Border Incident (1949, Anthony Mann) (Patreon)

71/100

Second viewing, last seen at Lincoln Center's Mann retro in 2004. In the nerd group, I'd recently noted reason #28 why I'm not a hardcore auteurist ( = shrugging at a bunch of canonical Manns and then flipping for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), to which someone responded that it was also reason #28 why I'm crazy. Promptly used that as a handy segue.

And I've just stumbled onto reason #29, since I thought the completely unheralded Border Incident, which both Le Chuck and Dan Sallitt more or less dismissed when I asked them about it, to be just a couple hairs shy of terrific—my favorite of the retro so far (with one day to go), along with El Cid. (I'm not counting the even more awesome Naked Spur and Raw Deal, which I saw years ago.) I must be nuts, because to my mind this film's merits are pretty obvious: superb location photography (in some ways this film is the missing link between Mann's noir period and his Westerns, as Dan observed); fabulous tough-guy acting (especially from George Murphy and Howard Da Silva, but even Montalban is surprisingly good); a taut yet non-mechanical narrative replete with bravura set pieces (the canyon ambush and quicksand struggle; Pablo's attempt to rescue the captive "Bryant"; the chase from the post office, with those amazing shots of the motorbike zipping down the furrows of crops); sharp dialogue of both the hard-boiled and urbane varieties; and one of the most genuinely startling and distressing murder scenes in postwar American cinema—I could scarcely believe my eyes when it actually happened. And yet the response from Mann aficionados seems to be a collective shrug. Whatever. Happy to be bonkers.

Ain't no fool for love songs that whisper in my ears, would not be convicted by a jury of my peers. Though I'm surprised that my list of virtues omits what's probably the most salient factor: Border Incident is fundamentally an undercover-cop movie, arguably the sturdiest mini-genre there is. ("No matter how hard you may try to make a cheap, sleazy, exploitative, totally unredeemable piece of direct-to-video crap," I noted, reviewing Donnie Brasco 26 years ago, "you will inevitably find that your undercover-cop saga sports, oh dear, a genuine subtext") Give me a Federale, posing as a migrant worker, who's immediately spotted due to his soft, uncallused palms, forcing him to improvise his way out of being murdered, and I'm happily groovin' on the thick anxiety. Here we have two such characters—one from each side of the U.S./Mexico border, working together but engaged in separate ruses—thereby doubling the number of ways that something can go horribly wrong. As noted above, horrible would be an understatement in one particular case, and I remain amazed that even a bloodless version of that death found its way to theaters in 1949; despite opening with a didactic air (NARRATOR: "Nature never waits. When the crops are ready, they must be harvested. This means manpower—a vast army of farm workers who must be available when needed. And this army of workers comes from our neighbor to the south, from Mexico"), this is a remarkably seedy and dangerous tale, focused on immigration agents who not only risk their lives but actively welcome torture in furtherance of their ostensibly noble goals. I don't buy the international fellow feeling, nor believe that operations like these prioritize migrant workers' well-being over agricultural profit margins, but the movie goes dark enough (sometimes literally, with cinematographer John Alton performing his customary shadowy magic) to considerably undermine any hokiness, generating plenty of sweaty tension along the way. Underrated Mann. Or, alternatively: Underrated, man!