HotToastyRag Given the choice between Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, and Cameron Mitchell, who would you choose? Richard Widmark, duh! Watch Garden of Evil to see if Susan Hayward is as smart as you are. In the film, the three Americans are shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico, on their way to search for gold in California. Susan Hayward storms into town and offers $1,000 a piece if they ride with her back to a collapsed goldmine and rescue her husband. At first, Dick and Gary are only interested in the money, but soon they join Cameron's camp and start to notice the beauty of their travelling companion. I love Susan Hayward, so I was looking forward to some seriously steamy scenes with her and hunky Richard Widmark, but it wasn't that kind of a movie. There are battle scenes against the Apaches, a mysterious storyline, and a love triangle that will keep you on the edge of your seat, but that's all. While Susan is tough and sexy, Gary is monotonous and boring. The fact that he's even in contention is a puzzlement. If you like Suzy or Gary, or 1950s westerns, feel free to rent this one. It's not my favorite though, probably because I've only liked Gary Cooper in a couple of films, and this isn't one of them.

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).

donofthedial Beautiful location photography and a good score by Bernard Hermann...and that about warps it up for GARDEN OF EVIL.Gary Cooper seems very bored with his part.Richard Widmark seems there for a vacation and doesn't want to get too worked up, either.Cameron Mitchell and the Mexican dude really get excited over their thinly written parts.And Susan Hayward, once again, gets a part that suits her non-acting ability.Do Cooper or Widmark get any close-ups in this film? Almost everything in the film is a medium or long shot. They get chased by Apache Indians, but there is no visual way to really prove it. The camera seems about a mile away.This is one of those vapid tales that seems to write itself in a rolling and banal manner.Hayward comes charging into town to get help for her trapped husband in a gold mine. The boys ride out with her and it takes half the film for them to get there - perhaps a 3 or 4 days ride. It takes about 90 seconds for them to rescue him (Hugh Marlowe). They stay around the gold mine for a while and then ride back to town with Apaches on their trail.And that's the picture.These characters have little emotional involvement to involve *you* in the film. Why is everyone in the film so pre-involved with the other characters? They don't know each other. They have little or no history together. Does the film want us to believe that Susan Hayward is that alluring that these men become near instantly attached to her? She has nothing to offer except gold and sex.The film is little more than a beautifully colored cartoon with nicely staged horse-riding sequences and gorgeous panoramas in Cinemascope.