THE RIVER’S EDGE. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson. Director: Allan Dwan.

   Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn face off in The River’s Edge, a contemporary western/thriller directed by Allan Dwan. Filmed in Cinemascope with some terrific on location shooting in Mexico, the movie tells the story of Nardo Denning (Milland), a scoundrel and criminal who shows up out of the clear blue sky at Ben Cameron’s (Quinn) small, modest farm.

   His plan? To win back the affections of Cameron’s wife, Meg (Debra Paget) and to abscond across the border to Mexico with stolen loot. It doesn’t take long for Meg to agree to her proposal, bored as she is by the quiet, but challenging, life on her husband’s farm.

   What Meg doesn’t quite realize is how her affections for Nardo are misplaced and that the guy is a cold blooded, heartless killer. After Nardo kills a state policeman, he convinces Cameron at gunpoint to take both him and Meg across the border, first by truck and then by foot. This gets to the heart of the movie, a story about a woman torn between two men, one of whom is very dangerous.

   Overall, I somewhat enjoyed watching this one, even though I don’t think there was enough material in it to sustain some ninety minutes or so of screen time. It’s also not quite clear what genre the movie fits into. In many ways, it’s both a contemporary western and a thriller. But it’s also a drama and a romance. One wonders who the exactly intended audience was.

   Final assessment: a relatively minor film in the scheme of things, but with Milland and Quinn as the leads, you can do far worse.