Like the previously reviewed His Kind of Woman, Anthony Mann's Border Incident isn't exactly what you might call a "typical" film noir. On his DVD commentary track, film historian Dana Polan even tries to make a case for it more as an example of the "police procedural" or "government agency film," a genre whose strict adherence to unwavering law and order and proto-Dragnet claims to documentarian authenticity put it at some distance from the ambiguity and pessimism which defined noir.
Also like His Kind of Woman, Border Incident takes place far from the dimly-lit urban alleyways of noir tradition, placing its action instead in the often bright and sunny frontiers of the Mexico-California border. But despite these departures from form, this film is an example of noir, and a pretty damned good one at that, because it knows how to use its incongruities to its advantage: that desert terrain looks an awful lot darker and more foreboding after you've seen it in broad daylight, after all, and by the same token, the "bad guys" in Border Incident look even worse when juxtaposed with the square-jawed, morally upright government agents whose mission is to bring them down.
More so than any of the other discs in this series, too, Border Incident's story is surprisingly relevant to current events. We all remember the debate over illegal immigration which exploded in political forums this summer, one of the more controversial solutions to which was to create a forced labor camp in which illegals from Mexico would erect a wall between the two countries; Border Incident, in its simplest form, is a story of why that wall wouldn't work.
Surprisingly progressive in its ideological perspective, the movie depicts a Mexican Policia Judicial Federal officer (the authentically Mexican Ricardo Montalban) and a U.S. Department of Immigration inspector (George Murphy, notably given lower billing than his non-white costar) who team up to halt the trafficking of Mexican braceros, or farm workers, into the clutches of unscrupulous American employers. What's so fascinating about Border Incident within the context of its time is the judicious eye it casts on all of its major players: from the black market operators in Mexico who arrange transportation for the braceros to the ranchers in America who hire them, everybody is the "bad guy."
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