Mann’s first film for a major studio edged him out of noir’s city streets, where he had been steadily building his reputation, towards the barren backdrops and sharp precipices where he would earn his naked spurs in the Fifties. Border Incident still falls within noir’s remit, however. In many ways it is a continuation of T-Men (the first film of the Mann-John Alton axis). The same semi-documentary tone is struck by the opening and closing narration, and by bridging scenes of men in suits planning undercover operations. Similar also is the queasy feeling of disorientation induced by the juxtaposition of realism with Alton’s expressionistic, often nightmarish, chiaroscuro photography.
The project was a neat fit not just for Mann and
Alton, but also for MGM chief Dore Schary, who favoured stories with a liberal,
progressive bent. Border Incident is
noir with a social conscience,
complementing the likes of Crossfire (shepherded
by Schary during his tenure as head of RKO) and Force of Evil. The plot tracks efforts to bust California rancher
Howard da Silva for employing illegal immigrants from Mexico. Ricardo
Montalban, whose top billing was a fairly radical move for a major studio,
plays a Mexican agent embedded with the impoverished labourers, or braceros; George Murphy is his Anglo
counterpart, who infiltrates da Silva’s gang.
It was a topical story – the Bracero Program,
initiated in 1942, was a US-Mexican agreement that provided a legal basis for
the use of immigrant workers on a temporary basis. But it was widely breached.
By 1949, Latino newspapers were equating it with modern-day slavery and
exploitation – barely distinguishable, give or take the murderous extremes,
from the abuses committed by the unscrupulous da Silva and his connivers on the
Mexican side.
Although
it explicitly condemns the maltreatment of the wetbacks – the opening scene
witnesses the brutal slaying of three workers who have fled into the desert’s
“canyon of death”, their bodies dumped in quicksand – Border Incident is not didactic. Framed as a procedural drama (much
like 1948’s He Walked by Night, which
Mann co-directed with Alfred L. Werker), it has the heart-pounding pace of the
best Forties thrillers. Mann wrings maximum suspense from the agents’
predicament. In one scene, Montalban sneaks away from the braceros’ camp one
night to confer with Murphy, held captive above a water tower. Time and again,
Montalban retreats into thick shadows to evade the watchful Arthur Hunnicutt,
one of da Silva’s henchmen. Mann, a masterly manipulator of screen space,
offers only a limited view of the tower, a fragmentary perspective, so that
Montalban’s escape appears almost impossible.
The most famous scene directly parallels T-Men, in which one agent must watch impotently while the other is murdered. Here, it is night again (almost all the action is nocturnal) when Murphy’s cover is blown and he is led out to a field to be executed. Shot and wounded, he lies helpless, clawing pathetically at the dirt, as a tractor is driven towards him. Mann cuts back and forth between Murphy and the advancing machine; Alton positions his camera at ground level, capturing the victim’s anguish in increasingly oppressive close-ups until his face is practically pressed up to the lens. Montalban cannot intervene without endangering the life of an accomplice, and looks on as Murphy is crushed and churned. “If one scene were chosen to illustrate the violence in film noir, Murphy’s death in Border Incident would surely be the best choice,” opines Jeanine Basinger in her book Anthony Mann. (She also remarks how unusual it was – in a Hollywood film of this vintage – for an ethnic minority character to survive to the end while his Caucasian co-lead met a grisly fate.)
Among
the film’s many attractions for students of noir (including the presence of
Charles McGraw as an ambitious heavy), Alton’s facility for high-contrast
lighting and deep-focus photography stands out. Of particular note is what
Alton called “Jimmy Valentine lighting”, after an effect he first noted in the
1915 film Alias Jimmy Valentine, in
which a key light is positioned below the face of a villain – there is a
brilliant example here in da Silva’s first scene, with McGraw’s flashlight
picking out his boss in the darkness, the beam distorting his baleful features.
Kevin Grant
No comments:
Post a Comment