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Don Siegel began his career cutting slick montages during the late 1930s and early 1940s – Blues in the Nigh<\/strong>t (1941) is especially trippy – before getting periodic shots at directing after 1945. The Big Steal<\/strong> (1949) with Robert Mitchum is especially fun, but it wasn’t until 1954’s Riot in Cell Block 11<\/strong> that Siegel would finally enjoy regular assignments, moving through sci-fi (Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/strong>), war (Annapolis Story<\/strong>), crime (Baby Face Nelson<\/strong>), and youth dramas (Crime in the Streets<\/strong>).<\/p>\n Along the way came an Elvis western – Flaming Star<\/strong><\/a> (1960) – and several TV shows, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that Siegel became known as a master of crime films with flawed characters on both sides of the law. Madigan<\/strong> (1965) was especially glossy, whereas Dirty Harry<\/strong> (1971) was gritty and unrelenting in depicting a detective whose stance in a moral grey zone drifted into areas harbored by\u00a0the serial sicko he was hunting.<\/p>\n Twilight Time’s release of Edge of Eternity<\/strong><\/a> (1959) is ostensibly a whodunnit, and like the similarly desert-set Violent Saturday<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(1955), it deals with a criminal plan that goes awry, and a local cop with a bruised past who must rise above his perceived shortcomings and essentially save the town from crooks.<\/p>\n What makes Edge<\/strong> a little more intriguing is the setting of a dying mining town – a stark contrast to the boulder-blasting kinetics of Saturday<\/strong>‘s boom town and dense population. That city’s town core is packed with cars, busy shoppers and kids, whereas Edge<\/strong>‘s Main Street is more modest, and surrounded by withering homes and industrial ruins of its glory days.<\/p>\n The cops in both films have been emasculated by past\u00a0events, and the respective criminal events prove to be fortuitous in allowing each lawman to face fears and move forward – a lesson told with more melodramatic scenes in Saturday<\/strong>, whereas Siegel’s point is implied purely and cleanly through a tense fight on a dangling mining gondola that still holds its own 48 years later.<\/p>\n