Review of Border Incident

In their Eagle-Lion days, director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton were the undisputed A-team of B-movies (T-Men, Raw Deal). When their lavish talents got them an offer to work for MGM, they stayed with the tried-and-true in Border Incident, which in its narrative and some of its magical photography echoes T-Men. It's a story about the ruthlessness of the migrant-worker trade between Mexico and California's great agricultural valleys, and it remains as topical today as it was in 1949 (if not more so). Teaming up to close down the human pipeline are Mexican agent Ricardo Montalban and American George Murphy, who perilously go undercover. The trail leads them to a brutal rancher (Howard DaSilva) with a cadre of murderous henchmen, who brokers the deals. As in T-Men, one of the agents is killed, by means of a terrifying piece of farm machinery, as his partner watches in silence lest he give himself away. When the braceros (as the laborers are called) grow inconvenient, they are "disappeared" into a quicksand mire known as the Canyon of Death; the terminally gruff Charles McGraw emits a girlish shriek as he topples in. Border Incident is hard-edged and unsentimental, and probably a fairly accurate, if lurid, indictment of the traffic in south-of-the-border human labor, circa midcentury. One can only hope that conditions have improved since them; movies, plainly, have not.