The Garden of Evil

The Garden of Evil is a 1954 technicolor (and cinemascope aspect ratio) Western.  The film has a first-rate cast:  Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell among others.  A young Rita Moreno sings in a cantina in the film's first ten minutes.  The picture has an ambitious and lyrical script featuring rather stilted and unnatural poetic dialogue.  The most remarkable aspect of the film is its use of memorable landscapes in Mexico for its locations.  Westerns are often constructed as a series of images of figures dwarfed by mighty and desolate terrain -- mountains and deserts.  The Garden of Evil adds to this familiar repertoire flooded savannahs with palm trees, mountain trails skirting frightful abysses, pampas with vast expanses of obsidian sand, and contorted, savage lava fields under dark ranges crenellated with cinder cones.  In the film's middle act, the characters are gathered next to a vast, lifeless lava field from which the steeple of a Mexican Baroque church rises like a corpse's finger accusing the heavens -- this is the church at San Juan Parangaricutiro ruined in the eruption of Paricutin in 1943.  I think the film is most noteworthy for its effective depiction of these unusual landscapes.  The picture is all of a piece, however, and the charred landscape of slag and ash seems to represent the ferocious passions of the characters, passions expressed in compressed and laconic poetry.  Henry Hathaway directed this curious attempt at an American art film in the Western genre.

A group of American gold-prospectors find themselves trapped in a tiny Mexican fishing village.  They've sailed around the Horn, aiming for the California gold fields, but their steamship has failed.  (We see a plume of smoke rising from the vessel in the picturesque Mexican bay.)  The men on the ship include Hooker, a taciturn older man (Gary Cooper), Richard Widmark's character, Fisk, a cynical poet and soldier of fortune and a hot-headed young bounty hunter, Daly (Cameron Mitchell).  Drinking mescal in the town's cantina, the men listen to a song performed by the very young and doe-eyed Rita Moreno.  Susan Hayward as Leah, the wife of a mining engineer, storms into the tavern and offers the men two-thousand dollars each if they will help her rescue her husband trapped by a cave-in in a mine about two days distant.  With a Mexican vaquero, the company of five depart, riding up a spectacular winding trail above a canyon to a mountain pass -- the riders have to jump across a ten-foot wide place where the narrow path has fallen into the gorge.  (The twisting cliff-side trail is an effective location although matte-work is required to establish its dizzying height above the canyon.)  The group spends the night at an abandoned Mission.  Apaches are abroad and have driven all of the settlers out of this part of the country.  There is tension among the men -- the hotheaded Daly tries to rape Leah.  Hooker beats him down and he falls repeatedly into their campfire.  Daly cries like a baby (an odd effect) as Hooker comforts him in a paternal way.  Hooker predicts that all of the men will be influenced to their doom by the femme fatale, Leah.  This is an odd prophecy because Susan Hayward is miscast in the role of Leah -- in the film, she's neither exotic nor glamorous enough to exude much in the way of sex appeal; instead, she seems to be a sturdy, practical girl-next-door type.  So the lyrical dialogue continuously characterizes her as a sort of Eve or Lilith, drawing men to their destruction is unconvincing -- it doesn't match what we see on screen.  We're told one thing and shown another.  After some more adventures, the group reaches the mine near the town buried in lava.  (This is where the church sticks up its accusing steeple above a jagged sea of black lava.)  The mining engineer is rescued, although his leg is badly broken.  By this time, the Apaches are threatening the company.  Leah perversely demands to be left behind, her bonfire as a beacon to mislead the Indians while the men ride back to the village at the bay.  Hooker will have none of his and he punches Leah, knocking her out, so that all can flee through the night.  (There's is lots of silvery, if unconvincing, day-for-night footage in this movie.)  The Indians pick off the members of the group one-by-one.  The mining engineer rides away in the dark (apparently to sacrifice himself) and his body is found crucified upside-down and shot through with arrows at the abandoned Mission.  At this point, the film's action revolves around the notion that someone must be left behind to save the others.  (This is by no means apparent - one would think that there would be strength in numbers; the movie seems driven by some arcane reference to current events with regard to its obsession with someone staying as a rear-guard to be sacrificed so that others can live,)  Here's a sample of the poetic style of the dialogue:  Hooker looking at the tortured corpse of the mining engineer says:  "This is his cross.  A cross is not a bad thing to see.  It can be beautiful.  We all have ours."  By the time, the party reaches the perilous winding mountain trail, it's just Hooker, Leah, and Fisk.  Hooker volunteers to stay behind and fight off the Apaches at the pass.  "I'm gonna stay here and fool around a little," he says.  But Fisk isn't about to give Hooker that privilege and the two men draw cards to see who will hold off the Indians at the pass.  (It seems to me that if they had spent more time fleeing and less arguing about matters of honor, they would have escaped without the need for these heroics.)  Fisk draws the low card (but he has contrived this because he is a card-sharp).  Hooker and Leah continue toward the village, leaping successfully over the broken part of the trail.  There are some gun shots and Hooker, unable to bear the thought of Fisk dying alone, goes back up the mountain, kills a few more Apaches, and finds Fisk dying on the trail where he has wiped-out the rest of the Indians.  "Somebody always stays .  Somebody always gets the job done," Hooker says.  He rides back down to Leah.  The sun is setting like a nuclear explosion over the sea.  Leah says that the village destroyed by the lava and the old mine was named by the parish priest at the abandoned Mission as "the garden of evil."  Hooker says:  "The garden of evil?  If the whole earth was made of gold, men would die for a handful of dirt."  An interesting notion, but a non sequitur it seems.  

The actors struggle with the weird Hemingway-styled dialogue.  And Susan Hayward is disastrously miscast.  But the movie is continuously exciting and shows us some landscapes with which we are unfamiliar.  The subject is classic -- a group of characters, who don't much like (or trust) one another, crossing a landscape deadly with all sorts of perils.  The film is one of those exercises in which you sense there's some kind of hidden agenda -- but I can't figure out what it might be.

Here's a place for me to tell an anecdote about Rita Moreno.  Ms. Moreno came to our little city some years ago -- she was probably about 60 at the time and still very glamorous.  She sang some songs, I think from West Side Story with the local symphony orchestra.  One of my partners went out to eat with her after the show and everyone enjoyed a few drinks.  Ms. Moreno, who was, by all accounts, a very gracious and kind woman, was friendly to everyone and, even, encouraged my law partner to "call her" if he intended to visit Los Angeles.  Whether she meant this seriously is unclear to me.  In any event, my partner planned a trip to LA and, a couple days before he left, he phoned her.  Unfortunately he failed to take into account the difference in time.  She said that she was an early riser and so my partner telephoned her at 8:30 Central time.  But, of course, this was 6:30 in Los Angeles and she was, in fact, asleep when the call reached her.  She was a little distant on the phone and, as far as I know, the meeting between the two did not occur.