Customer Reviews

Bordertown (1937)

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Bordertown is great Bette Davis and Paul Muni, but in this DVD R format it is not up to visual par with other Bette Davis films on DVD , or other Warner films of the same period.

Obviouly, a whole bunch of third rate films that have piled up are being pushed on devotees of them. I love most of these films and am saddened to see the dirty plate they are now being served on, for they are not third rate or whatever.

A Simple solution: Do not buy anything in this "series". And, they are easy to spot: Same covers, no features listed, no subtitles for the hearing impaired, no restorations, no scene slections...you can skip, but you just get a 10 minute leap at each skip you make. This shows a tremendous lack of respect for many of these offerings: Private Lives, Bowhani Junction, Sins of Rachel Cade, Bordertown, Mr Lucky and on and on and at 28.99 plus tax!! The price adds to the outrage.

Save your tapes and skip this mess.

This is a variation on "They Drive By Night", and it was recently aired on Turner Classic Movies and seemed to be in good condition. That's important because this film is on DVD-R that has had absolutely no restoration done to it - whatever happens to be in the Warner vault is what you get. It comes with no extra features and not even scene selections. It is priced at about ten dollars more than films in the Warner Archives, which puzzles me since this film is not nearly as good as many of the films in the Warner Archives.

This film is not an introduction to Bette Davis. She had first worked at Universal and then switched over to Warner Brothers in 1931 where she starred opposite George Arliss in "The Man Who Played God". Universal thought she didn't have any potential. Bette Davis is still playing a largely supporting role here. Paul Muni is the actual star as a Latino man with big dreams (Johnny Ramirez) as he finally graduates from night school with a law degree. However, his first case finds him totally unprepared to the point of malpractice. Next he loses his temper and punches the opposing attorney in the nose. The judge recommends that he be disbarred, and our hero's short law career is over. A disheartened Johnny wanders down to a border town where he becomes friends with Charlie Roark (Eugene Pallette), and soon becomes partners with him in a casino there. Bette Davis plays Roark's wife who secretly loves Johnny. She thinks the only thing coming between her and Johnny is her marriage, so she leaves her drunken husband in the garage one night with the car running, making his death look like an accident to the authorities. However, Johnny really loves a society girl, and this drives Roark's widow to even more desperate measures.

Muni's last lines in the film and the apparent moral to the story will have modern audiences probably saying "What the...", but you have to remember this was made in 1935 and appreciate it for the performances.

In the mid 30s film producers tried to expand their market so they began focusing on exotic locations. This led to a plethora of film biographies of famous Europeans (Rembrandt, Pasteur, Emile Zola), historical dramas (Henry VIII, Elizabeth), and films set in Asia (Fun Manchu, "China Seas") and Mexico ("Viva Villa"). Even Charlie Chan started visiting Paris, London, etc. "Bordertown" (1935) fit this need and was adapted from the 1934 novel of the same name by Carroll Graham. It stars Paul Muni and Bette Davis and was directed by Archie Mayo.

Paul Muni (1895-1967) plays a disgraced Mexican attorney living in the US who goes to work as a bouncer in Davis' saloon, makes it a thriving success, but has to deal with Davis' lust even while he is attracted to a socialite (Margaret Lindsay).

What's a nice Jewish boy like Muni doing dressed up as a Mexican? Remember that until the 60s (and even later) non-whites were consistently played by whites in films like "Birth of a Nation", "Last of the Mohicans", "Viva Villa", etc. Muni himself played a Mexican again in "Juarez" (1938).

FWIW - Muni was nominated for an Oscar his very first film, "The Valiant" in 1929, and 6 more times - "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932), "Black Fury" (1935), "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936), "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937), "The Last Angry Man" (1959). He won once - for Louis Pasteur. To be nominated 6 times over a period of 30 years is remarkable (and unmatched) itself, but this achievement is all the more meaningful when you realize that Muni made only 21 films, and furthermore, he wasn't nominated for "Scarface" (1932) or "The Good Earth" (1937) in which his performances were also exceptional.

Bette Davis (1908-89) plays a sexually charged wife of a saloon keeper (Eugene Pallette) in Bordertown. Davis is a film icon. She appeared in nearly 100 films, was nominated for an Oscar 11 times and won twice ("Dangerous" in 1935 and "Jezebel" in 1939), nominated for an Emmy 4 times and won once ("Strangers" in 1979), 3 Golden Globe Nominations, and for "All About Eve" (1950) she won awards at Cannes, in Italy, and the New York Film Critics. According to AFI she is the #2 female screen legend.

In 1935 Bette Davis was finally on a roll. She received her first wave of critical acclaim for "Of Human Bondage" (1934). Life magazine called it the the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress" and Davis received the most write-ins ever recorded for an Oscar. Result - in 1935 she appeared in 5 films, including this one.

Eugene Pallette (1889-1954) plays Davis' ill fated husband. He was the best Friar Tuck in all the Robin Hood films, appearing in the classic 1938 version with Flynn and de Havilland. He played a similar role in "The Mark of Zorro" (1940), but these were only 2 of more than 200 film appearances.

Look for Archer Treacher (1894-1975) in a cameo as - what else - a butler.

Archie Mayo (1891-1968) directed more than 80 films from 1917 to 1946. He was an eclectic, making a variety of films from the Marx Brothers' "A Night in Casablanca" (1946) to Edward G Robinson in "The Man with Two Faces" (1934), Cagney in "The Mayor of Hell" (1933), and Gary Cooper in "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (1938).

