Garden of Evil (1954)

Big credentials, indifferent result. 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 myself. 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