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Such a frustrating disappointment

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I'm having a problem understanding all the reviewers who call this film 'under-rated'. In fact, for me at least, the reviews it received are, if anything, a little too high. I love Cooper and Widmark generally as actors but Cooper's performance is wooden and he seems to be just reading his lines in places while Widmark is a caricature of the gambler/adventurer and comes across as unreal. Hayward is HORRIBLY miscast as a tough, resourceful woman and we never do see the love and devotion that is supposed to be driving her to rescue her 'husband'...she sure doesn't otherwise act like a devoted wife. The writing, despite the normally skilled writers is quite lackluster and bland and there are far too many long shots which do nothing for the story development and are just window dressing and filler using the lovely landscape shots. The scene involving Cooper putting a whooping on our young bounty hunter is laughably pathetic as he falls and STAYS down in the fire over and over......cringingly terrible and I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I think this movie was justifiably overlooked by time....it's a second rate effort by otherwise skilled actors and it's clear they didn't 'gel' at all.

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.

No one will doubt that "Garden of Evil" has a great cast. Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell are leads; Hugh Marlowe and Victor Mendoza are in supporting roles; and Rita Morena has something a little more than a cameo. But a cast is only as good as their performances. And their performances depend a great deal on the script they have with which to work. This film fails miserably mostly because of a terrible script. And the acting is generally sub-par for most of the cast – and very bad by Gary Cooper.The DVD I watched had a bonus with it on the making of this film. It is referred to as a morality tale about greed, good and evil. But the script is so terrible that it ruins everything about the story. A couple of other reviewers saw the same thing. The writers tried to make the Cooper and Widmark roles philosophical. Ergo, the terse, flat replies, especially by Cooper. They come across as wisecracks or put-downs. Then, Widmark's character waxes poetic frequently about any situation. Again, to what point or avail? Susan Hayward's Leah Fuller is driven to find help to rescue a man caught in a cave-in. Well, is it her husband, or isn't it? He doesn't call her honey or darling, but "You," a person who came back. She doesn't call him darling or honey or husband. We don't ever know if they are man and wife until he's killed by Indians and they bury him on the trail. Leah takes her wedding ring off and presses it into the dirt over his grave.Is she driven by love, gold or what? The screenplay raises many questions in the minds of the audience, and it never answers most of them. Hayward is OK in her role, even if we never learn exactly what her aims may be. Mitchell overacts, and Widmark's Fiske is a very talkative role that seems to be philosophical but doesn't make sense much of the time. We never know why Marlowe doesn't seem to have affection for Leah. Was he driven by her to look for gold? Did she marry him so that he would find a gold mine for her, or was it for love? Or both? The most disappointing and frustrating role to me is Cooper's Hooker. Toward the end we find out that he formerly was a sheriff. But now he's a fortune hunter, along with the rest, heading West on a steamship for the gold fields of California. His lines are so poor, I can't believe he would take this part in a movie. They seem to affect his whole character and he is wooden throughout the film. Cooper was 53 when this movie was made, and he died seven years later of prostate cancer. I thought he may have been ill in this film because he seemed very old, and never is there a close-up of his face. Yet he made a few very good films after this one.Then, there are the Indians. Did Apaches range as far south as the jungles of southern Mexico? When Hooker and Fiske shoot the Indians pursuing them on the cliff trail, they must have been terrible shots – or they shot the horses. I think every Indian that fell over the cliff screamedThe only reason this movie gets even five stars from me is for the scenery. This is one of the first films shot in Cinemascope, which was the invention of Fox Films. I remember reading or hearing a commentary recently about one of the top directors who didn't like the wide panorama format of Cinemascope. But this clearly was a movie for that. And, its sweeping panoramas and vistas shot in the mountains and jungles of southern Mexico are beautiful to behold. It's just too bad that Fox wasn't as interested in having a movie with a very good screenplay as it was in filming as many movies as it could in its new format.In this case, the format is the only reason to see this movie. Unless one wants to see a top cast in a poor movie with a terrible script and some weak to very bad performances. If viewers are interested in seeing a Western about gold and greed, I recommend a couple of excellent films. "Mackenna's Gold" of 1969 has a top notch cast with Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Keenan Wynn, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey and Julie Newmar. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" of 1948 won three Oscars and starred Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Bruce Bennett.

Garden Of Evil is an entertaining and well made Technicolor/Cinemascope adventure that shows a part of Mexico's interior not usually shown in western pictures.The plot involves Gary Cooper and his treasure seeking pals being paid to rescue Susan Hayward's husband from a collapsed goldmine located in the supposedly cursed title area. Little do they know that the local superstitious natives are enraged at their encroachment.Things get a little odd with every character (save the always laid back Cooper) becoming very melodramatic, especially Hugh Marlowe as Hayward's husband. His performance crosses the line into overacting as every bit of dialog he mutters is in the form of a rant!Also on the verge of of overacting is Cameron Mitchell as the "kid" of the bunch. In my mind's eye he'll always be the older overweight actor I remember from numerous films of the late sixties and early seventies. It's very strange to see him young and lean.It was a good call on the part of the filmmakers to not show the furious natives until near the end and then only show brief glimpses. As the unseen menace, it really heightened the atmosphere of dread and helped build tension, making the eventual appearance of the Indians a frightening matter.The final act is exciting, scary, and suspenseful.