A transition film for Anthony Mann, between film noir and Western-a gritty thriller with Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy (yes) playing undercover Immigration agents on the Mexican-California border. As in the Westerns, the landscape and lighting of the Southwest are used dramatically and thematically. "In all his thrillers of the late forties Mann evoked two worlds diametrically opposed, one of innocence and purity, the other an evil domain which extracts sacrifice in its defeat. Nowhere was this interaction more harshly in evidence than in Border Incident...However, here the melodrama was extended by an elemental violence, one agent ground into a field by a tractor, the other nearly suffocating nightmarishly in quicksand. In a fragmented way (like T-Men, the film has a documentary framework), the metaphorical drive of the imagery...gives Border Incident an almost symbolic level of action. Promising a thriller, Mann delivers something of a cosmic conflict..." (Jim Kitses, Horizons West)