I thoroughly enjoyed this picture and I had been looking for it for a long time. It's not often a motion picture can mesh all components into a first class entertainment production. This one is so completely absorbing from start to finish that I wished it wouldn't end. It was 110 minutes well spent.It is remarkable to note the metamorphosis in Dick Powells' career, from an effeminate tenor in "42nd Street" in the early '30's to a tough-talking, gravel-voiced film noir star, beginning in the mid '40's with "Murder, My Sweet", and "Cornered", culminating in this near-masterpiece.Can't find fault anywhere here. The story moves along at breakneck speed, and, as mentioned in my summary, if you get up to get a snack you will lose the thread of the story, so intricate and complex is the plot. If this were a book I would say I couldn't put it down.Whatever happened to good film-making? Movies get worse and worse, but thank God for TCM. This picture is a little outdated, but just go with it and take into consideration that it was made 60 years ago. Truly, they don't make 'em like this anymore.

The idea of drug trafficking and addiction as social threats didn't emerge until the post-war years – when marijuana and heroin no longer confined themselves to urban blacks and jazz musicians. Though the subject would seem a natural for film noir, the cycle as a whole ignored it, except for odd references (Jules Amthor drugging Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, for example). But in the late 1940s, two films took on the phenomenon directly: Port of New York and To The Ends of the Earth. Both films show the stridency that would soon come to be characteristic of the Red Scare films of the early 1950s. Port of New York, however, effectively explored its noirish milieu, while To The Ends of the Earth harks back to the international espionage pictures of wartime and the pre-war years.Treasury agent Dick Powell witnesses the mass death of Asian `slaves,' jettisoned overboard in chains from a Japanese freighter off the coast of San Francisco. Soon, in relentless pursuit of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, he circles the globe from Shanghai to Egypt to Cuba and finally to New York. His travels curiously intertwine with those of an American widow (Signe Hasso) and her young Chinese ward (Maylia). He uncovers a ruthless (`fanatical' is the preferred adjective) worldwide conspiracy to grow, distribute and sell opium, ultimately refined into heroin. The case doesn't crack until his ocean liner begins entry into New York harbor.It's a good-bad movie. One of the burdens the noir cycle occasionally had to shoulder was paying homage to various principalities and duchies of the U.S. Government, generally J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (as in Call Northside 777) or the Treasury Department (as in T-Men). Here, it's the Narcotics Bureau headed by Harry Anslinger, who graces the movie with his presence in three cameos. The requisite tone of reverence is anathema to noir, and Powell's voice-over narration drones on and on, a powerful opiate in itself.But the nuts and bolts of the drug trade operated by a global cartel retain surprising interest, and the movie's pace picks up as it progresses, right up to a fairly shocking twist at the end. Many of its attitudes and assumptions show their age, but To The Ends of the Earth ultimately delivers its product.

In some ways, it is very much ahead of its time. In the first few minutes, you'll know you are watching a very well done movie. The scene where the slaves go overboard and it motivates Dick Powell to track down the murderer is enough to get you interested. Every time, Powell gets nearer something happens to sidetrack him. The predications about drugs and South America are extraordinary, given that over 50 years has elapsed. The way of smuggling the drugs is very clever. I recommend this movie because of its suspense and its ability to draw you into it.

A fun, serial-like adventure movie which presages "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and that harkens back to a time when the world seemed like a bigger and more mysterious place. Dick Powell is the quintessential tough guy who also loves his rose garden. Excellent twist ending.Strangely neglected film, probably because its view of the international drug trade seems rather quaint by today's standards. Still, a wonderful time capsule that reminds us of such forgotten history as Japan's wartime domination of China and the crumbling colonial empires of England and France in the Middle East. Also, the slave trade theme continues (sadly) to resonate, given the recent headlines about Chinese workers being smuggled into the States as sweatshop laborers.