The New Pictures, Aug. 28, 1950

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Edge of Doom (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio) sets out to dramatize Catholic Author Leo Brady's prizewinning novel about a twisted youth who kills a priest. The book was largely an introspective study of the killer's complex motives and his painful redemption. On the screen, the story becomes a second-rate melodrama with a wispy religious motif.

Farley Granger plays the young truck driver who is nagged by poverty, a sense of guilt over the death of his pious mother and a confused resentment against his testy old parish priest and the Roman Catholic Church itself. Obsessed with the idea of making up for his mother's death, he determines that the church must pay for a sumptuous funeral. When the priest balks, the truck driver murders him. Then a younger, understanding priest (Dana Andrews) and a detective (Robert Keith) stand by until the killer gives himself away and collapses into repentance.

Director Mark Robson's accent on gloom, the script's blurry counterfeit of the novel's hero and Actor Granger's lack of depth and force all combine to produce an effect which is neither dramatic nor provocative, but merely overpoweringly monotonous.