The border is crossed and re-crossed in this seminal noir eventually double-crossed and re-edited by the studio. Director Orson Welles constructs an unsettling space among seedy motels, baroque brothels, and soiled apartments, the haunts of sundry dead-enders and delinquents. At the top of the heap is Hank Quinlan (Welles), a grubby police detective who never saw a frame he couldn't picture. When a car bomb rolls across the border from Los Robles (actually shot in Venice, California), Quinlan is joined in his investigation by “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston), a Mexican narc who has just wed gringa Janet Leigh. Welles's cast of castaways is grotesque––Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Dennis Weaver are swept grimly along by Russell Metty's ever-frenetic camerawork and a soundscape of crackling detritus. Here, the borders are many: between nations, between morality and turpitude, between white and wrong. When Universal altered his cut of the film, a trusting Welles had already left for Mexico to shoot Don Quixote. Tonight's version is the 1998 Walter Murch re-edit.