Bordertown (1935)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Wow! Such a good movie.

Overrated

Excellent but underrated film

Directed by Archie Mayo, this film was later remade, better, as They Drive By Night (1940). It's based on a Robert Lord story, and Henry O'Neill appears uncredited.Paul Muni plays Johnny, a poor Mexican working as a mechanic while he puts himself through law school. A rich socialite Dale (Margaret Lindsay) runs into his friend (Arthur Stone) Manuel's car, which becomes his first case. Johnny sues Dale in court but is ill- prepared, losing to her boyfriend Brook (Gavin Gordon). Though she offers to pay anyway, Brook stops her. So, Johnny hits him causing him to be disbarred.Johnny hits the road and finds his way to a gambling establishment run by Charlie (Eugene Palette), who hires him. As a hard worker, Johnny quickly becomes Charlie's partner, earning unwanted affections from his wife Marie (Bette Davis). Her attraction to Johnny is so great, Marie uses an automatic garage door mechanism to kill her husband with carbon monoxide one night when Charlie is drunk. She is able to convince everyone it was an accidental death. With the insurance money, Johnny builds a successful casino with silent partner Marie.But Marie isn't pleased with her and Johnny's platonic relationship, especially when Dale, with Brook in tow, shows up as a guest at their casino. When Johnny begins seeing Dale, who is merely towing with him though he fails to see it, Marie confesses the murder and its purpose. Johnny wants nothing to do with her, as he blindly pursues Dale. So, Marie tries to pin the murder of her husband on Johnny. Ms. Davis's acting ability is in full exhibition at the trial, and there is a bit of redemption concerning Lindsay's character too, as this sad parable comes to an end.

Paul Muni and Bette Davis overact monstrously while lacklustre studio hack Archie Mayo seems distracted and oblivious in this racially provocative film that derives its "bittersweet ending" by condoning segregationist attitudes. Heavy handed and poorly constructed the film collapses under its own weight within the first fifteen minutes with an out of control courtroom scene that it never recovers from as Mr. Muni begins to chew up scenery by the yard hollering and howling away in an almost incoherent fashion.Johnny Ramirez is a Mexican American from the other side of the tracks who through determination and grit attains a law degree from a store front night school. In his first big case involving an auto accident he displays only ineptitude and is quickly made to look the fool by his well heeled opponents and an impatient judge who recommends he be disbarred. Devastated by the setback an angry Johnny takes on a job at a gambling joint where he is befriended by the owner Charlie Roark (Eugene Palette) who likes his style. The owner cuts him in on the place but problems arise with Mrs. Roark (Davis) who also wants a piece of Johnny. She kills Charlie, implicates Johnny and slowly goes mad before he is acquitted and free to be with a high society Wasp who coldly explains to him that they are from "different tribes, savage" and it will never work. When she flees to escape his rage she is run over and killed by a car. Ramirez sells the casino and moves back to his poor neighborhood rationalizing that its best to stay with your own.In addition to this appalling denouement Bordertown has a series of bad performances to compliment the overall ugliness of the story. Unfair as his plight might be, Muni's Ramirez is so abrasive and arrogant it becomes hard to show sympathy for such a bull headed blunderer. Davis is no better as the less than loyal wife matching the same adolescent emotions of Muni. Her Lady Macbeth mad scenes give no indication that she was about to become the best film actress of her era. Margaret Lindsay as Muni's American Dream is cold, remote and flat.Bad as Bordertown is (and it is very) it remains an interesting indicator of the times and acceptable attitudes. The rest is just a mishmash of bad acting and uninspired direction.

PAUL MUNI with dark make-up and an Hispanic accent is a hot-blooded Mexican lawyer who turns to a different sort of life when his career as a lawyer leads nowhere. He works for EUGENE Palette in a gambling joint and is soon the jovial man's partner. On the sidelines watching him is BETTE DAVIS, in one of her early femme fatale roles, a bleached blonde whose advances toward Muni are promptly rebuffed.A sub-plot involving Muni's romance with a society girl (MARGARET LINDSEY) is really rather predictable, especially when she flirts with him from the start and then turns on him when he becomes serious, flinging words at him like "savage" and "brute" and telling him to stay with "his own tribe." The script resolves this ill-fated affair in an abrupt manner before the fade-out.The highlight of the drama is Bette Davis turning on Muni too, on the stand, declaring that he conspired with her to kill her husband, when in fact she is the guilty one. She goes to pieces on the stand, allowing us a Bette Davis moment that was an indication of the kind of actress she was on the verge of becoming.Frankly, this whole story bears a strong relationship to another tale Warners produced in '41 with Ida Lupino as the stressed out woman filled with guilt over the murder of her husband. Lupino was even more impressive in her mad moment than Davis. In fact, the whole picture was smoother and produced with more polish than this similar version using some of the same story elements.Summing up: Intense drama suffers from Muni's overacting as the Mexican lawyer and a script that doesn't develop the wife's character sufficiently to lead to her mental breakdown. A better version is THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT ('41)with George Raft and Ida Lupino and Alan Hale as the hubby she wants to get rid of.

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.