Saturday, November 18, 2017

Movie review - "Border River" (1954) **

Who says Hollywood can't be educational? I'd never heard of the Mexican free trade zone, the Zona Libre, until this movie - where a Confederate soldier, Joel McCrea, rocks up to buy guns for his slave-owning masters. Yvonne de Carlo is on hand as a local gal, and Pedro Armendariz is the local warlord.

The Confederate-supplies story gets ignored for a lot of time and instead there's lots of stuff of Armendariz being jealous of de Carlo's attraction to McCrea, and a local revolutionary wanting to take over Armendariz.

Why not have a main character be a Union soldier after McCrea? (There is one but it's half arsed.) Why not talk about what happened to the, you know, guns? Why not have a decent ending? Why not have McCrea be more actively involved with the revolutionaries? Or at least de Carlo, who comes from revolutionary stock? (She basically carries the water for McCrea.)

The ingredients are there for something decent but the result is dull and mediocre.

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