Border Incident

Curator's Note: Today's Daily Dose begins to demonstrate the

increasing range of the noir style. While we have had many Doses
that owe significant debts to German Expressionism, today's clip
shows that film noir was also very influenced by documentary realism.
A growing trend in Hollywood movies during the postwar period,
documentary realism influenced the film noir style after 1946. This
trend towards more realistic films and stories was fueled in large part
by MGM's new head of production, Dore Schary, who eventually
replaced that studio's founding mogul, Louis B. Mayer. Border Incident
was part of several low budget films that Schary greenlit as head of
production at MGM. This sequence is beautifully shot by
cinematographer John Alton, under the direction of Anthony Mann.
Notice how Alton and Mann carefully use diagonal framings, as they
pan across the natural barriers and rectilinear landscaping of the
Imperial Valley. This is not the bleak urban jungle prominent in most
films noir, rather it is the natural "great agricultural empire" along the
California-Mexico border, establishing the setting for this film's story
about braceros (or migrant Mexico farm workers). Complete with
documentary voiceover narration, this scene demonstrates how
documentary realism in a film noir is never without its darker
undercurrents and ominous overtones of fate

Although I haven't seen Border Incident, a few things jumped out at me from
the credits alone. First, several of the actors listed were in
MGM's Battleground, also made under Schary's leadership, and also widely
praised as the most realistic war film made up to that point. Second, Charles
McGraw is in the cast. That almost ensures that this is a noir. (We also saw him
in The Killers). McGraw starred in one of the bestB films ever made, The
Narrow Margin, which is certainly noirish.

The opening photography and narration, as pointed out by the Daily Dose
preamble, signal realism to the audience. Although I doubt we are in for a
documentary about migrant farm workers a la Edward R Murrow, we are being
set up to see a film about how US immigration policy is causing unintended
harm to Mexican migrant farm workers. The Mexicans congregating behind a
fence and the facts adduced from the INS set the audience up to be critical of
our own government in what we are about to see. So, the film is realistic and
progressive in nature. This documentary style of fiction film making was done
particularly well by 20th Century Fox in movies such as House on 92d St, 13

Rue Madeleine, and Call Northside 777. All of these films were examples of
documentary realism, not noir. The fact that Border Incident is a noir will
obviously benefit from a dose of realism in the beginning as a way to orient the
audience's thinking about the subject matter and the filmmakers' political point
of view.