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Bordertown (1935)
9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
South of the border, 26 June 2005
Author: jotix100 from New York
Archie Mayo's "Bordertown" is a film that by today's standards would be deemed politically incorrect. The idea of the poor Mexican immigrant that wants to better himself, only to see people step all over him, is at the center of this tale.
Juan Ramirez, the young lawyer, trying to defend the victim of an accident caused by the young and reckless Dale Elwell, is defeated by a much more experienced Anglo lawyer, who happened to know the system and the judge, obviously. As a result, Juan, decides to leave L.A. to go to a border town, probably Tijuana, where he becomes a partner of Charlie Roark, a decent man who sees the potential in Johnny, as he calls himself now.
What Charlie doesn't know is that he is married to a scheming woman that couldn't care less for him. She has to get rid of her husband in order to get her hands on his money and looks to Johnny to help her, but of course, he wants nothing to do with her.
Paul Muni was a great star at Warner Bros. at the time of this film. We were never fans of Mr. Muni, who in this film gives a clichéd account of the Hispanic Juan in a performance that goes over the top and doesn't convince anyone. On the other hand, Bette Davis, as Marie Roark, is her usual excellent self in a more nuanced performance. We see why later on, Ms. Davis will use all what she shows in this film and more to be the great star that she was. In minor roles, the formidable Eugene Palette plays Charlie Roark and Margaret Lindsay is seen as Dale Elwell, the rich girl that provoked the accident.
This film is a rarity seldom seen these days.
5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Follow-up to Bondage, 6 December 2004
Author: dgibsonia from Texas
Confronting Muni in one scene, Davis suddenly so forcefully expels cigarette smoke from her nose that she looks like a cartoon bull about to charge. But though it's funny, it's not ludicrous: it's one of those startling, inspired B.D. moments.
Warners cast Davis in "Bordertown" when it became apparent that her just-completed loanout to RKO for "Of Human Bondage" was not going to wreck her career, as Warners had feared. Instead, as Davis had gambled, the risky "Bondage" had been her breakout performance. "Bordertown" was a worthy follow-up, with Davis just as compelling as the obsessor rather than the obsessee.
1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
A Muni Mistake, 15 November 2006
Author: theowinthrop from United States
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
It is interesting to see how a reputation that was once high can tumble to later generations - somewhat unfairly. Paul Muni was not a poor actor. In his best work (SCARFACE, JUAREZ, LIFE OF LOUIS PASTEUR, WE ARE NOT ALONE) his work remains quite substantial in it's effectiveness - he was no mean actor. But when he got hammy....then the knives are our for him. One example is Joseph Elsner (Chopin's music teacher and friend in A SONG TO REMEMBER). Another is Johnny Ramirez in BORDERTOWN.
One can make an excuse for Muni playing a Mexican hero like Benito Juarez. In the 1930s Warner Baxter played the Cisco Kid and Joaichim Murietta and Wallace Beery was a memorable Pancho Villa. But these figures were presented as heroes - there was a degree of sympathy in these personalities. There was supposed to be similar sympathy for Ramirez, but Muni really blew it apart in the opening of the film.
Johnny has just become a lawyer - and has just hung his license up. He gets a client (Manuel Diego - Arthur Stone) whose truck was destroyed in a car accident caused by a limousine driven by a drunken socialite (Dale Elwell - Margaret Lindsey). Johnny willingly takes the case, but he is a terrible lawyer (and, to tell the truth, anyone seeing this performance would think Muni is a terrible actor - the scene in the court is the worst overacting). Johnny not only loses to the professional competence of Elwell's attorney, but the disgusted judge tells him that he is going to request that the state bar association take back Johnny's license. He is disbarred and humiliated. But he subsequently starts working for Charlie Roarke (Eugene Palette), a jolly and good natured man who has a roadhouse with gambling.
The plot is that Roarke's wife Marie (Bette Davis) meets Johnny, and falls for him (not hard - he's a romantic Mexican, and look at jolly but short, fat, and old Chalie). But Johnny is not interested. He's loyal to Charlie, and he's met Dale again. At first she makes fun of the ex-lawyer, but she starts enjoying "slumming" with him. But he's more serious.
Marie suddenly gets the idea of getting rid of Charlie. When they return home from a party, he's totally drunk. They are in the garage of their home, and she realizes that if she leaves the gasoline motor on and closes the door on Charlie - well, it's goodbye Charlie! So it works out, and now she thinks that Johnny will be easy to get. But he's not...and in a moment of anger she confesses the murder and says that Johnny was her co-conspirator.
