Edge of Doom

Farley Granger is a young man on the "Edge of Doom," in this 1950 film also starring Dana Andrews, Mala Powers and Paul Stewart.

When a young priest wants to change parishes, Father Roth (Dana Andrews) tells the story of Martin Lynn (Granger), saying that what happened with Martin showed him that, as a priest, he was in the right place.

Martin Lynn is a young man who is having trouble making ends meet as a delivery man for a florist; he has a chronically ill mother, and he wants to be able to move her to Arizona. However, after working with the florist for four years, he still can't get a raise.

When his mother dies, he wants a high-priced funeral for her. He goes to the church rectory, as his mother was deeply religious and, despite living in near poverty, always gave what she could to the parish church.

In an ensuing argument with an old, tired and tough priest (Harold Vermilyea), Martin hits him over the head, and the priest dies. Later, he's picked up, not for the murder, but for the robbery of a movie theater actually done by his neighbor (Paul Stewart). Though released, the detective in charge (Robert Keith) is still suspicious of him.

"Edge of Doom" is a grim noir that never lets up; Martin Lynn can't get a break, not from his boss, the funeral director or the church. His girlfriend (Mala Powers) at first feels there is no place for her in his life because of his mother. After the mother dies and Paul commits murder, he breaks up with her.

His only support is Father Roth, whom he doesn't like - he resents the church for not burying his father on hallowed ground when he committed suicide and for taking his mother's money. It's not often in a film that one sees a priest killed - and with a cross yet.

The acting is good if not great. Farley Granger is sympathetic as Martin. He was often cast in this type of role. Dana Andrews does an okay job as the priest, but is a little too precious. The way to play a priest is the way Spencer Tracy did - as a man first. Andrews tries to put on a priestly air but it seems forced.

Apparently this film was not well received upon release and was withdrawn to add the very beginning, where Andrews begins to tell the story, and the very end, which comes back to the present time with Andrews and the priest.

It doesn't really help the film's relentless, depressing tone. Don't watch this one if you need a smile or a feel-good movie.

My dad wrote the book that EOD is based on. It is interesting to me that a film that was declared a resounding failure still elicits some interesting commentary. The view that it is possibly the most depressing noir-type film around sounds like a huge compliment to me, given what noir is always striving to do, and indeed it IS a dark film (which makes the above comment about the Stradling cinematography kind of puzzling). Also, the IMDb trivia statement that the film has never been shown on TV can't possibly be true, since I remember seeing it on TV when I was a teen.

The novel Edge of Doom used a Crime and Punishment narrative style to tell a contemporary murder story revolving around poverty in a large American city—the template was Philadelphia—and to raise issues about how devotion to church alone can not solve the ills of a modern society. The subject matter is indeed bleak, and indeed ahead of its time. It's certainly a brooding tale, but the novel as literature was considered significant in its day. How Goldwyn came to produce it as a film is a story unto itself, but there can be no doubting that if the film's creative team had stuck to their noir-ish guns, and focused more artfully on the message, it would have been a much better film, not to mention a film that might've actually raised noir above its melodramatic station. (Noir is great, of course, and it's fun to view its style, but a lot of the entries in the genre are tough to watch nowadays, simply because the dialogue is so corny.) Bookending the movie with the corny priest scenes ruined the film's chance to actually probe the poverty theme with seriousness. By soft-pedaling its style, Mark Robson and Philip Yordan failed to capture what was important about the novel. Here was yet another example of Hollywood so afraid of box-office impact that they made a difficult situation worse, when what they might've had was a critically well-received work that would have also failed at the box office but at least might've been counted as art.

I can't say I agree with the above post that hails the work of Farley Granger. Granger has been publicly vitriolic about the movie, but in my view he did nothing to help it. He's wooden and self-conscious, and, let's face it, he was never a good actor even when Hitchcock directed him. However, I am also open to the possibility that, had Robson had any conceptual idea about how to best tell this tale, Granger might've made for an interesting screen subject. The Yordan screenplay tweaks trivialized the message and shortchanged the potential for a visual style. Even then, if Robson had brought a creative approach to things, even the screenplay issues might've been overcome.

EOD the film remains a historical curiosity, but it's mostly an example of what happens when unsympathetic, apparently clueless, filmmakers are hired to tackle a subject of seriousness, which they can only reduce to cinematic hackwork. It could have been, it SHOULD have been, a much better movie.

An interesting but not very good movie. It's overlong and too often repetitive. Yet it's also one of the clearest examples of Hollywood's hybrid nature during the studio period. On one hand is the literary desire for hard-hitting social commentary, represented here by novelist Brady (thanks reviewer Songwarrior), and left-wing screenwriter Yordan (my opinion). On the other hand are the studios (including Goldwyn) deathly afraid of defying convention and of boycotting groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency. Here, the tension between these two social tendencies is on clear display.

Few movies of the period convey a clearer sense of economic entrapment than this one. No matter in what direction slum-dweller Martin (Granger) turns, he's thwarted by a lack of money and no prospects. Even the parish lacks sufficient wherewithal to help. Sure, the desire to give his dead mom a "proper send-off" seems extravagantly unrealistic. But behind his strident demand is a very democratic desire to be seen as the social equal of anyone else. His protest tellingly never gets beyond the symbolic stage of a "room full of flowers", but unpack it and you get years of frustration, privation, and a dead mother whose only consolation was a priest. Martin may not be very likable, but he is understandable.

