(1949)

Starring Ricardo Montalban, Howard da Silva, George Murphy; dir; Anthony Mann

Ostensibly a case taken from the files of the Immigration Office in which two agents - one Mexican, one American - are sent to infiltrate a criminal organisation smuggling cheap Mexican labour across the border into the U.S. Like T-Men (also a collaboration between Mann and Alton from a script by Higgins), Border Incident is an object lesson in how form can transform content. The 'fiction' enclosed within the docudrama redefines narrative space as film noir: Intense close-ups juxtaposed with long shots implicating locations in the drama. Space is unsettingly deployed and expectations established by character conventions confounded, adding to the general atmosphere of paranoia.