Garden of Evil
1954 film by Henry Hathaway
Garden of Evil is a 1954 American CinemaScope Western film directed by Henry Hathaway about three somewhat disreputable 19th-century soldiers of fortune, played by Gary Cooper as an ex-lawman, Richard Widmark as a gambler, and Cameron Mitchell as a bounty hunter, who, along with Vicente, played by Víctor Manuel Mendoza, are hired by a woman to rescue her husband, who is trapped in a collapsed mine. Rita Moreno appears at the beginning of the film as a Mexican cantina singer/dancer. Director Hathaway took special pains to use the stunning vistas of the Mexican locations to show off the CinemaScope screen dimensions to best effect.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Garden of Evil” is 1954 film by Henry Hathaway. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Garden, Evil and film, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1954 film by Henry Hathaway” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1954.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Garden of Evil primary sources, Garden of Evil archive and Garden research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Garden of Evil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.