SPOILERS. The title has a double meaning. Nicholson is an agent of the border patrol who moves from California to El Paso. He and his wife begin hanging with Harvey Keitel and his wife, also a border patrol family. The women are complete airheads. (I'm trying to keep this summary brief.) Nicholson and his wife, