bkoganbing One of the reasons that I liked Edge Of Doom is the fact that Catholic priests are portrayed as human. In that the contrast in the behavior of Dana Andrews and Harold Vermilyea is the key to the film, not withstanding the performance of Farley Granger as the protagonist, a sensitive troubled youth driven to rage and murder.Harold Vermilyea is a thirty year veteran of the skid row parish he's been assigned to. Faces have changed, but conditions haven't and he's seeing that his religious message hasn't brought much change. He's suffering from the very human condition of burnout. So when Farley Granger who has a history with the church consisting of his father not being given a Catholic funeral because he was a suicide comes to Vermilyea asking for a big celebratory funeral for his mother who was a believer who never lost faith and being told no, the rage takes over him. He clubs Vermilyea with a heavy crucifix and kills him.Vermilyea is having a family crisis of his own, his niece has run off with a divorced man and is having a civil ceremony because the church won't marry them. He was also bound by Catholic rules not to give Granger's father a Catholic rite because of those selfsame rules. All that Granger doesn't know and when we seek guidance from clergy in any faith we never know what's in their background that could affect their actions with us.Anyway Granger spends the rest of the film with a troubled conscience which Dana Andrews suspects, but can't really prove. Since he hasn't come to him in confession there's no vow of silence unlike O.E. Hasse who tormented Montgomery Clift with that in I Confess. So Andrews is free to help the police investigation which is headed by Robert Keith.But Andrews is a priest in the best G.K. Chesterton tradition, as much concerned with Granger's soul as with solving the case. That's his dilemma. You can also see that he looks at Vermilyea and thinks that this could be him in another twenty years.Edge Of Doom is one of the bleakest noir films ever made. It offers no solutions to any problems. People seemed bound by fate and trapped by the dogma they believe. Some similar themes in a secular vein were also expressed in the Humphrey Bogart film Knock On Any Door which came out a year earlier with Bogart as an attorney and John Derek a young client who has a lot of history and baggage. It's a fine film, but prepare yourself for a real downer.

songwarrior52 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.

Neil Doyle That a film of this sort should come from Samuel Goldwyn is in itself quite a surprise, for he was much more apt to produce something with an uplifting feeling (THE BISHOP'S WIFE, ENCHANTMENT) than a grim study of the lower fringes of society. He gave it some box-office assurance by combining DANA ANDREWS (as a priest) and FARLEY GRANGER (as a victimized youth from the slums). But in telling a story of how the poor boy becomes a criminal on the run, it fails to inject enough ingredients to make the screenplay work on any level. And that, too, is surprising, since the screenplay is the work of Philip Yordan and it is directed in bleak, noir fashion by none other than Mark Robson. But neither of the two priest characters are well developed--the testy, aging priest who is murdered and his young assistant (played by DANA ANDREWS) are not given the amount of detail they were in the novel to explain their background and motives. This is equally true of the tormented young man who rebels against the Catholic Church's treatment of his father's death and his mother's funeral. Granger, however, is good in his edgy role.Bleak and uncompromising, it nevertheless appeared to be a film ahead of its time and would probably be more appreciated today by fans of gritty film noir, as it captures the streets, the noise, and general atmosphere of a very blighted city.

Karen (Gypsy1962) 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.