Last night we found another Don Siegel movie, "Edge of Eternity" starring Cornel Wilde, who recently stood out in "Storm Fear" (reviewed a couple weeks ago) as a bank robber on the run. He's on the other side of the law here, playing a Sheriff's deputy in Kingman, Arizona. The movie starts with a struggle. A man gets out of his car at the edge of the Grand Canyon to take in the view with binoculars. While he's doing that, another man sneaks up, releases the emergency brake on his car, and pushes it toward the first man, intending to knock him off the cliff. But the first man rolls away. The car goes over the cliff. The two men engage in a punchout, and the second man falls into the Grand Canyon. The first man stumbles away. His car is gone, he's all beat up. He ends up wandering down the road where he babbles incoherently to a prospector. This scares the grizzled Old Timer, who runs off to look for Deputy Wilde. When he finds him, clocking speeders by the highway, he tells him about the crazy sounding man.
But Wilde's heard it all before. "Oh, c'mon Eli. Is this another one of your tall tales"? "No, I swear I saw him". Just then a car speeds by, driven by a pretty woman. Wilde starts his engine. "Okay, I promise I'll take a look, right after I issue her a citation". He takes off in pursuit. The woman is a reckless driver, doing 80mph around the hairpin turns. But when Wilde pulls her over, her beauty and her charm work to her advantage. "This time I'm only gonna cite you for speeding", he says, trying and failing to sound stern. "I'll even mark it down to 45mph. But you could've killed somebody, at the very least yourself. If I catch you driving like that again I'll throw the book at you". The woman is "Janice Kendon" (Victoria Shaw), the daughter of a gold mine magnate. The scene serves to hint at a possible future romance, but also to show off her driving skills. There will be a reason for that later on.
Wilde lets her go, then heads back to the station. When he gets there, Eli the prospector is waiting for him. "That man! The one I was telling you about? He's dead! Hangin' by his neck in the mining office"! This time, Wilde believes him. He takes Eli back to the office, where a man is indeed strung up. He looks about 60 and is wearing an expensive suit, but he has no wallet and therefore no identification. To Deputy Wilde, it looks and sounds like a suicide. After all, Eli said the man sounded crazy. We know, however, that it's the man from the beginning of the movie, who got into the fight on the cliffside. Someone has likely murdered him. If it was murder, there has to be a third man involved. But who? No one knows. Wilde turns the case over to his boss, "Sheriff Edwards" (Edgar Buchanan, aka "Uncle Joe", who this time is Movin' Kinda Slow at the Junction).
The Sheriff assigns Wilde to track down the hanged man's identity. He interviews people who might've seen him in the area, including "Bill Ward", who - before he played drums for Black Sabbath - was Jack Elam, the foreman for a bat guano mine. Wilde also goes back to talk to Janice Kendon, who lets on that the man's death has something to do with gold. "There's still 20 million dollars worth sitting underground. All those open mine shafts? Sometimes the locals go down there. But it takes a lot of know-how to locate a vein. Lots of equipment, too. Still, if someone got lucky, someone else might've wanted in on his strike. The suit that guy was wearing cost a lot of money". Being a fashion plate herself, she happens to know the tailor. This establishes that the man is originally from New York. An interview with a motel clerk I.D.s him.
It's an interesting premise for a murder mystery, and this one is intercut with romance. It's also a widescreen Eastmancolor epic, where the landscape is the backdrop for the storyline. Grand Canyon gold fever is the name of the game. Deputy Cornel Wilde is now sweet on Janice Kendon, who acts like she knows more than she's telling. Her younger brother "Bob" (Rian Garrick") is a terrible alcoholic and her father the mine owner doesn't like Wilde coming around. It's not your typical case-hardened Don Siegel movie. He spends a lot of time on close ups of Victoria Shaw's dazzling smile. Things do slow down a bit during these interludes, but Siegel makes up for it with a teeth gritting finale, having to do with the bat guano mine. Though the plot takes time to develop, the last third of the movie is well worth the wait. The location photography is spectacular. There's also a subtheme about a district attorney who's up for re-election and is trying to get rid of Cornel Wilde. Were it a little tighter, it could've earned Two Huge Thumbs Up. But "Edge of Eternity" is one of those ambitious crime flicks like Taylor Hackford's "Against All Odds", where instead of sticking to the nuts and bolts of Noir, the director includes an Epic Location and a Sweeping Romance. Even the titles are similar. It's still good enough to rate Two Bigs, however, so it's definitely recommended, and the picture is Blu-ray razor sharp. /////
The previous night's picture was a low budget - but surprisingly good - espionage flick called "Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard"(1950). Howard St. John, who played the brutal sportswiter "Al Judge" in "The Big Night" (reviewed December 9th), this time is good guy "Counterspy David Harding", who heads up an intelligence team to stop a group of American Communists, who are out to steal secrets from the Army's first ballistic missile test. When an officer at the base is "suicided" by the Commies, the Yard offers their help. They send over "Agent Simon Langdon" (Ron Randell), who goes undercover to get to the heart of the spy group. This leads him to "Karen Michelle", the secretary for the dead officer. She's undergoing psychiatric treatments for her experiences in a concentration camp. Counterspy Harding suspects there's a connection between her psychiatrist and her bosses' death, which he's certain was a murder. The screenplay here is heavily layered, something you don't often see in a 67 minute movie. There's also no fat. Intelligence techniques are realistically represented. There are stake outs, a wiretapping operation. It turns out the shrink is using narcohypnosis to extract top secret test launch information from Karen Michelle, who - as a secretary for the missile program - has clearance to know the results.
Harding and his team home in on the shrink but they need proof before they can bust him. June Vincent plays his evil secretary. The way the information is passed out of the high security base is extremely clever. I won't tell you how it's done, but Agent Langdon discovers it after donning a disguise to infiltrate the psychiatrist's office. This is about as tight a spy flick as you're ever likely to see. IMDB says that the Counterspy character originated on a radio show. There are also supposed to be other movies so I'll see if I can find them. The budget is low, but "Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard" has the hallmarks of an A-list movie. That's why I'm gonna give it Two Huge Thumbs Up. You absolutely don't wanna miss it. The picture is good, though not razor sharp, and TV tough guy John Dehner is great as an agency operative who's pretending to be an electrician. ////
That's all I know for this evening. Rams beat Cards, hooray! I hope your week is off to a good start and I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment