Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 23 June 1954 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. New York opening at the Roxy: 9 July 1954. U.S. release: July 1954. U.K. release: December 1954. London opening at the Odeon Marble Arch. Australian release: 14 October 1954. Sydney opening at the Plaza. 8,868 feet. 99 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Stranded in a Mexican fishing village, three American gold hunters agree to help rescue a man trapped in a remote mine.NOTES: Fox's 13th CinemaScope movie and the first to be photographed with an improved CinemaScope lens that provided greater clarity, sharpness and depth of field.VIEWER'S GUIDE: A borderline case. May be too violent for some children.COMMENT: Without CinemaScope it's doubtful if "Garden of Evil" would have recouped its negative cost (including three high-priced stars, plus lots of location lensing in the ruggedly picturesque mountainous wilds of Mexico). That it actually made a fair profit is a tribute to CinemaScope's box-office drawing power. Of course it's always possible that in the energetic yet stylish hands of Hollywood's master of action and location lensing, Henry Hathaway, and with stars like Cooper, Hayward and Widmark, the movie would have made money even in normal-screen black-and-white, but it would certainly have been a gamble. With CinemaScope (plus Bernard Herrmann's full-blooded, atmospheric score in stereophonic sound) there was never a day's worry that the film would fail to pull in the paying customers. This still is a finely crafted movie, with plenty of stirring Hathaway action including a heart-pounding chase climax down a steeply twisting, rock-strewn, narrow ledge of a mountain trail, plus appealing performances from a top group of charismatic players.

byfying This long-forgotten western boasts a great cast with Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell, filmed extensively in seldom seen remote Mexican locations. Most of the actors were underused, with the exception of Susan Hayward who gave a committed performance while both Coop and Widmark practically 'walked through' this film, albeit under arduous conditions. This is primarily due to a weak storyline which veteran director Henry Hathaway couldn't do anything about. A band of soldier of fortune landed somewhere in Mexico and met a woman(Hayward) who seek help to rescue her injured husband in a far away mine(gold) offering a large sum of money(gold coins). The ride took days with ominous attacks by Apache along the way. The rescue was a failure and the group had to ride back to safety for survival. A forgettable western.

Spikeopath It's gold rush time and en route to California, Hooker (Gary Cooper), Fiske (Richard Widmark), and Luke Daly (Cameron Mitchell) stop over in a small Mexican village. Here the three men hook up with Vicente Madariaga (Victor Manuel Mendoza) and are lured by a desperate Leah Fuller (Susan Hayward) to go rescue her husband John (Hugh Marlowe), who is trapped in a gold mine up in the mountains. Mountains where hostile Indians lay in wait, but the Apache are not the only thing to be worried about, the other is themselves.With that cast, Henry Hathaway directing, Bernard Herrmann scoring and CinemaScope inspired location work coming from a volcano region in Mexico: you would think that Garden Of Evil would be far more well known than it actually is. That it isn't comes as no surprise once viewing it for oneself.Hathaway's film has real good intentions, it wants to be a brooding parable about the effects of greed, a character examination as men are forced to question their motives. Yet the film is muddled and winds up being bogged down by its eagerness to be profound. That it looks fabulous is a bonus of course, yet with this story the locale seems badly at odds in the narrative. This is more Aztec adventure than Western, I kept expecting one of Harryhausen's skeletons, or a Valley Of Gwangi dinosaur to home into view, not Apache Indians, who quite frankly are miscast up there in them thar hills. Herrmann's score is terrific, truly, but it's in the wrong movie. It would be more at home in some science fiction blockbuster, or at least in some Jason & The Argonauts type sword and sandal piece.It has its good points, notably the cast who give compelling performances and some shots are to die for, with the final shot in the film one of the finest there is. But this is a wasted opportunity and proof positive that putting fine technical ingredients together can't compensate for an over ambitious and plodding script. 5/10

MARIO GAUCI This is a pretty good Western, from an expert in the field (Hathaway) – immeasurably aided by its star cast (Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark, Hugh Marlowe and Cameron Mitchell), a compelling plot line (three adventurers help a woman save her husband, trapped in a mine, then fight over her and the couple’s gold), the pleasant Widescreen photography (the format was still a new fad at the time), and a magnificent score (courtesy of the great Bernard Herrmann). Perhaps wisely, the script doesn’t overly stress the pretentiousness inherent in the film’s title. Incidentally, yet another contemporaneous Western pitting one woman among several desperate men in a remote landscape was THE NAKED SPUR (1953), one of the well-regarded series of Anthony Mann/James Stewart Westerns – as in that film, the central group here has to contend also with a horde of marauding Indians.Cooper, the nominal lead, had just had a career resurgence with his Oscar-winning performance in another genre outing – the classic HIGH NOON (1952); as I said in my review of YELLOW SKY (1948), which I’ve just watched, Widmark’s role here was kind of similar to the one he played in that earlier Western – though, by now, he had begun to stretch effectively from outright villain types. The two stars work well off each other: Cooper is laconic but experienced and essentially honest, while Widmark is cynical and opportunistic yet effortlessly charming; interestingly, Cooper was often paired with younger but equally tough men around this time – such as Anthony Quinn in BLOWING WILD (1953), Widmark here, Burt Lancaster in VERA CRUZ (1954) and Charlton Heston in THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE (1959).Mitchell’s brash and gullible character is pretty much a stock figure in this type of adventure: the scene where he’s provoked by Cooper into a confrontation, eventually exposing his innate cowardice, emerges as one of the film’s highlights. Marlowe and Hayward’s relationship, too, is typically lukewarm; the latter was one of the foremost dramatic actresses of the era, though she appeared in a fair number of action-oriented pictures. The supporting cast, then, includes only one prominent role for a Mexican – yet another member of the group who, in defiance of the Indian onslaught, expires in a hail of arrows – whereas young Rita Moreno’s saloon singer proves to be the only other female character in the film.P.S. I own a copy of the bare-bones R2 DVD of GARDEN OF EVIL; the upcoming R1 edition should be a SE and include an Audio Commentary – and, as far as I can tell, it’s only going to be available as part of a 3-Disc Collection also comprising two other classic Westerns from the Fox studio: THE GUNFIGHTER (1950; which I already own on R2 as well) and RAWHIDE (1951; not available elsewhere)...