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The overture, from views of California's fenced Imperial Valley to the horrific knifing and dumping of immigrants, offers Anthony Mann's landscapes at their most treacherous, and perhaps gave Tomás Rivera the title he needed (...Y no se lo Tragó la Tierra). A Department of Justice case, undercover agents Mexican (Ricardo Montalbán) and American (George Murphy) enduring the corporeal torments of film noir infiltrators while their governments exchange hands-across-the-frontier homilies. Montalbán poses as a runaway bandit in order to enter the bracero-smuggling ring (the headquarters is a cantina run by Sig Ruman, where a weather-beaten Madame Defarge inspects prospective workers by feeling the calluses on their hands), the crossing has men crammed horizontally inside the rolling sarcophagus of a freight truck. Murphy meanwhile peddles stolen work permits to get into the lair of the head trafficker (Howard Da Silva), who, in anticipation of the director's Western barons, gets a lesson in the instability of power. "For once, I want you to see what your dirty work looks like." In a circular network of exploitation and suffering, the border is a mirror that reflects both ways: Twin underworld hideouts, Mexican thugs (Arnold Moss, Alfonso Bedoya) rhymed with Yankee wranglers (Charles McGraw, Arthur Hunnicutt), one man's shawl-clad Madonna like another's pistol-packing moll. The stylistic influence of Treasure of the Sierra Madre is acknowledged and transcended by Mann's bravura episodes of excruciation—Murphy agonizing in distorted close-up as a tractor's furrowing blades grind toward the low-angled camera is a magnificently sadistic rubato. The crossed-flags finale of this tale of "murder, robbery and rescue" can't erase the brutalities of a quicksand world suspended between garden and desert. Cinematography by John Alton. With James Mitchell, Teresa Celli, José Torvay, and Jack Lambert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |