Border Incident

Border Incident (1949)

Runtime: 94 minutes

Directed by: Anthony Mann

Starring: Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Howard Da Silva, James Mitchell, Alfonso Bedoya

From: MGM

This was a film noir I watched last night as I was able to and I needed to see something else from the genre. The Letterboxd review is below:

I was reminded that I needed to see another noir and I picked this one out. It's about the still relevant topic of illegal immigrants and Americans smuggling Mexicans over the border for the purposes of hard labor... the topic was interesting to me. It starred the likes of Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Howard Da Silva and genre veteran Charles McGraw... and it's from Anthony Mann... sounds like a great formula to me.

The plot is simple: The United States and Mexico work together to stop a case where illegal Mexicans are shipped over the border to work as migrants in the fields and it's a conspiracy between people in both countries so it requires an investigator from Mexico (Montalban) and an investigator from the United States (Murphy) to work together and they both have to go deep undercover; there's natural tension over whether they'll be exposed as they deal with a bunch of sleazy people.

While it's not a typical film noir set in the city with such things as gangsters and hardboiled detectives, it's still one as it covers a criminal investigation and it was a low budget affair and shot as such, with many examples of the low lighting and shadows you expect from the genre. I was always interested in the story and its various twists & turns and wow is there a nasty death scene that happens which I won't spoil but just from using your imagination, your mind paints a picture of something quite gruesome.

Anyhow, if you're a fan of the director you'll likely want to see this.