TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 504, 18 February 1949, Page 33

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

(Columbia) T a preview of .this film on the drug traffic there were a number of bulky-look-ing gentlemen with vaguely familiar faces who turned out to be policemen in plain clothes. There were also several customs officials present, and since the picture was described on the printed invitation as a documentary, the question unedsily arose as it proceeded, How much can these men really learn from it? To the Ends of the Earth is said to be based on the files of the Narcotics Bureau of the United States Treasury Department. Does that make it a documentary? All the participants are indisputably film actors and actresses. Dick Powell is the agent who brings to justice the members of an international opium ring, Signe Hasso is the woman in the case, and Vladimir Sokoloff is the Chinese narcotics commissioner, Surely a documentary is essentially a document, a transcript of real dife in which ordinary people are seen at work at their everyday occupations. So although the basis of T'o the Ends of the Earth may be factual, to call it a documentary seems to be giving it more importance than it actually possesses. It is largely a matter of intent, of course, and this film seems intended to attract as many people as possible to the box-office through its revelations of the seamier side of life, given superficial authenticity by incidental references to the United Nations, the Narcotics Bureau, and international co-operation. Still, few who see the-film should fail to enjoy it, if simply as a somewhat better-than-average thriller that keeps them on the edge of the seat right until the last moment of suspense. The events take place around the year 1938, when the Japanese were completing their conquest of Manchuria. Dick Powell, as Commissioner Barrows of Los Angeles, gets on to the trail of a gang of opium smugglers who are oper-

ating in a big way. The trail leads first to Shanghai, where he has some thoroughly melodramatic adventures in a sinister Oriental atmosphere. Although one or two minor crooks are killed, he is after the ringleader of the gang, a mysterious person called Jean Hawks, so from Shanghai he goes to Cairo. Here he succeeds in locating a hidden poppy field and even in discovering how the raw opium is smuggled- out of the country -in the first stomachs of camels (they have four) headed for a Beirut slaughter-house.

From Beirut he follows the opium to Cuba, and from there to New York, where a final attempt to smuggle the drug into America-five million dollars’ worth of it by now-is thwarted. The rest of the gang are then captured, and finally the identity of the mysterious Jean Hawks herself is revealed, to the smug satisfaction of those who had spotted her five or six reels beforehand. A large part of the film’s undoubted success must be credited to the downright performance of Dick Powell as the’ agent who goes to the ends of the earth (almost) in his pursuit. He does more to make the whole thing believable than the plot, the dialogue, the photography, or the spoken narrative technique. ;