Border Incident

One of Anthony Mann’s series of noirs in the late 1940s, Border Incident takes the genre out of the city and into the fields and borderlands of Southern California. Ricardo Montalban received a rare leading dramatic role as a Mexican federal agent investigating the exploitation of migrant farmworkers entering the United States under the Bracero Program. Shot by essential noir cinematographer John Alton, the film brings noir’s deep shadows to the borderlands of Southern California.

A gang smuggles illegal Mexican farmworkers across the California border and kills the immigrants before they can return home. When federal agents Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) and Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) go undercover to overturn the organization, they find themselves face-to-face with its leader, Owen Parkson (Howard da Silva). The agents quickly realize that what began as a routine murder case has become a struggle for survival.