You may sense several points here: 1935 was the year Thelma Todd died in a still mysterious death connected to her having carbon monoxide poisoning in her closed car garage like Palette did. I don't know which of the two events proceeded the other. Secondly, the situation between Davis and Muni is a model for the similar relationship of Ida Lupino and George Raft in THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. In fact the death of Palette is a model for the same death for Alan Hale Sr. in the latter film. And the denouement in the trial court is identical too.
SPOILERS COMING UP!
Both Davis and Lupino suffer mental collapses on the witness stands, revealing their own guilt but accidentally saving Muni and Raft. Raft is able to pick up the pieces with Ann Sheridan in THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Muni is less lucky. Running from him when he reveals his desire to marry her, Lindsay is run down and killed by a car. The effect is overdone by Muni looking so horrified one wonders if he is actually witnessing the sinking of the Titanic! Or maybe he was thinking about his really bad performance in this film.
2 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Bette as Femme Fatale, 15 May 2006
Author: nycritic
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
Talk about a politically incorrect movie. BORDERTOWN has German-born actor Paul Muni playing Mexican, in a made-up tan and fluctuating "accent". Although this isn't the worst of it -- hardly -- as much as when Margaret Lindsay, Warner Bros. reliable secondary leading lady, tells him off near the end just before she gets creamed by an oncoming car off-screen that he's a "savage brute" who belongs to "another tribe". Being Latino, I found myself a little bemused instead of bothered by these lines, but I'm aware of how the times were back then and Hollywood has always found itself playing catch-up with other cultures. One only has to see how wrong and off the mark the industry was in portraying Blacks and Asians on camera to get the point.
Anyway, the story of a Mexican lawyer who gets involved with a murderous female while having his own attraction to a patrician socialite (Lindsay) is a better than average crime-drama that would be remade less than ten years later as THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Made at around the time that OF HUMAN BONDAGE had been released, Bette Davis manages to out-act Paul Muni in her portrayal of a very wicked woman with little to no scruples, but despite her manic energy on screen and the blackness of Marie Roark, she remains fairly suppressed down to the moment her character spins out of control in a key scene. Her rendition of a femme fatale is less bosomy, less hushed, but close to a she-dog able to commit an act of horror for the love a man she can't have.
3 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Ugh, 5 April 2005
Author: ctomvelu from usa
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
German emigree and uber-hambone actor Paul Muni who never saw a scene he didn't want to chew up goes "blackface" to play a humble Mexican immigrant living in Los Angeles and working his way up in the world. If this creaky vehicle reminds anyone of Al Pacino's minstrel performance as an uncultured Cuban in the remake of SCARFACE, don't be too surprised. The characters are quite similar, and both get wildly pop-eyed when the script calls for it. Hispanics everywhere should be greatly offended by Muni's over-the-top performance as this giddy Mexican living the American dream, consequences be damned. I guess Benicio DelToro's grandfather wasn't available. A young, bleached-blonde Bette Davis plays one of Muni's love interests; she eventually goes insane for love of Mr. Meh-hee-can Muni. An absolute hoot, Davis is the sole reason to watch this racially offensive claptrap. There is an absolutely delirious near the end when Muni asks the gal of his dreams to marry him -- a white gal of breeding with one of those stilted, stage-like '30s accents that Hollywood loved so much -- and she calls him a savage and a brute, of "a different tribe." Muni immediately transforms into Mr. Hyde and chases her to an untimely death. In the final scene, a repentant Muni tells his sober-faced priest that he is going back to his own people, his own kind. End of movie. Finis. That's all she wrote. Muni was said to have hired a gen-oo-ine Mexican as a chauffeur in order to study this exotic creature's speech pattern and physical habits. Yowza!
5 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Before Bette Davis was big, 30 November 2001
Author: Brian Ellis from Chantilly, VA
A film where everyone gets whats coming to them, and true to the 1930's formula, in melodramatic fashion. Featuring the now forgotten Paul Muni (was he really a superstar back then?) as a Hispanic lawyer who learns a hard lesson about the facts of life. Muni, as usual plays it weird; before and after Bordertown, he is a pretty normal guy but while he is in Bordertown he becomes a Hispanic parody. But nevermind that, this film has Bette Davis playing yet another scheming psychopath as only she can. Like the several other Davis movies that she had a minor role in ("Fog over Frisco" and "In This Our Life", to name two), her twisted character stays with you long after she is gone. Plus, she's a blonde! Yowza!
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