrong action to try to horn in on. And in addition to Edwards, the other major returnee from Murder by Contract is director of photography Lucien Ballard, who was capable of doing amazing things no matter what budget he was given. Lastly, it's worth noting that this was one of the first feature films to be scored by Jerry Goldsmith, whose work was already quite distinctive. Suffice it to say, it wasn't long before he moved on to bigger and better things.