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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Border Incident (1949)

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Tequila Sunset

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Border Incident on DVD

Anthony Mann directed this amazingly vicious film noir just at the tail end of his career as a "B" moviemaker. The plot has a Mexican agent (Ricardo Montalban) and an American agent (George Murphy) teaming up to go undercover and stop an illegal migrant worker operation. The film begins, like Mann's earlier T-Men and Raw Deal, with a voiceover narration, giving the film a documentary-like urgency. But John Alton's remarkable, stylized black-and-white cinematography quickly takes it somewhere new, somewhere quite a bit more stirring. Border Incident is a volatile movie, liable to go off at any moment, and without the comfort of a happy, predictable ending.

DVD Details: Border Incident is only available in Warner Home Video's "Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 3," but it's worth the price, for this and for Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952).

Starring: Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Howard Da Silva, James Mitchell, Arnold Moss, Alfonso Bedoya, Teresa Celli, Charles McGraw, JosŽ Torvay, John Ridgely, Arthur Hunnicutt, Sig Ruman, Otto Waldis
Written by: John C. Higgins, based on a story by George Zuckerman, John C. Higgins
Directed by: Anthony Mann
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 95 minutes
Date: September 9, 2006