Last Thursday TCM screened Border Incident (1949) as part of its Race in Hollywood: Latino Images in Film program (running May 5 – 11). I decided to make it a double-feature by getting the dvd for Mystery Street (1950). What do these films have in common? Both show a young Ricardo Montalbán fighting bad guys under the careful compositions of cinematographer John Alton, who deservedly earned much acclaim for his contributions to the aesthetics of film noir.

Border Incident is a crime melodrama directed by Anthony Mann that has Montalbán playing the role of a Mexican federal agent who teams up with an American counterpart to put an end to an illegal migrant worker operation. If not for Montalbán, the film could not be said to stray very far from the usual stereotypical representations allotted to Mexicans in American cinema, but Montalbán really knows how to kick ass and take names – as pictured in the scene above, where he escapes from a truck, overpowers the driver, takes it over, and then cooly drives it along while the bad guy tries to get back in. Montalbán then swats him off like a fly.

Although loosely based on some true incidents and border skirmishes from the late forties, the narrative flow is a bit slow and the attempts at giving the film a quasi-documentary-like feel by adding a voice-over narration are then upended by the rather silly (and still common) practice of eschewing subtitles altogether in favor of having people from another country speaking English in their homeland, but with a notable accent.  Still, there are a lot of gritty scenes, with plenty of action, and at least here we have Montalbán to give us one handsome, courageous, smart, and morally righteous Mexican to add some measure of a counterbalance to the usual proceedings.

The other bright side of Border Incident is closely woven into the dark shadows of John Alton’s cinematography. Had I been left to focus on plot and story alone, my attention may have drifted – but Alton’s compositions always had my attention. And, wow!… Its execution-by-tractor scene still stands out as a gruesome tour-de-force on all levels. Fans of The Narrow Margin (1952) who delighted in Charles McGraw’s charms as the gravelly-voiced cop who was never at a loss for quotable zingers will, here, be chilled by his turn as a ruthless killer.

On to Mystery Street… it’s a bland title and I prefer Murder at Harvard (listed as an alternate) – especially since the latter highlights one of the things that was unique about this film insofar as it was shot in Boston, and because, on the face of it, a murder is always going to be more attention-grabbing than a mystery.

Alton’s craft are the star of the show during the first few minutes which carry a pure noir aesthetic that drips with seedy eroticism, innuendo, and ominous signs that foretell of bad things to come. Check out how the opening damsel is framed in these two shots:

And it just gets darker from there as it follows with a morbid killing in which the assassin props up the victim’s fresh corpse in a lover’s embrace to avoid detection from a passing vehicle, and then knocks its head against the car-door with complete abandon as soon as the coast is clear. We then cut back to the present, six months after the murder, to see the skeleton of that body discovered washed up on the beach.

It takes us 15 minutes to be introduced to Pete Morales, Montalbán’s character. Morales is a Portuguese detective – the ethnic fudge here being partially explained by the notion that Boston, at that time, had a big settlement of Portuguese fisherman. While Montalbán is thus not able to represent Mexico per say, he is still able to at least defy the usual representations of Latino-Americans by coming on strong, in suit and tie, both suave and capable; a full-on law-enforcement hero with pep in his stride and brimming with enthusiasm.

Mystery Street garnered Leonard Spigelgass (who the year before scripted Howard Hawks’ I Was A Male War Bride) an Oscar nomination for Best Writing – which is a bit odd because the story suffers from a fractured narrative that keeps shifting its focus from one person to the next. What it does do, which was not very common at the time, was spend a lot of time on the procedural aspects of the investigation. Of course, nowadays criminal forensic science is done to death, but that doesn’t lessen the gruesome impact of the macabre superimpositions seen when attempts are being made to reconstruct the identity of the murder victim:

With Mystery Street, as with Border Incident, I found myself once again underwhelmed by the plot of the film itself, but my attention nonetheless being rewarded whenever Montalbán was allowed to shine or when Alton’s cinematography really went for the gusto. In Mystery Street there are lots of prison-bar like shadows cast onto backgrounds and the lighting can be wonderfully surreal. The last scene, which takes place in a train yard, gives the viewer a nice payoff. Other things to look for include great performances by Elsa (The Bride of Frankenstein!) Lanchester and Betsy Blair – in one of her last films before being unfairly blacklisted for four years, not for being a communist, but for her activism in fighting for woman’s rights. These two women know how to handle their guns.

Montalbán also faced recriminations for his activism pursuing equal rights and justice, and as a result was probably overlooked for a lot of plum roles that would have given him a broader platform from which to be heard. He helped establish the Nosotros Foundation in 1970 to advocate for Latinos in the movie and television industry. Given the politics behind Border Incident, it seems appropriate to end here with a quote from Montalbán (listed in Wikipedia) in which he eloquently describes the goals behind his group:

Mexico is my mother; the United States the best friend I will ever have. And so I dream of the day when my mother will say, ‘Ricardo, you have chosen a wonderful friend.’ And the day when the friend will say, ‘Ricardo, you have a sensational mother.’ That is why it is very important to bring us together. Brothers and sisters, love thy neighbor as thyself. And this theatre, I think, can be a little grain of sand towards that end. Here we have opened the doors not only for the opportunity of young talent to develop — writers, directors, actors — but also in coming together as a group in this society in which we live. Let’s open a hand of friendship and love and brotherhood. That is my dream. I’ll never see it complete while I’m still alive, but I think this is the beginning, and that is what makes me so happy to see this come to fruition.