Stradling's photography underscores that sense of hopelessness. The tenements are bare and dingy, the streets grimy and teeming, even the parish lodgings are spare and uninviting. Only the ornate funeral home presents a contrast, seeming to say that only in death will there be a change. At the same time, the scenes unfold one after the other like episodes in a twilight world of noir. If there's a single ray of actual sunshine, I missed it. No wonder Martin's going slowly nutzoid.

Nor, for that matter, are Martin's fellow slum dwellers any help. His neighbor Mr. Craig (Stewart) is a stickup man and practical adviser telling Martin to take what he can because that's the only way to survive. And when Martin yells in the hallway in some distress, the other neighbors look on mutely offering no help. Even the well-meaning old lady can't get her eye-witness identification right. There's no hint here of sentimentalizing the poor. Instead, it's a world of dis-spirited, atomized individuals giving Martin only cursory sympathy for his dead mother. Thus trapped in a hopeless environment, Martin's demand for flowers for mom becomes something much more meaningful.

Now, had the role of religion in this bleak panorama been left as it is without the wrap- around prologue and epilogue and without the omniscient narration, the result would have been much less compromised. For, without these later concessions, the priests come across more as "omsbudsmen" than anything else. In short, in its original version (without the wrap-around & narration), the movie portrays the priests as able to intercede with the cops and businessmen, etc. to make life more livable for their benighted flock, but most importantly the original screenplay does not connect them conventionally with the divine. So, the priests viewed in their purely societal role (apart from the soul-saving, divine mission), do perform a worthy assistance function. However, that limited role also lays them open to the charge that they are part of the problem and not the solution since, despite their help, they also do nothing to change the conditions in which Martin, for one, is trapped. They only make life better, not different. And when Father Kirkman tells Martin to "resign" himself to his poverty, a bleakly passive social philosophy is summed up, and much of Martin's unhappiness with the church is lent credence.

But, thanks to reviewer Piyork, we learn that original screenwriter Yordan and original director Robson were fired, and the wrap-around and narration added to "lighten" the mood (Film Noir Encyclopedia also lists two production dates). One can imagine the reaction of studio executives on seeing the original version for the first time. With its bleak atmospherics and generally unflattering portrayal of the police and the church, visions of boycott must have danced in their head. Thus what started out as a pessimistic expose of poverty and the church's role ends up making key concessions for popular consumption. Specifically, the church is now connected to the divine— Father Roth refers in the epilogue to: "the immortal soul", "faith is a part of the human soul", "I saw God in Martin Lynn", plus the key implication that apostate Martin is returning to his former faith. The cumulative result is to dilute the original message with an unmistakable supernatural overlay. At the same time, attention is redirected away from social ills to a timeless dimension. As a result, what emerges collapses into an awkward hybrid of noirish pessimism and religious optimism with the final comforting note going to the latter.

My gripe here is with Hollywood of the studio period, not with religion or Catholicism generally. Many thoughtful believers (I venture) would be challenged by the original version— that is, by its posing the question of what the actual role of the church (not only the Catholic) in ministering to the poor is? That is, is the church helping or hindering. But then, who's surprised that neither the studios nor the watchdog outfits wanted such fundamental questions troubling popular audiences, at least without conventional answers being supplied. And so another literary work gets processed into near-pablum by commercial Hollywood of the day.

Nonetheless, despite the crippling compromises, the novel's original intent still shines through, and if I were reviewer Songwarrior, I would be very proud of my dad.

The first 40 minutes or so of Edge of Doom are quite interesting, as Farley Granger offers a character that we sympathize with and understand. Another standout is the always excellent Paul Stewart, who portrays a no-good neighbor of Granger's. But the movie becomes predictable and rather tiresome about halfway through, and the viewer is forced to endure trite dialogue and a tired climax before it's all over. Although there are several good scenes, and strong noir overtones, the overpowering religious message is a bit much, being pounded over the viewer's head like a mallet. It's not a complete waste of time, but it comes pretty close.

Edge of Doom (1950)

It would be hard to find a movie as unrelentingly dark and brooding as this one. Everyone from the priest to the hero's mother, from the sweet girlfriend to the neighbor down the hall is burdened with the pain of everyday life. Most of the scenes at night, too, or inside dark rooms and hallways, or both, so the shadowy world only descends lower.

And this is partly what makes it really work. Dana Andrews is a worldly, reflective priest in a tale of redemption, actually, against all this gloom. The protagonist is a young Farley Granger, who gets in trouble from a single rash act, and is in a tailspin for the rest of the movie. From one shadowy scene to another, running through dark streets or hiding in a dingy apartment, Granger has to face his inner demon.

But Granger, like Andrews, is a thoroughly decent person inside, and the movie, despite all the negative vibes, is about faith and goodness. Director Mark Robson is not a big name, of course, but he paid his dues with some of the best--Robert Wise and Val Lewton. And he came out of an era of Hollywood that was uncompromising in its technical quality. It shows.

This is a movie with a single main theme, and if it has impassioned acting and high dramatics (at times) it also is gritty and single minded, too. The plot is packaged too neatly, and littered with Andrews narrating through the long flashback. That's its one limitation--that it's limited. But what it does do it does with real intensity.