The Border

The Border (1979) (i.e. The Blood Barrier or Border Patrol USA)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: Christopher Leitch

Starring: Telly Savalas, Eddie Albert, Michael V. Gazzo, Danny De La Paz, Cecilia Camacho

From: MGM

Here is a real obscure movie (at least judging by the low amount of votes it has on IMDb) that for some odd reason has been on MGMHD a few times in the past few weeks. Then again, given the whole situation going on in Arizona this year… maybe that’s why this has been put into rotation. I won’t say too much about the Arizona stuff except that unlike what the people there would like to believe, it’s clear to me that many Mexican immigrants go into this country not to “run drugs” or whatever, but rather because they want to make more money and send it to their poor families back south of the border by working awful jobs that no one in the U.S. wants to take. That is actually an important plot point in this film… it’s just a shame that overall this was middling and OK at best.

Telly stars as Cooper, a veteran member of the Border Patrol, protecting the boundary between California and Baja California. Ironically, Cooper seems to prefer being in Baja and hanging out with his Hispanic pals there rather than deal with Americans or especially his fellow Border Patrol crew, especially the captain (Albert) who seems to be rather corrupt. He’d rather just complete the next few months, cash in and then retire. Things get complicated, though, when at the very beginning he gets into a car-bashing chase with a Ford Ranchero car (which has a pickup bed; it’s like an El Camino) with a pair of illegals hanging onto the undercarriage of the vehicle. As they go off-road and on those guys end up getting all torn up to hell (not to mention Cooper’s partner ends up getting killed during all that) and I thought that was the real highlight of the movie. That causes problems with the captain, as you might expect. From there, we see Cooper interacting with a young couple he knows, Benny and Leina (De La Paz and Camacho), who happen to live south of the border. They end up marrying, but they have to deal with Chico Suarez (believe it or not, Gazzo; I act incredulously as Gazzo was Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather, Part II and is as Italian and raspy-voiced as you can get. His performance overall was fine here, if a little hammy by the end. It’s just that despite his usage of some Spanish words, he wasn’t Hispanic at all!), an evil man who profits from hauling illegals over the border to work in places like sweatshops or slaughterhouses in California. Chico has known Benny for awhile go and acts nice to him, but that’s to make it where Benny is in debt to him and without telling Cooper the truth-as despite the poor house he and Leina live in, with dirt floors and no electricity, Cooper doesn’t want him to go over the border as that’s trouble-Benny does become a coyote and then spends some time at a slaughterhouse, where we get to see graphic footage of what happens there, as if PETA or someone asked them to do it so that people would become vegetarians and not enjoy their quarter pounder or porterhouse steaks. Stuff happens and Telly has to kick some ass.

Like I said, this movie ends up being middling, sadly. I mean, it’s certainly interesting in that it’s mainly drama with some action in it and it almost feels like a documentary in that it shows people-long before books like Fast Food Nation-why job markets like that use illegals and why they would accept tough work like that, which is they want to try and support their families by having a job that pays much more than what they can find in Mexico, if they even can find a job. That’s all well and good and there’s a lot of drama and De La Paz & Camacho both do a great job with their roles. But, the story just doesn’t come together. In the second half it meanders around and starts to fall apart with it being rather ridiculous, and not in a good way. I mean, for example there’s one scene where Benny raises a lot of hell and clearly disrupts things, and yet the people that you’d think would punish him for being so disobedient… don’t really do anything. I didn’t quite get that, and that sort of thing happens more than one other time. And the ending… as others have said, it’s like they ran out of money so they needed to do something flashy to disguise the fact that there’s no proper ending, and what they came up with was rather laughable.

As for Telly, as I’ve also heard others say, maybe someone like Charles Bronson would have been better to play a bitter old cop. I thought he was fine-enough for the role, but he still had that “oh so cool” sort of style to him, as if he was playing his famous Kojak character. I mean, when most of his scenes have him wearing a shirt with most of its buttons unbuttoned so that everyone can check out his tanned buffed chest and his gold chains (even in uniform!)…

Criticisms aside, if this curio still sounds interesting to you warts and all-and really, I didn’t think it was a BAD movie; it just could have been more than it was-then you can see it a few more times in the next few weeks. You can check out MGMHD’s website and search for the movie there.

I'll be back Sunday night with a new review.