The Tijuana Story

László Kardos' The Tijuana Story (1957) stars James Darren -- Gidget (1959) -- and features Robert Blake -- Baretta, Mickey in The Little Rascals & Our Gang -- both of whom are also in another lesser-known B-Noir: Fred F. Sears' Rumble on the Docks (1956) which is what led me to The Tijuana Story.

James Darren plays a tough American high school punk who vacations with two of his punk buddies. They buy some marijuana in a Nightclub that is a front for a Mexican syndicate which later ends with tragedy. This is where the film seems to be propaganda and it weakens the story which focuses on Robert Blake's character Enrique Acosta Mesa's father Manuel Acosta Mesa, played by Rodolfo Acosta, who is a journalist trying to expose the syndicate which causes him predictable trouble.

The acting is decent but sometimes wooden from the supporting cast. Paul Newlan as Peron Diaz is a convincing crime boss. Overall the movie is decent, but sometimes a bit slow with very little action, It's worthwhile viewing if you enjoy B-noir films, though there is nothing special about it, e.g., the music, the cinematography. Etc. I watched it while completing Robert Blake's film noir films.

One of those 1950's noir/exposès that includes an actual government official's opening narration, staring into the camera and telling us that this really happened... which is hard to believe since most of the Mexican characters in the titular THE TIJUANA STORY are not only white, but not even attempting to look authentic...

Yet the most intriguing are supposed to be white, Robert McQueeney and Jean Willes, as married, crooked go-betweens for a Mexican crime-boss that's keeping the marijuana-ridden bordertown at bay...

And in the noir fashion, the two pawns are somewhat nice-at-heart while stuck in dire circumstances, but not enough attention's paid for their suspenseful heat-coming-down demise to matter...

Then there's young good looking James Darren visiting a dope-running nightclub while romancing a cute local girl working for investigative journalist Rodolfo Acosta, famous for exposing the bigwig crime bosses while parenting an intense Robert Blake, another potentially good actor ultimately wasted in what's a patchwork of about four stories that never connect as whole.

Gallant little guy standing up to the mob. Hardly an original storyline (sub-Jimmy Stewart), but this is a dramatised documentary, quite a common low-cost option in 1957, celebrating the recent martyrdom of newspaper editor Manuel Acosta Mesa, who had been trying to clean up Tijuana single-handed. The funeral tribute, with which the film ends ("He did not die in vain"), would earn a belly-laugh today, with its naïve hopes about turning the city back into a family-friendly community from which gangsterism had been banished forever. One glimpse of modern-day Tijuana would have made those audiences feel they'd been watching a kids' game 'Let's Play Narcos'.

Only one performance stands out - the villain Diaz, played by Paul Newlan, highly convincing, with gangsterism deeply embedded in him. No-one else comes close. The 20-year old James Darren gets star billing, but a curiously small part that offers him few opportunities and hardly affects the plot. It just adds a touch of pathos: a schoolkid on vacation, wanting to try his first grown-up Mexican weekend, but doomed from the moment a bar-girl offers to sell him marijuana ("Are you too frightened?"), leading indirectly to his death. The rest of it is disappointingly mechanical, both in plot and in delivery, hardly worth watching.

(And to think, despite my fluent Spanish, it had never occurred to me that Tijuana translates as 'Auntie Jane'!)

"The Tijuana Story" is far from a great film, but it is entertaining and well made...and also treats most Mexicans quite well for an American film from this era.

According to IMDB, this movie and the crusading newspaper man, Rodolfo Acosta, are based on Manuel Acosta Meza, a reported in Tijuana was who murdered the year before the film debuted. The film is about a crusade led by Acosta to rid the city of organized crime. Now he was NOT trying to rid the city of all crime and vice (after all, it is Tijuana) but he tried to get the mobsters out of town by exposing their graft in his paper. But you know this can only go on so long before the mob has had enough and decide to kill him.

The mobster portion of the film is excellent and I liked how the film showed the good and evil in the town....as well as American mobsters who were pulling the strings of the local creeps. In other words, it's not some sort of anti-Mexican film taking cheap shots.

What wasn't so great was the portion with the young James Darren. While a fine actor and singer, here it really looks as if they had two different movies and chopped the Darren portion out of one film and stuck it in the other. His actions really had nothing to do with the mobsters and his characters end seemed baffling and ill-suited for the film. If I ever meet the man, I'd love to ask him about this....surely his part was either chopped to pieces or added in at the last minute. Regardless, it just didn't fit.

On balance, despite this Darren portion the film is exciting, well made for a low-budget film and well worth seeing.

Crusading newspaperman Rodolfo Acosta takes on 'the syndicate' in Tijuana after a young man goes berserk when the police try to arrest him for damage he's done while under the influence of marijuana. The syndicate promptly tries to shut him up, first by scaring off his advertisers, and then by any means they deem necessary.

The notes indicate the lead's character is based on a real-life newspaperman named Manuel Acosta Meza. A brief Google search could not turn up the individual. Apparently it's not that unusual a name.

The movie is a variety of the sort of movie like THE MIAMI STORY. It is a very sincere picture, but also obviously a cheap movie, with bare, simple sets. A few location sessions around Tijuana help, but despite its statement that the town was cleaning up, by the time I was there in 1971, it was pretty sleazy again.