Border Incident

Showcasing plenty of Western genre elements and featuring B&W cinematography from the great John Alton, Anthony Mann’s Border Incident transports noir from city streets to border towns, replacing cold, anonymous urban skylines with hot, anonymous desert vistas. Immigration agents Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) and Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) are assigned to go undercover to infiltrate a criminal gang that smuggles Mexican laborers across the border; Pablo’s cover as a migrant laborer is soon questioned because his hands are too soft. Both beautiful and brutal, the mostly exterior settings channel Alton’s camera mastery in exciting new ways while the third act features one of noir’s most explicit, tense, and depraved murder scenes (it involves farming equipment). With his razor blade voice, Charles McGraw plays Jeff Amboy who contains the migrants in packs like a sheepdog with a gun. Alton’s angular camera perspectives create both distance and depth on screen, whether glancing upward at smoky ceilings or outward across the lettuce farm, and André Previn’s dramatic score heightens suspense in all the right places.