geordiesdad I'm having a problem understanding all the reviewers who call this film 'under-rated'. In fact, for me at least, the reviews it received are, if anything, a little too high. I love Cooper and Widmark generally as actors but Cooper's performance is wooden and he seems to be just reading his lines in places while Widmark is a caricature of the gambler/adventurer and comes across as unreal. Hayward is HORRIBLY miscast as a tough, resourceful woman and we never do see the love and devotion that is supposed to be driving her to rescue her 'husband'...she sure doesn't otherwise act like a devoted wife. The writing, despite the normally skilled writers is quite lackluster and bland and there are far too many long shots which do nothing for the story development and are just window dressing and filler using the lovely landscape shots. The scene involving Cooper putting a whooping on our young bounty hunter is laughably pathetic as he falls and STAYS down in the fire over and over......cringingly terrible and I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I think this movie was justifiably overlooked by time....it's a second rate effort by otherwise skilled actors and it's clear they didn't 'gel' at all.

SnoopyStyle Hooker (Gary Cooper), Fiske (Richard Widmark) and Luke Daly (Cameron Mitchell) are stranded in the dusty town of Puerto Miguel, Mexico when their ship breaks down. It will take weeks to fix. Leah Fuller (Susan Hayward) comes to town in need of men to rescue her husband John Fuller (Hugh Marlowe) who is trapped in their mine. Despite the threat of Apache attacks, the three Americans are lured by the promise of $2000 each and they are joined by Vicente Madariaga (Victor Manuel Mendoza).This could be remade into a great modern dark gritty thriller. The adventure is there. The romantic entanglement could be remade into something creepier and more sinister. The combination of Widmark and Cooper is great. I don't really like some of the old fashion sensibilities. This could have been amazingly dark if the characters are more stripped down to their greedy selfish cores.

Jeff (actionrating.com) Skip it – There's a reason you probably haven't heard of this Gary Cooper western. Actually, I wouldn't call it a western at all. It's more of a psychological thriller, except it isn't thrilling. The plot revolves around a woman who hires a band of men, including Cooper and Richard Widmark, to help rescue her husband. The only problem is that he's deep in Apache country. When the men find out there may be a treasure map involved, conflict breaks out amongst themselves. It's evident that the director didn't want to make a normal western. I'll give him that because it's definitely out of the ordinary. The only problem is that a western needs to entertain, and this one doesn't. The movie attempts to reveal profound breakthroughs in human nature but doesn't do that either. I rarely use the B-word for an "action" movie, but this movie is just Boring.

Robert J. Maxwell I don't think anyone would argue that this is one of the better Westerns ever made. The story has Susan Hayward's husband trapped in a gold mine in a hinterland of Mexico inhabited by Apaches. She finds four men at loose ends in a seaside cantina -- the strong and silent Gary Cooper, the cynical gambler Richard Widmark, the hypomanic and libidinous Cameron Mitchell, and the proud and competent Victor Mendoza, who is a Mexican, you can tell, because he wears a big floppy sombrero and speaks only Spanish. Hayward hires these four guys to ride with her through dangerous country, rescue her husband, and return with the couple to town. Hayward was a decent actress in the right part, but as a low-down gold digger in Terra Incognita she doesn't cut it. Her grooming is impeccable, as if Sidney Guilaroff were hiding behind one of the cactus.The film didn't cost much to make, though the principles were all box-office boffo at the time. I guess that's where most of the money went, to salaries and to the film's technology. It's in glorious Cinemascope, the movies' answer to television, and the Michoacan locations are glorious. Bernard Hermann contributed the only musical score he ever wrote for a Western.Nothing -- nada -- seems to have been left over to construct a coherent narrative. Nobody's motives are especially clear. Worse than that, sometimes they're incomprehensible. Try to figure out what the relationship between Susan Hayward and her husband, Hugh Marlowe, are. Does he love her? Does she love him? Do they hate each other? It isn't that such ambivalent attitudes aren't found in real life. They're the stuff of it. It's just that the writers seemed to have no idea what they were trying to get across.And it's the same with the other characters. Richard Widmark's role, for instance, is written at the beginning almost as a familiar stereotype, the untrusting and untrustworthy man of fortune who may either sacrifice his life for a dame in distress or strike like a rattlesnake -- but he turns out to be just another one of the good guys. The Apaches are given a motive for their banzai attacks, but what a motive it is! They don't mind two loners digging away in a mine, but SIX people trigger the charge of the light brigade.The dialog is reflects the overall conception of character, listless and done as if by numbers. "If the earth was made of gold, I guess people would kill just for a handful of dirt," Cooper philosophizes. What does that mean? None of that takes away from the visual imagery. Man, volcanic rocks and all, it is a splendidly scenic place where certain types might be happy to roll around naked in the black ash. Nice job, there.I can't help mentioning the audio commentary on the DVD. It's all about Bernard Hermann's score, and it's both instructive and amusing, though the four contributors didn't intend it to be funny. Hermann's biographer is heard, along with a film historian and two film composers, and they sit around bitching about how in today's industry the composer is ground under the heels of the director and those to whom they contemptuously refer as "sound designers." They all laud Hermann, one of those filmic composers who, unlike Henry Mancini and some others, had never written "tunes" into their musical scores. You won't hear "Laura", "Moon River", or "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'". Instead Hermann included diverse themes or leitmotifs for the settings and characters, sometimes only a few notes. As one commentator puts it, it's as if a Hermann score consisted of endless repetitions of "Jeepers Creepers," without ever getting to, "Where'd you get those eyes?"