So much average

As Good As It Gets

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Directed by Archie Mayo, this film was later remade, better, as They Drive By Night (1940). It's based on a Robert Lord story, and Henry O'Neill appears uncredited.Paul Muni plays Johnny, a poor Mexican working as a mechanic while he puts himself through law school. A rich socialite Dale (Margaret Lindsay) runs into his friend (Arthur Stone) Manuel's car, which becomes his first case. Johnny sues Dale in court but is ill- prepared, losing to her boyfriend Brook (Gavin Gordon). Though she offers to pay anyway, Brook stops her. So, Johnny hits him causing him to be disbarred.Johnny hits the road and finds his way to a gambling establishment run by Charlie (Eugene Palette), who hires him. As a hard worker, Johnny quickly becomes Charlie's partner, earning unwanted affections from his wife Marie (Bette Davis). Her attraction to Johnny is so great, Marie uses an automatic garage door mechanism to kill her husband with carbon monoxide one night when Charlie is drunk. She is able to convince everyone it was an accidental death. With the insurance money, Johnny builds a successful casino with silent partner Marie.But Marie isn't pleased with her and Johnny's platonic relationship, especially when Dale, with Brook in tow, shows up as a guest at their casino. When Johnny begins seeing Dale, who is merely towing with him though he fails to see it, Marie confesses the murder and its purpose. Johnny wants nothing to do with her, as he blindly pursues Dale. So, Marie tries to pin the murder of her husband on Johnny. Ms. Davis's acting ability is in full exhibition at the trial, and there is a bit of redemption concerning Lindsay's character too, as this sad parable comes to an end.

Although Paul Muni does go over the top a bit in Bordertown, the film remains a savage indictment of racism, concentrating as it does on the struggles of one man in a racial/ethnic minority to find a place in this society.In a biography of Paul Muni I read that he deliberately hired a Mexican driver who stayed with him for several weeks so he could copy his mannerisms and get down the proper speech pattern. He didn't do half bad as Johnny Ramirez, the disbarred attorney who turns to the dark side.The story has Muni bright and eager to start making a living as a lawyer and please his mom Soledad Jimenez who sacrificed a lot so her kid could study law. But in his first appearance in court he loses his temper and manages to get himself disbarred. Had this been a white attorney, I assure you he might have gotten a slap on the wrist and a censure, but not a disbarment. Broken in spirit, Muni ends up working for Eugene Palette at a road house as a bouncer.He also catches the eye of Palette's wife played by Bette Davis. But Muni has eyes for Margaret Lindsay, a society girl who likes to go slumming. In the end both women disillusion and betray him.Bordertown is one of the darkest films of the Thirties, the future is by no means clear for Muni. Though he does overact a bit, you will not forget the smoldering anger that he brings to the part of Johnny Ramirez. This was the second of two films in which Paul Muni played a person of Mexican background. The other was Juarez and there is 180 degree difference between the angry Ramirez and the stoic Juarez. You can hardly believe it's the same actor, but Muni had one incredible range as a player.This is a film that could probably stand a remake. I could see someone like Benjamin Bratt or Lou Diamond Phillips in an updated version as Johnny Ramirez, possibly Edward James Olmos. It was in fact made over in part by Warner Brothers in They Drive By Night. But the Mexican heritage and a great deal more was not included in that film.Until then I recommend Bordertown highly

Two films that Bette Davis and Paul Muni did together evolved around Spanish heritage-this one and 1939's "Juarez."When I saw this film, I began to think of "They Drive By Night," which came several years later and had Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogard in similar roles where a spurned Lupino, who had killed her husband in the same way that Davis did in the Eugene Palette character, goes berserk when Bogart ignores her.Lupino's outburst in the court that the doors made her do it was much more effective than Davis's insanity scene.Nonetheless, we have an excellent film here with the element of class identity and racism added to the mix.Muni as Johnny Ramirez is perfect. He desires the American dream, but even a law degree can't save him from a poor performance in court, a terrible temper which will lead to his expulsion from practicing the law. Ramirez finds success another way, by opening a nightclub after he formed a partnership with Palette and met Palette's bored, lust filled Davis.In a supporting performance, Margaret Lindsay is effective as the high class society spoiled woman who turned the tables on attorney Ramirez in court, only to meet him some time later, when he is a success, but only to reject him again.Remember Rita Moreno's statement in "West Side Story?" Stick to your own kind, stay with your own kind. Ramirez repeats this at the end of the film. 1935 or 1961, this was the prevailing time of racism.

PAUL MUNI with dark make-up and an Hispanic accent is a hot-blooded Mexican lawyer who turns to a different sort of life when his career as a lawyer leads nowhere. He works for EUGENE Palette in a gambling joint and is soon the jovial man's partner. On the sidelines watching him is BETTE DAVIS, in one of her early femme fatale roles, a bleached blonde whose advances toward Muni are promptly rebuffed.A sub-plot involving Muni's romance with a society girl (MARGARET LINDSEY) is really rather predictable, especially when she flirts with him from the start and then turns on him when he becomes serious, flinging words at him like "savage" and "brute" and telling him to stay with "his own tribe." The script resolves this ill-fated affair in an abrupt manner before the fade-out.The highlight of the drama is Bette Davis turning on Muni too, on the stand, declaring that he conspired with her to kill her husband, when in fact she is the guilty one. She goes to pieces on the stand, allowing us a Bette Davis moment that was an indication of the kind of actress she was on the verge of becoming.Frankly, this whole story bears a strong relationship to another tale Warners produced in '41 with Ida Lupino as the stressed out woman filled with guilt over the murder of her husband. Lupino was even more impressive in her mad moment than Davis. In fact, the whole picture was smoother and produced with more polish than this similar version using some of the same story elements.Summing up: Intense drama suffers from Muni's overacting as the Mexican lawyer and a script that doesn't develop the wife's character sufficiently to lead to her mental breakdown. A better version is THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT ('41)with George Raft and Ida Lupino and Alan Hale as the hubby she wants to get rid of.