Border Incident

A ring smuggling farm labourers from Mexico into California takes them across and then kills them rather than paying their wages. Two agents, one American and one Mexican, work their way in separately: the Mexican crosses as a labourer, the American poses as a seller of forged papers. Inside, nobody trusts anybody, and the two cannot even save each other. The subject is not crime but labour itself being transported as goods. The film does not present the ring as an isolated gang; it says plainly that the farms create the demand and that the system needs this cheap labour. The form is noir. John Alton's cinematography leaves the night scenes almost entirely dark; light enters only as a torch or a headlamp. The sequence in the marsh is among the most cited images in the genre. The production uses the semi-documentary police template common at the time: an official narrator over the opening, real locations, cooperation from the authorities. But the film goes somewhere far darker than the template allows; the scene with the farm machinery is hard enough to have strained the censors. Ricardo Montalban plays the Mexican agent and George Murphy the American. Anthony Mann directs. Who it is for: viewers who like forties noir and crime films with a social subject. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the period's narration didactic; the opening and closing carry an openly official voice.