Delayed Reaction: Edge of Doom

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

 

Connection to Wonder Man: Both Edited by Daniel Mandell

 

Premise: After the death of his mother, a distraught man kills a priest then battles with his conscience about what to do next.

 

Sorry for the delay, but I'm back with this "Century in a Month" project, although it's looking more like two months at this point. I opted to use the film editor as the linking element with the last movie, however I forgot something. Bad editing jumps out at you. Good editing, to the non-professional, is practically invisible. So I can't point to much in terms of how Wonder Man and Edge of Doom are similar except that I didn't notice much about the editing for either. Oh well.

 

Taken on its own, Edge of Doom is a heavy-handed morality movie. Many films from this era you can feel actively pushing against what the Hays Code would allow. Edge of Doom on the other hand I can't imagine having much trouble at all. Then again, maybe the amount of religious discussion or the actual murder scene created problems. With the Hays Code, I never doubt any level of prudishness.

 

I do like the structure of this as a story a priest is telling another priest. Narration feels less intrusive when it's clear why there's a narrator, and you can always apply the extra level of analyzation to ask why he's telling this story and if he's trying to pull a different lesson out of it than someone else would. The film doesn't examine that, but it's implicit.

 

I don't know much about director Mark Robson, but I don't suspect that suspense is his forte. I never felt that nervous for Farley Granger's Martin, possibly because he actively annoyed me. This is based on a novel, and I can't help but wonder if Martin's motivations are a little clearer in the book. In the film, his break with the church is flimsy and his desperation to give his mother a big funeral feels forced. I did like that the police like him for a crime but it's the wrong crime. That's a nice twist. Ultimately, there's too much forced piousness in this for me to ever get completely on board.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend