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| ♪Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away... |
Like stunts, scenery porn should have a category at the Oscars (in the Berenstein dimension where the Oscars are about rewarding anything worthwhile). In the hierarchy of sights I'd gladly watch all day, the Grand Canyon ranks between Stacy Keibler dancing and the Stephen McDaniel interrogation (fourth). Since Edge of Eternity is set in and around the aforementioned landmark, and makes still-impressive use of aerial photography, plot and character are optional bonuses, which is fortunate, since the movie opens with a guy trying to off a guy by pushing his car into him and thus over the edge of the canyon.
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| Like just push the dude son, damn. |
Hitchcockesque poetical illogic is forgivable in old movies because they don't posture as "self-aware" like all today's shitflicks that still have stuff this dumb in them. Moreover, opening your late-50s kino with a classic car tumbling down the Grand Canyon is cool. Edge is populated by a strong cast, but a stronger cast of automobiles with that increasingly alien look of that dream-time between the birth of rock and roll and television and the malaise of the 60s proper.
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| Cars don't look like this anymore because you voted for anal sex flags on government buildings. |
Cornell Wilde plays a sheriff's deputy investigating a series of deaths surrounding an abandoned gold mine and a redhead with a penchant for speeding. You won't care too much about the details, but the payoffs are solid and the procedural schtick affords us a pretext to tour the long-gone world of 1959. The ending also prefigures Cliffhanger in its let's-have-everyone-fight-on-a-thing-above-a-canyon spectacle:
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| *Record scratch* *freeze frame* yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got into this predicament... |
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