Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Prismark10 Don Siegel has an eye for the visuals in this mystery story set in the Grand Canyon but the plot and dialogue are merely serviceable.Deputy Sheriff Les Martin (Cornell Wilde) patrols the canyon area which includes an abandoned gold mine. He listens to a tall story told by an old timer of a beaten up guy he saw when he suddenly pursues Janice Kendon (Victoria Shaw) the daughter of a local mine owner who speeds past him and after he books her they begin flirting with each other.Pretty soon the deputy is investigating missing men, murders and looking into whether gold is being smuggled out of the mine works. You have an old coot, a drunken son, a hostile father, a foreman, a comic relief and any one of them could be the shady heavy.There is an entertaining climax with the cable cars high above the canyon and there seemed to be a real bat cave full of bat crap which was involved in the location filming. I think a bit of bat poo went into the script.

badajoz-1 In the 1950s when television was beginning to make inroads into the cinema-going audience, Hollywood made films that were grander, bigger, more colourful, and shot on location. So you got huge big budget historical epics, but also smaller films that were given wide screen and colourful location treatment. Thus some movies like the 'crime noir' genre were opened out into big screen colour, thus almost at a stroke cutting 'noir' off from its' roots in black and white. This is such a film. But, despite the fact that Don Siegel is the director, the movie is short on suspense and any deep characterisation - at 80 minutes it really is too short for much. But perhaps the budget was being too stretched! However, we get lots of aerial shots of the tremendous Grand Canyon, and a spirited, breathtaking denouement on a tramway over the said gorge. The actors try, against a very ordinary script. But the plot is fairly preposterous - unknowns taking gold out of an old mine with no-one noticing, until murder of a John Doe sets the flawed Deputy Sheriff (Cornel Wilde) off in pursuit. There are political pressures as well, but never fully realised. A romantic element is in the backdrop and provides the vital breakthrough, but it never all adds up to much, except the scenery and location.

roughman Ah... This is a gem of a movie! Panned by most, but it remains one of my favorites! A bit short on plot, it has a plenitude of familiar faces, including Jack Elam, Edgar Buchanan, Victoria Shaw, Mikey Shaughnessy, the superb Tom Fadden, and of course, Cornell Wilde.Look for the director, Don Siegel (The Shootist, Dirty Harry, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, The Killers) sitting by the pool wearing a red sweater at the motel where one of the murder victims stayed.With the action set in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, as well as Kingman and its environs, Edge of Eternity provides a delicious time capsule of the late 1950's, as well as great location photography! So glad it was made available on DVD! Don't miss this one!

Robert J. Maxwell One thing you have to say for Don Siegel -- he managed to work in some scenic locations, in this case in and around the Grand Canyon. But this is a formula film, not an identifiably Siegel product. His favorite theme seemed to revolve around a person caught between the law and the underworld, siding with neither, on his own trip so to speak. And he was not a camera artist. There are no fancy shots in his movies, no epic explosions, no artsy compositions. It's all craftsmanship -- but it's really GOOD craftsmanship at its best. It's difficult after the fact to pin down exactly what his contribution was to his best films but he seemed to add something of his own to the script and to pull out unusual performances from otherwise ordinary actors.Take "Line Up", made about the same time as "Edge of Eternity." It's a relatively plain movie about dope smugglers but Siegel managed to put something extra in it. There's Robert Keith, nobody's idea of a finely tuned performer, doing something very odd with his intellectual reserve. And Siegel even manages to turn Vaughan Taylor (!) into a figure of menace even though he has no more than one or two lines of dialogue.Nothing like that happens here. Cornell Wilde is the upright sheriff. Edgar Buchanan his folksy boss. Mickey Shaughnessy is the heavy posing as the comic relief. There is the drunken wastrel of a son. There is the pure (if rather aggressive) girl after Wilde. Jack Elam as a regular hard hat. The plot is simplicity itself. A small group of nogoodniks are trying to smuggle gold out of an abandoned mind and commit a couple of murders along the way. The plot is foiled by Wild, ending in a fist fight aboard one of those dangling trams over the Grand Canyon, done better than the one in "Second Chance" but not as lengthy or exciting as the one in "Where Eagles Dare." No unusual guns are in sight. No bitterness or betrayal. The actors hit their marks, say their lines, and depart. It's as if Siegel were shadow boxing, warming up a bit.If there is anything outstanding about the film it's the gorgeous photography, crisp, colorful, sunny, and the scenery itself. The cars are equally magnificent, especially a long yellow convertible that glistens under the day-for-night sun. Yet it's engaging as these things go. It's formula movie making but it's not bad, anymore than Pythagoras' theorem is bad. It's just -- well -- just THERE. On the plus side, I never knew that bat guano was worth so much that even a considerable quantity would justify building a tram across the Grand Canyon. What would we do without bats?