Garden of Evil

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 w...

Unique 50s 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 50s 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 Herrmanns score, which was his only one for a feature-length Western. ...

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 ...

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 ...