FWIW - Mayo and Davis worked together again on "The Petrified Forest" (1936) and "It's Love I'm After" (1937), and with Muni in "Angel on My Shoulder" (1946). Davis and Muni worked together again in "The Corn is Green" and "Juarez" (1939).

1935 was a good year for films."Mutiny on the Bounty" and "The Informer" were box office and Oscar winners. Other top 10 grossing films included Gable and Harlow in "China Seas", Flynn and de Havilland in "Captain Blood", Shirley Temple in "The Littlest Rebel" and "Curly Top", and Greta Garbo in "Anna Karenina". Other notable films released that year included "Alice Adams" with Hepburn, "The 39 Steps", "The Bride of Frankenstein", "David Copperfield", "A Tale of Two Cities", "Les Miserables", "Top Hat", and "A Night at the Opera". In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl released "Triumph of the Will".

The NY Times called "Bordertown" "raw and biting" and praised Muni ("consummately satisfying") and Davis ("fine and uncommonly honest performance"). The film is often viewed as a criticism of racism, although the race card can be ignored and the film stands as a melodrama about one man's search for the American dream and the problems in achieving it. In fact, the film borders on "film noir" although these aspects have been ignored in favor of the focus on racism. There is also a strong carryover from the gangster genre in which David and Muni also appeared prior to this film.

Of course the racism is hard to ignore with comments like "savage" and "tribe" and "my own kind." It's also interesting to note that cinema at this time demanded that sex between whites and non-whites had to meet a bad end, often death, as it does in this film. In "Madame Butterfly" (1932) Asian Sylvia Sydney commits hari kari when Cary Grant marries a white woman. In Frank Capra's "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" (1932) Barbara Stanwyck's suitor, an Asian warlord (Nils Asther) drinks poisoned tea. Even as late as 1957 ("Sayonara"), Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki commit suicide because they cannot be together, and John Wayne seeks to kill his niece in "The Searchers" (1956) because she has been living with Indians.

FWIW - Many of the plot points were repeated in "They Drive By Night" with George Raft in the Muni role and Ida Lupino in Davis' role.

Bottom line - these are great performances from two of the biggest stars of the 30s, one of whom is already at his peak and the other who is a rising star, headed for even more fame in the near future.

This was Bette Davis's first role after her breakthrough performance in OF HUMAN BONDAGE: Jack Warner was so impressed by her performance as Mildred, the sour and hysterical Cockney waitress, that he insisted she be given the showcase role in this film of Marie Roark, the wealthy wife of a fat nightspot owner (the intensely likable Eugene Pallette) driven to murder by her lust for her husband's right-hand man, the Mexican-American Johnny Ramirez (Paul Muni). The film is ostensibly the story of Muni's character, and details how after getting his lawyer's degree he messes up his first case and leaves his eternally praying Mamacita (Soledad Jimenez, doing her best with an insufferable and stereotypical part) after being disbarred to sample a chance at the high life working at The Silver Slipper, Palette's bordertown nightclub. Muni does his usual stodgy, careful work as Johnny (he was Warner's go-to man in the 30s for markedly ethnic heroic and antiheroic types), but the film really belongs to Bette Davis, who dominates the film with her neurotic performance as the beautiful, doomed Marie.

This is probably a good thing, since the Hays Code forced so many changes on the screenplay (in the original version, Johnny is disbarred for murder and has an actual affair with Marie before she tries to frame him for her husband's crime), and Davis's elegant twitchings distract you from the rambling and episodic plot. After Davis traps her drunken husband in a deathtrap in the garage, so he dies of carbon monoxide fumes, she stares and stares at the garage door in anxious guilt; when Johnny tries to drive her home from work after the murder and almost parks the car in the garage, Davis practically jumps right out of her skin. This isn't Davis's best work (that would come later in the decade and in the early 40s), but it was so showy that Warner's repeated several of the basic plot points of this film when the studio launched Ida Lupino as their next major actress in THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT five years later, right down to the garage deathtrap, the frame-up, and the nutty breakdown on the witness stand. Like THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, the plot of BORDERTOWN seems disjointed and episodic, and ends with the bizarre and offensive moralistic piety that Mexican-Americans shouldn't try to mix with European-Americans. Even so, the film does have several things going for it, including a fun performance by Margot Lindsay as the wealthy debutante for whom Johnny Ramirez yearns, the intriguing depiction of Hispanic Los Angeles in the 1930s (which was very rarely imagined in 30s studio films), and an over-the-top set of costumes in sequins, taffeta, and waffle-weave for Lindsay and Davis by Orry-Kelly.

A rather dark movie involving murder,greed, lust and racism in the vein of the pre-code movies. It also has one of the first garage door openers featured!

"Bordertown" is an uninteresting, stereotype, partly boring, much too conventionally acted and filmed story about a Mexican lawyer (Paul Muni), forced to work in a night club for a fat man (Eugene Palette) and his much younger, frustrated wife (Bette Davis). It is, other than some remarkable Warner Brothers' pictures of the time, full of social and ethnical prejudice and finally points out that Muni as a Mexican has to stay "on his side". The psychological developments of the main characters (is it enough to be a frustrated wife for going mad???) are all but plausible, BUT: Davis' courtroom scene, when her mental illness is revealed, is a superb study of acting by understatement (which was very unusual in movies at that time and which you definitely would not expect by the early Bette Davis!). The rest of the picture is quite forgettable.

For anyone who speaks German, see my longer review on amazon.de.

Script in part was used in a later film, They Drive By Night, to conclude it, and it ruined the tragic ending of the book of the same name by A.I. Bezerides. Film was 1935 intro of Bette Davis.