Guerra di sessi

Hi, Everyone,

I bought the DVD of Borderline at the 99 Cent Store. One buck for the movie makes it low cost but also there is no menu or chapters to make it easy to find a specific place in the movie.

There are some fun moments in the film. If you are an old car buff, you will see a 1939 Buick (pushed front end first into a shallow ravine), a 1949 Mercury, an old Nash and other vintage cars and trucks and buses.

Some mistakes from the movie include at the 45 minute point, Fred MacMurray looks into his rear view mirror (39 Buick) to see a motorcycle cop who is chasing him. The only problem is there is no rear view mirror. It was common in these old movies to remove the rear view mirror at the top of the inside of the windshield so the camera could see the driver and the passengers in the car. At 76 minutes into the movie watch the 1949 Mercury as it comes toward the camera and merges with traffic. It is supposed to be a convertible with 2 people inside. This is a stock footage insert of a '49 Mercury 4 door sedan with one person inside.

Two excellent scenes to watch for include a plane landing beautifully on a beach and taxiing up to the camera (63 minutes into the film), and a scene where a dead man is in the back seat of Fred MacMurray's car. The man playing the corpse keeps his eyes wide open for what seems like a minute or longer without blinking. That is at the 44 minute spot in the movie.

The story is OK. It straddles somewhere between comedy and serious detective chase film.

A better Raymond Burr movie might be "Rear Window." Fred MacMurray was more memorable in "Double Indemnity."

Tom Willett

After a good start, this crime drama gets bogged down from time to time, and ends up being just average, or perhaps slightly above average. Besides the interesting story setup, it features a good core cast, with Claire Trevor getting a good role that allows her to play a variety of material, Raymond Burr well-cast as a brutish villain, and Fred MacMurray.

The story starts with Trevor as a police officer working undercover in Mexico. Her initial dealings with Burr and MacMurray set up some interesting possibilities, and create some suspense from the start. The rest of the story is not really bad, but it too often allows the pace to stagnate, and it does not make the best use of some of the possibilities. Aside from a couple of good scenes, it plays out in a more routine fashion.

"Borderline" is still worth seeing for fans of the genre. Besides the main story, it has some occasional comic touches that come across all right. If it ends up seeming like a bit of a disappointment, it is simply because it showed signs of becoming something better than it turned out to be.

This is a perfectly adequate movie with perfectly adequate performances and while there's nothing bad about this film, there certainly isn't anything that good that stands out either. This film sort of like a "Film Noir-LITE", in that it has some of the outward signs of a Noir film (such as gangsters, villains and violence) but is far from a good example of the genre (mediocre camera-work and rather listless dialog compared to "true" Noir). And, despite starring Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor, I really had to struggle to keep watching the film because nothing peaked my interest. Plus, even though the film co-starred Raymond Burr (one of the greatest Noir actors of all-time--especially in RAW DEAL), he wasn't given that much screen time (his removal from the plot was way too easy and anti-climactic) and his usual sadism was absent. In many ways, I consider this film to be like eating meatloaf--it's pretty ordinary, inoffensive and nothing to get excited over. Gimme a "steak" anytime over meatloaf!

I am not sure how this "film noir" turned into a romance, but this romantic is not complaining. I thought Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor were wonderful together. I also loved the misunderstanding with each of them thinking that the other is part of a drug smuggling racket. What is particularly funny is their childhood stories that they tell each other!

This starts as the story of police woman, Madeleine Haley going undercover south of the border in Mexico in order to get information on a notorious drug smuggler. There she meets the nefarious Raymond Burr who plays Pete Ritchie. She is almost immediately embroiled in a drug run with a tough character named Johnny McEvoy (played by Fred MacMurray).

During this trip to the border, while posing as a newly married couple...these two are trying to get information out of each other. This in my opinion becomes the best part of the film.

I think this is misclassified as a film noir...I recommend this film to romantics. There is a little comedy and a nice romantic story told.

Clare Trevor had decorated many films in a range of roles which commonly portrayed her as a tough broad. She was able to assure her husband, producer Milton Bren, that she was also qualified to perform in comedic parts, and the result is his bankrolling of this action-comedy hybrid: BORDERLINE, which features Fred MacMurray and Trevor as undercover narcotics operatives working for different agencies with the same target, but unaware of each other's placement. The film just misses working on both levels of drama and comedy; the scenario by veteran Hollywood light musical scriptor Devery Freeman cuts its chances, but improves during the second half. MacMurray, generally unrecognized as a cinema tough guy, shines and teams well with Trevor, who in fact does demonstrate that she can do light comedy.