Waste of time

Undescribable Perfection

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Though "Border Incident" is billed as a film noir and was a collaboration between the famous duo of director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton (who did make several noirs together), it doesn't really have a noir sensibility. Part of that is due to the fact that it is set not in a claustrophobic urban environment but in the wide open spaces of the southern U.S. It's also partly due to a lack of many of the thematic elements that are so predominant in true noirs. It's really just a crime thriller, starring Ricardo Montalban as an undercover detective who is trying to stop a criminal set up that exploits illegal immigrants from Mexico. It's an o.k. film but not a great one -- it's got a satisfyingly gritty and sweaty atmosphere, but there's something just missing that prevents it from being one of those really good "B" movies. There is a gruesome and shocking scene late in the film that adds a surprising twist to the proceedings, and that's what I most remember about the movie in general.Grade: B-

Anthony Mann directed this still-timely drama that stars Ricardo Montalban as Mexican agent Pablo Rodriguez, who teams up with American agent Jack Bearnes(played by George Murphy) to tackle the problem of illegal Mexican Immigrant smuggling into California, which has seen many of them mysteriously murdered. Rancher Owen Parkson(played by Howard Da Silva) is chief suspect as the ringleader. Pablo goes undercover from the inside as an immigrant, while Jack investigates from the outside. The case will prove quite dangerous, more than either man realized... Fine drama with solid acting and direction, and an incisive script that wouldn't need much changing to work today, sadly.

Mexican and American agents team up to crackdown on those taking advantage of illegal farm workers. The film starts with hokey and superfluous narration explaining the premise of the film. It then tracks a groups of Mexicans as they illegally cross the border, with Montalban as an undercover agent among them. It is quite dull and looks drab. It perks up a bit in the middle, but the basic story is too uninteresting to hold one's interest. Murphy, the affable dancer, seems miscast as a tough American agent. The cast includes Bedoya, who uttered his famous "stinking badges" line the year before. Despite its short running time, the film drags because the plot has no flow.

This movie is very much like one of the most memorable images in it. It's late at night and we're inside a car crossing empty stretches of land kicking up a trail of dust on its path, at some point the beams of light from the headlights momentarily flash a strange running figure and then it's dark again and we've moved on because the movie is trying to get somewhere and there's a fascinating world of possibilities out in the vast arid expanses of land by the sides of the road but we're not allowed out of the car, we're only allowed glimpses from the windows of the speeding car.I know I shouldn't expect circumstantial treatment of plot in the name of suggestive atmosphere from a movie made in a time and place where movies were seldom allowed to be little more than narrative vehicles of premises and points (especially on the b-side level Anthony Mann was working on at the time), and Border Incident is pretty much that, bookended on both sides with voice-over narration that seems the careful studied product of some State Agency. We open with sweeping aerial shots of California farmland as the narrator boastfully muses on about "vast farm empires" and "lifegiving arteries of water". In the end we get handshakes between Mexico and US officials superimposed over the flags of the two countries and shots of farmers picking up bales of hay.Inbetween this Mann is allowed room for maneuvre but he's not allowed off the road. His duo with cinematographer John Alton ranks among the all time best's and you'll find ample evidence here, in the deep-focus arrangements, the unusual angles, the tricks with light and shadow, in the way Alton lights the back of a truck full of Mexican laborers using the flickering headlights of a car on its tail. The end conclusion happens in a place called the Canyon of Death so that Mann must forsake the elaborate tricks with light and shadow he could pull in the domestic setting of something like Raw Deal for heavy stark contrasts between lone figures against clear skies and processions of silhouettes snaking through dark walls of rock and it's great that way.All this, coupled with the unmistakable smell of a government-approved plot, reminds me of Mikhail Kalatozov's stunning collaborations with Sergei Urusevksy for the Soviet film industry. Like their films, Border Incident feels very modern in a roundabout way, there's no music at all for most of the film, and the whole thing is as much a product of its time as it is a forerunner of movies like Prime Cut, Charley Varrick, and gritnik cinema of 20 years later.