MartinHafer needed special permission of production code to talk about drug smuggling made during Powell's 'tough guy' years opium trade set 1935"To The Ends Of The Earth" was a film made during the period after Dick Powell transitioned from the pretty-boy crooner in light-weight films to a more world-weary and middle aged leading man. I generally loved these films, as Powell's characters were often incredibly cynical...and he pulled it off very well. This one, while showing SOME of this new sort of Powell character, sadly, isn't up to the quality of his best performances of the era...though it is a decent time-passer.The film begins in the mid-1930s with an insanely graphic and troubling scene. Treasury Department Commissioner, Mike Barrows (Powell), is on a boat in the San Francisco area that is trailing a boat full of smugglers. In a sick and desperate act, the captain of the boat being pursued decides to have his men toss their illegal cargo overboard instead of being caught with it...and you see dozens of Chinese migrant workers chained together being tossed into the sea to their deaths! Barrows witnesses this and is horrified...and vows to see this captain apprehended. But they are now in international waters and the boat escapes.Later, there is a lead that the captain MIGHT be in China and so Barrows travels there to hunt for the scum-bag. However, it soon begins clear that these Chinese workers were not what he originally thought. They were, in fact, slave laborers used by folks in the narcotics trade to plant and harvest poppies and soon he finds himself investigating the heroin trade. While all this sounds very exciting, the film's pacing wasn't great and the story went to too many locations and had too many characters. Normally I don't see this as a problem but I found that the pacing and story were not especially well done. I think a lot of this was made more obvious because too often instead of DOING anything, the characters talked and talked and talked. Overall, not a bad film but one that was surprisingly flat at times.

Robert J. Maxwell This is pretty good. Dick Powell is a high-level agent of the Bureau of Narcotics who tracks down opium from Shanghai to to Egypt to Cuba to New York. It's a tangled but believable tale in which he uncovers an intricate network of opium from its extraction from poppies through it refinement, shipping, and delivery in New York. It doesn't look as exotic as it sounds because except for some shots aboard a liner at sea, we only see locations through the lens of the second unit.Dick Powell is in his hard-boiled mode here. He gets conked on the head twice. He gets conked on the head in every hard-boiled movie he's ever made. In "Murder, My Sweet," when he is conked on the head, his narration gives us Raymond Chandler's prose: "a dark pool opened up at my feet and I fell in," and we see a dark pool opening at his feet. Then we see him fall in. Here, during his two conks, there are only dissolves. They lack poetry.It makes a hero out of Harry Anslinger, head of the narcotics bureau, and almost turns him into President-for-Life of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Well, there has to be a hero at the top, but the fact is that Anslinger was, as one critic called him, "a notorious bonehead" who put marijuana in the same class as heroin. It was all hard narcotics to Anslinger, part of a widespread plot to sap our will to fight.It's a fascinating tale, really, given the Hollywood treatment. It opens with the murder of a hundred or so Chinese slaves being deep sixed on a heavy chain, like the slaves of yore, so it gets your attention and keeps it all the way through. Of course, this being Hollywood, we have to live with Vladimir Sokolov as a Chinese guy, trying to speak English with a Chinese accent while disguising his native Russian phones.

Alex da Silva Michael Barrows (Dick Powell) goes on the trail of an opium smuggling gang. There are some big players involved in the chain and we follow Barrows through various countries including Shanghai, Egypt, Beirut and Cuba before he sets sail for New York. It is at the end of this journey that we have a surprise twist in the story and a spectacularly evil villain is revealed - one of my favourite moments. The cast are good - Maylia who plays "Shu Pan" looks a bit like a pussy cat alien. However, she ain't no pussy. Signe Hasso who plays "Ann Grant" is an enigma throughout the film and you just know that there is something menacing lurking within Ivan Triesault who plays "Vrandstadter". The cast change quite quickly during the film and this can be confusing at the beginning.In fact, the film is overlong and complicated with a very annoying intro that never seems to finish. Shut up and get on with the film! The beginning section is particularly confusing with all the different federal bodies and consuls that are involved. What on earth is going on and who is who? The film improves once Barrows sneaks onto the land of Binda Sha (Fritz Leiber) in search of the poppy field. You can then ride out the rest of the film which plays as a James Bond adventure and has some great ideas for smuggling drugs.There is a harrowing scene at the beginning of the film where we see some Chinese slaves being thrown overboard tied in chains and attached to the anchor. There are other memorable scenes throughout the film, eg, the search for the poppies, the fire on the ship to New York and the final confrontation on the small police/coastguard boat. It's a good film but it's length means that it can be quite exhausting, especially if you are trying to follow matters at the beginning.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Very probably the very first serious movie coming out of Hollywood about illegal drugs and how their being being smuggled into the USA has Dick Powell as FBN, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Agent Michael Borrows going as the movies title suggests to the ends of the earth to stop a boat load of opium from being smuggled into New York Harbor. It's Agent Borrows shock of seeing some 100 Chinese coolies thrown overboard off the Japanese freighter Kira Maru that sent him on his course of stopping the opium shipment that the ship was involved with from being successful even at the cost of his own life!Traveling to far off Shanghai then Cairo as well as the Middle East, Palestine Lebanon and Syria, Agent Barrow finally got some results in pre-Castro Havana Cuba where the shipment of illegal Opium was on it's last leg on its voyage to New York City. While tracking the drugs down Agent Borrows got involved with Ann Grant, Signe Hasso, and her ward of the state pretty Chinese teenager Sho Pan Wu, Maylia, who's parents were killed in China in a Japanese bombing raid on their village. It's Ann that Agent Borrows is a bit suspicious of in that she's not straight with him about what she's doing Shanghai China and the mysterious circumstances of her husbands, an irrigation engineer, death!It later comes out that Mr.Grant was involved in the planting and hiding, under a bed of roses, a field of poppies, the plant that Opium comes from, in Southern Egypt! This is later confirmed by the Egyptian owner of the "rose garden" Binda Sha, Fritz Libner, who when exposed killed himself by jumping off a cliff! The movie finally gets to the point to how the Opium was processed and hidden in the ships, docked in Havana Harbor, kitchen that's to be secretly smuggled into New York City under the cover of darkness or for a better word garbage!***SPOILERS*** It's by then that Agent Borrows gets a bead to who's the big boss of the drug smuggling operation. Not really knowing that Agent Borrors is on to him or her the drug kingpin drops his guard which gives Borrows the chance to get the jump on him and his drug smuggling, who by then were almost all dead or behind bars, colleagues! The final few tense filled minutes of the movie has Agent Borrows take a chance in letting the head of the drug smuggling operation take a shot on him just to prove that he's the one in charge! It took nerves of steel on Agent Borrows part but it worked to the shock, in finding out who the head man was, of everybody watching as well as in the cast the movie!P.S There's also in "To The Ends of the Earth" in a number of newsreel clips the head of the FBN Harry J. Anslinger who together with the assistance of his crime fighting government agency made the making of the movie possible.