CITY OF FEAR: a hair-raising thriller in the city of angels

"He's one man holding the lives of three million people in his hands" declares LA Police Chief Jensen (Lyle Talbot) rather ominously.

And what hands, attached as they are to the most disturbingly hairy pair of arms it's been my misfortune to see in a long time. It looks like actor Vince Edwards has two particularly thick and bristly doormats strapped to his biceps. The first time they appeared I thought his upper arms were heavily tattooed, which would have been in keeping with the character he's playing. Vince Ryker is a ruthless murderer who's just busted out of San Quentin and, at least according to cinema convention, convicts have a penchant for tattoos. What they don't have a penchant for, more surprisingly, is a haircut.
If you thought prisoners were forced to keep their hair short while behind bars then you've clearly not been studying cons from San Quentin. There's almost as much hair on Ryker's head as there is on his upper arms, and the stuff on his head is shaped into a quiff that would make Elvis jealous.
Where - you may be wondering - is all this fascination with Mr Edwards body hair leading us? To Los Angeles is the answer, in the company of a steel thermos flask with an unscrewable lid that Ryker has stolen from the prison hospital during his jailbreak. He thinks it contains a pound of pure heroin which he can sell to finance his fugitive lifestyle. What's actually inside is highly radioactive Cobalt 60 and, despite the unremovable lid, it's slowly poisoning him (while leaving every one of his hair follicles untouched). What's worse is what it could do to the population of LA if he ever manages to prise it open. Can the cops track him down before he turns the City of Angels into the world's largest cemetery?

1959's CITY OF FEAR has recently been released by Columbia as part of a 'film noir classics' DVD box set but it's really a crime thriller laced with Cold War nuclear annihilation paranoia. And it's a tight one at that, clocking in at just 75 minutes, which might lead one to presume that there's not a wasted minute, but surprisingly there is or - more accurately - there are. Plenty of them. Reportedly shot in just 7 days it appears to have been edited in 7 minutes by someone who was continually distracted by phone calls. There are endless, pointless shots of people doing stuff or just standing around which do absolutely nothing to advance the plot or add to the sum of our knowledge about what's going on. Some actually detract from that knowledge as I wasted precious minutes trying to figure what that last meaningless sequence meant.
Edwards is suitably animalistic as the protagonist no-one is rooting for, but the best entertainment is provided by veteran low budget film actor Talbot and John Archer as the only two senior police officers in LA, exchanging hackneyed cop dialogue in claustrophobic offices and barking orders like "get me a car!" into the intercom.
Not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, CITY OF FEAR is not even a particularly great B-movie but it's definitely worth a watch if you've not got anything better to do.