Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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.

Jeff (actionrating.com) Skip it – There's a reason you probably haven't heard of this Gary Cooper western. Actually, I wouldn't call it a western at all. It's more of a psychological thriller, except it isn't thrilling. The plot revolves around a woman who hires a band of men, including Cooper and Richard Widmark, to help rescue her husband. The only problem is that he's deep in Apache country. When the men find out there may be a treasure map involved, conflict breaks out amongst themselves. It's evident that the director didn't want to make a normal western. I'll give him that because it's definitely out of the ordinary. The only problem is that a western needs to entertain, and this one doesn't. The movie attempts to reveal profound breakthroughs in human nature but doesn't do that either. I rarely use the B-word for an "action" movie, but this movie is just Boring.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx Sometimes it's difficult to believe the films that come your way. I've had my fill of hokey 1950s studio westerns with awful scores, Garden of Evil though is like a Venus fly trap in a bouquet of daisies. The closest comparator I could muster is Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The story is about three gringo chancers who are on their way up the coast by steamer to California to join in the Gold Rush, when their steamer has engine failure and has to take harbour in sleepy Puerto Miguel, Mexico. Faced with weeks on end of boredom the men agree to follow a woman in need into the interior, in order to rescue her husband from a cave-in in their gold mine.The Garden of Evil is really is a downright theological movie at times. An idea enunciated in Antichrist is that "nature is Satan's church", and that flesh is this miserable thing. In this movie the men get lost in an almost supernaturally beautiful Mexican interior, over which quite the most exquisite and foreboding Bernard Hermann score plays, led on by lust only, truly in a Garden of Evil. Even the way a guy takes a beating in this film seemed theological, he literally starts blubbering like a toddler afterwards and I was reminded of Matthew 18:3, "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven". The world we are told in the Bible, is a veil of tears, and it certainly seems that way in this film, at one point Hooker eerily proclaims that, "when that sun goes down, someone always goes with it.".Director of photography Milton Krasner seems to have set out to make this film a last hurrah to three-strip Technicolor (the very last Hollywood Techicolor film was filmed in the same year as Garden of Evil was released), soon to be entirely replaced with the inferior-quality but cheaper Eastmancolor. When I got to the bar scene in Puerto Miguel a few minutes in, I stopped the player and broke open a bottle of calvados, that's how purty the film looks, it required celebrating with spirits. There's this stream of blue light entering the courtyard of the bar that started up creaky wheels in some ancient crypt of my brain. The rest of the film is like a travelogue in unfamiliar Mexico, full of banana trees and rolling verdant hills, like green sand carved by rivulets.The movie's take on love is as pungent as the rest of the film. Evidently psychotic takes on women as scarlet harlots, lusty beacons leading men on, alternate with equally disturbed fantasies of purity, and also a more reasonable dualism/ambivalence. Romantic love in Garden of Evil is however something inevitably unsatisfactory, riven by lust, doubt and the chasm that separates two entities. The male gaze is undoubtedly key to the movie's flavour, skewed even when Leah is praised, "She's like something hammered out of silver"; even then she's a thing not a person. The key image for me is when Leah walks into a ruined church and stands still in a diagonal shaft of light. Is she weaving a spell on the men, presenting a vision of supernatural beauty to stagger them, has she gone to pray, or is she simply ruminating and unawares?So Garden of Evil is also chock full of the most gob-smacking gorgeous matte shots, maybe they're so well done people aren't aware that some of them are matte shots, but this film should almost be the textbook on the subject. Offhand the only matte shot I've liked more is from Tarzan the Ape Man, 1932 (actually another cliff overhanging green plains).Did I mention that this film has Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, and Susan Haywood? What are you waiting for! (Honesty bids me point out that Gary Cooper acts as if he doesn't have the faintest idea what the movie is about, similarly to his role in The Fountainhead).

Robert J. Maxwell I don't think anyone would argue that this is one of the better Westerns ever made. The story has Susan Hayward's husband trapped in a gold mine in a hinterland of Mexico inhabited by Apaches. She finds four men at loose ends in a seaside cantina -- the strong and silent Gary Cooper, the cynical gambler Richard Widmark, the hypomanic and libidinous Cameron Mitchell, and the proud and competent Victor Mendoza, who is a Mexican, you can tell, because he wears a big floppy sombrero and speaks only Spanish. Hayward hires these four guys to ride with her through dangerous country, rescue her husband, and return with the couple to town. Hayward was a decent actress in the right part, but as a low-down gold digger in Terra Incognita she doesn't cut it. Her grooming is impeccable, as if Sidney Guilaroff were hiding behind one of the cactus.The film didn't cost much to make, though the principles were all box-office boffo at the time. I guess that's where most of the money went, to salaries and to the film's technology. It's in glorious Cinemascope, the movies' answer to television, and the Michoacan locations are glorious. Bernard Hermann contributed the only musical score he ever wrote for a Western.Nothing -- nada -- seems to have been left over to construct a coherent narrative. Nobody's motives are especially clear. Worse than that, sometimes they're incomprehensible. Try to figure out what the relationship between Susan Hayward and her husband, Hugh Marlowe, are. Does he love her? Does she love him? Do they hate each other? It isn't that such ambivalent attitudes aren't found in real life. They're the stuff of it. It's just that the writers seemed to have no idea what they were trying to get across.And it's the same with the other characters. Richard Widmark's role, for instance, is written at the beginning almost as a familiar stereotype, the untrusting and untrustworthy man of fortune who may either sacrifice his life for a dame in distress or strike like a rattlesnake -- but he turns out to be just another one of the good guys. The Apaches are given a motive for their banzai attacks, but what a motive it is! They don't mind two loners digging away in a mine, but SIX people trigger the charge of the light brigade.The dialog is reflects the overall conception of character, listless and done as if by numbers. "If the earth was made of gold, I guess people would kill just for a handful of dirt," Cooper philosophizes. What does that mean? None of that takes away from the visual imagery. Man, volcanic rocks and all, it is a splendidly scenic place where certain types might be happy to roll around naked in the black ash. Nice job, there.I can't help mentioning the audio commentary on the DVD. It's all about Bernard Hermann's score, and it's both instructive and amusing, though the four contributors didn't intend it to be funny. Hermann's biographer is heard, along with a film historian and two film composers, and they sit around bitching about how in today's industry the composer is ground under the heels of the director and those to whom they contemptuously refer as "sound designers." They all laud Hermann, one of those filmic composers who, unlike Henry Mancini and some others, had never written "tunes" into their musical scores. You won't hear "Laura", "Moon River", or "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'". Instead Hermann included diverse themes or leitmotifs for the settings and characters, sometimes only a few notes. As one commentator puts it, it's as if a Hermann score consisted of endless repetitions of "Jeepers Creepers," without ever getting to, "Where'd you get those eyes?"