Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

tomgillespie2002 When one considers the extraordinary acting career of Jack Nicholson, the performances that immediately spring to mind are the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Shining and even Tim Burton's Batman. They were roles seemingly tailor-made for Nicholson's manic arched eyebrows and devilish grin, but he was capable of so much more when, ironically, doing far less. Arguably, he has never been better than as Charlie Smith, the middle-aged and weary border agent working within a corrupt organisation in El Paso. When we first meet him, he is discussing with the owner of a factory which of his illegal immigrant employees to arrest so he can meet his quota of deportations. He reads the Mexican youths their rights like reading from a shopping list, but they'll be back in a few days. Charlie's job is ineffective and he knows it, and it takes a special actor to pull off indifference and boredom without appearing disinterested.Every night he returns to his nondescript trailer to eat a TV dinner cooked by his stay-at-home wife Marcy (Valerie Perrine). It is Marcy who convinces Charlie to quit his job as an immigration enforcement officer and move to El Paso, where property is cheaper and a job as a border agent awaits him. To please the wife he has fallen out of love with but nevertheless tolerates, Charlie agrees, and falls in with fellow border agent Cat (Harvey Keitel). Along with his supervisor Red (Warren Oates), Cat runs a human trafficking operation across the border, and wants Charlie to join the payroll. Meanwhile, young Mexican mother Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) attempts to flee into the U.S. with her baby and younger brother after an earthquake decimates her town. When she frequently comes up against the border patrols, Charlie start to sympathise with her situation, as well as growing increasingly weary of his wife's wild spending and his colleagues' abuse of power.The Border didn't do particularly well on its release and its memory has somewhat faded since, but director Tony Richardson's film packs enough of a punch to warrant a reevaluation. It perhaps arrived too late in a decade when cinema had moved away from the character-driven 70s and more towards visual decadence. Yet The Border could also be released today, and its subject matter would be just as relevant, if not more so. It highlights the problems on both sides, with corruption rife and those caught in the middle treated like dogs, and what little progress has been made in the decades since. Recent films like Sin Nombre and Cartel Land have explored and highlighted the same issues, and the result is always violence upon violence. Richardson, who is better known for his exceptional British works Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runnier and Tom Jones (amongst others), directs with little flair but trusts the story to pack enough power on its own. Although it descends into a generic, action-packed climax (which was forced in after test audiences reacted badly to the original ending), The Border deserves another shot, and features a Jack Nicholson at the very top of his game.

Predrag To appreciate Jack Nicholson's work in "The Border" you have to take into account the time it was made. Nicholson was just coming off "The Shining" where his performance was universally mocked by the elites as ham boned. His turn here is the polar opposite of Jack Torrance. Nicholson plays a passive border guard submissively going along with a corrupt system until events force him to take a stand for what is right. The transformation of his character is subtle with few broad gestures or demonstratives.The story-line takes place in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, in which there is the border between the two places (the Rio Grande river, more specifically). It deals a lot with the illegal immigration problem, and other issues that occurred at that time. The immigration issue still with us after all these years, but its hard to imagine a movie dealing with that issue in as thoughtful or morally complex a way as this one does being made today.I think the striking contrast between Charlie's air-headed Mary and the desperate and needy Maria needed to be further explored. As it was played Charlie is just a good Joe doing a good deed or two when in fact we know he is much more involved than that. I think the movie would have been improved by making him choose between the two women as he had to make the moral choice between going with the Cat's corruption or going against him. You gotta see this for Jack Nicholson, one of the great actors of our time, who brings subtlety and veracity to a role that could have been ordinary, while giving us only a hint of the commanding and irreverent style that he would adopt in later years.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

emuir-1 Yes it was choppy. Yes a different ending was reshot to a 'happy' ending. If you want to know why, read Tony Richardson's autobiography "Long Distance Runner" which details the infighting, budget cutting, rewriting by others, studio head demands and more. It is a wonder the film ever got made. Originally the studio heads wanted Robert Blake, and it was written for him. No one else in the studio wanted Blake, in fact they loathed him, some were terrified of him, others just disgusted - and this was long before his murder trial. After long negotiations, demands, and flip flopping, Blake passed, and Jack Nicholson, who was a friend of Tony Richardson agreed to do the film, which immediately meant a budget increase and renewed interest. Tony Richardson found Jack to be the ultimate professional - he was on time, knew his lines, took direction without a qualm and delivered. Unlike others in the cast. HarveyNicholson Keitel was a neurotic worrier and demanded take after take. Next day he fretted over the take in the can and wanted to do it again. Valerie Perrine was an thoroughly unpleasant B__tch and seemed to go out of her way to upset everyone.It took me a long long time to find this film as it is rarely shown on TV and the library does not have it, but I was lucky to find it in the $3 bin at 'Big Lots' store. After watching it on my big screen, i went back to the beginning and watched it again - it's that good. This is the old Jack Nicholson of Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, and The Passenger, before he began hamming it up in blockbuster movies. I found myself thinking he would have done a far better job than John Travolta in Urban Cowboy had he been young enough at the time.Jack gives a restrained performance as a decent man trapped in an unpleasant situation. He has to return poor immigrants, who have nothing and only seek to survive - even at exploitation wages, back to a life of grinding poverty in a country across a river. the golden dream is tantalizingly close. To make it worse, the border patrol agents are on the take, his wife is a vapid acquisitive airhead who thinks happiness is a duplex with dinky pool, getting her hair and nails done and great sex. He is an honest man who is confronted by the fact that not only is his friend and neighbor not above convenient murder, but so is his supervisor.The film begins beautifully with a baptism in an old Spanish church where the young Indian woman and her husband are dressed in their best and surrounded by relatives for the occasion. An sudden earthquake kills the husband and destroys the church and town leaving the young mother and baby destitute. They head to the north with her brother to try to cross the border and get into the US. In doing so they are exploited by coyotes and the baby is stolen for sale to an American couple for $25,000. The film manages to depict the dilemma of the border patrol agent, Nicholson, and the desperately poor immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution, as our recent ancestors were able to do legally not too many years ago, as well as the cynical opportunists on the take and turning a blind eye for money.This film should be released again, because things have not changed.

merklekranz "The Border" has a powerhouse cast in it's favor. Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Warren Oates, are uniformly good. What is not so good is the script, and editing. The script seems somewhat redundant, and the editing is seasickness inducing choppy. Despite these flaws, the film is watchable, but I doubt repeat viewings would be necessary. The corruption that is shown, certainly portrays the United States Border Patrol in a most negative way. The plight of the Mexicans is not a very pretty picture, and is exploited throughout the movie. Is it a political statement or entertainment, I am not certain? As a movie I would call it marginally successful at best. - MERK