Masterful Movie

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Although the Film is Bookended with Typical for the Time, Government Propaganda Containing Smooth and Convincing Big Brother is Looking Out for You Verbiage Coupled with Elegant Aerial Photography of the Fertile Farmland So Important to the Grocery Stores of America, the Rest of the Movie is a Dark, Dismal, Depressing, Violent World of Cut-Throats, Victims, and Villains on Both Sides of the Border. Director Anthony Mann Pulls No Punches and Along with John Alton, His Noirish Collaborator, Unleashes a Timeless Tale of the Human Trafficking of Desperate People by Greedy and Exploitive Criminals.This is a Downbeat Story that at its Core is Gut-Wrenching and Intolerable, but Continues in Various Forms to This Day. MGM Finally Made the Descent Into Social Consciousness and Film-Noir by This Time and Delivered a Gem of a Commentary with Very Little Restraint. Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Howard DeSilva, and Charles McGraw All Give Good Performances, but it is the Visual and Violent Template that Surrounds the Prescient Story that Remains and it's Bloody and Filthy Residue Resides in the Subconscious Long After the Movie is Over.

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.

How could a film dealing with illegal Mexican immigrants being robbed and beaten over the border be dull? Well, "Border Incident" is.No wonder that song and dance man George Murphy's career ended not long after this terrible film came out. Politics was certainly a way out for this future senator who dies a horrible death in this slowly paced film. The film stereotypes the typical Mexican migrant farmer worker as dimwitted and awfully dull.The film only picks up in intensity once the identities of Murphy and Ricardo Montalban have been discovered as federal agents for the U.S. and Mexico respectively.Disappointing at best, we see similar problems in our very own society today.

"Border incident" (1949) directed by Anthony Mann remains surely as movie in your remembrance, namely of the all people whose bad conscience is concerning immigration and illegal papers for working in a foreign market. As though since then in where the local bosses agree nowadays as before yesterday, with such a low costs for the labor and importation of human flesh, as also parallel circuits of exploitation from Mexicans. Finally, in why with some of them on the spot there are as a fact that shows us how the myth of liberty is only for other mentality of equality of opportunities. The only thing that is perhaps somewhat out of the time in this movie is the manner by which works Mann's style for introducing the sensuality of the two women of the story - apart the young widow with angelic face and the witch reading the hand - in small roles inside a masculine environment : one is a Mexican beautiful employee of the boss half corrupted or prostitute at his service, the other is also a beauty whom the young Mexican invades the flat to call the police by her phone without waiting for her permission, but which took another way when she cut the link and points her pistol to him, calling the husband who works with the illegal immigration. Anthony Mann courageously at a given time that it was not surely very well seen on screening, by the feelings like such were in this matter, wins still our sensibility to change the dust from the border stand of trade for human beings, like in the recent past slaves inside clandestine vans and shootings like if it was the same as against coyotes. There are six deaths : an old man who had the last breath before our eyes inside a clandestine van and whose corpse is thrown away in the evening through the sands and slopes of the no man's land without being even buried like a Indian as well in the past, an intruder killed by a caterpillar because he was in the net of the illegal immigration which took nine of the fifteen dollars promised to each one working for Arizona land owners, a racist driver of a van for whom the immigrants like that are like monkeys, another campaigner against the net who is killed in an ambush by night, the boss of the both sides who was killed by his own employee during a cross fire by night in the desert and one of the mustaches of the ridicule crooks.As almost a documentary in certain moments, this movie actually brings the old problem of illegal immigration from Mexico to United States. As it was since then an unsolved nightmare of the offer from a free strength of labor to the economics of the consumption market from the food industries, much more competitive crossing a fragile border, that means more corruption and killings. In one of the scenes it's watched, in a given office of a powerful man of the region, a lighter imitating a pistol, like in an old far-west movie with characters that are the caricatured misery of themselves, as displaced in a kind of mental no man's land.