To the Ends of the Earth

A globetrotting noir that chases smuggled drugs from San Francisco to China to Egypt to Lebanon to Cuba, Robert Stevenson’s To the Ends of the Earth begins with one of the cruelest crimes in noir: spotted and chased by the Coast Guard, a drug smuggling freighter called the Kira Maru is forced to get rid of its “crew” of 100 Egyptian slaves by chaining them all to each other and dumping them overboard. Having witnessed this act helplessly through binoculars, United States Narcotics Agent Michael Barrows (Dick Powell) makes it his mission to avenge the slaves by eliminating the smuggling racket and its perpetrators, a commitment that takes him around the world, tracking each link in the chain backwards, some contacts going so far as suicide just to avoid talking. In China, Barrows meets Ann Grant (Signe Hasso), recently widowed from an engineer who may have been involved with the drug trade, and the orphan Chinese teenager Shu Pan Wu (Maylia) whom Grant is preparing to send back to the United States to start a new life. The film’s pace is fast, accelerated by Powell’s constant voiceover, which adds greater depth to the character and somehow never seems excessive or unnecessary, and even offers a few lessons on poppy harvesting and opium production. Featuring a couple of excellent twists, it’s an American noir set everywhere except America, the noir visual universe springing to life especially whenever the action takes place at dusk or at sea.