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

***Unique 50’s Western takes place in coastal Mexico and the volcanic interior***

A desperate woman (Susan Hayward) hires three gringos and a Mexican to help save her husband (Hugh Marlowe) trapped in a gold mine several days away in the volcanic jungles of Mexico. The men she enlists are played by Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, Cameron Mitchell and Víctor Manuel Mendoza. Rita Moreno has a memorable bit part singing a song at a saloon.

"Garden of Evil” (1954) is an unusual 50’s Western in that it takes place completely in former Aztecan areas of Mexico. The sceneries of the coast, jungles, deserts and (authentic) volcanic zones are magnificent and augmented by Bernard Herrmann’s score, which was his only one for a feature-length Western. The movie was remade as “Find a Place to Die” 24 years later, one of the few truly worthwhile Spaghetti Westerns due to its somber tone and quality characters rather than caricatures typical of Italo Westerns.

This is basically a trail movie (the Western version of a road movie) in that a lot of the story consists of a small group traveling the imposing wilderness, similar to “The Train Robbers” (1973), but with jungle footage.

The film runs 1 hour, 40 minutes, and was shot in Mexico as follows: The “colonial town" of Tepatzlan; the jungle areas alongside the Los Concheros River near Acapulco; Parícutin Mountain, which was surrounded by black volcanic sands; and the village of Guanajuato; meanwhile interior scenes were shot at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City.

GRADE: B

Susan Hayward always was a little better at playing the feistier characters, and with her "Leah" role here, she certainly has a good try. She manages to convince three disparate men to travel with her from Mexico to a cave deep inside Apache territory to rescue her gold-mining husband who is trapped there. "Hooker" (Gary Cooper), "Fiske" (Richard Widmark) and "Fuller" (Hugh Marlow) have the uneasiest of truces between them at the best of times, but off they all go on some set-piece escapades to deliver the man. Hayward does plenty of smouldering here, but the rest of the story is pretty devoid of much action. There isn't much chemistry going on as each try to outmanoeuvre the other, stay alive and hopefully reap the $2,000 reward money she has promised them (which she quite possibly hasn't even got!). It does look good, plenty of grand outdoor cinematography, some lovely sunsets etc., but the title of this western is probably the most intriguing thing about it. Pity, had the direction been a bit tighter and more inspired, this could have been much better. Watchable, though, just not memorable.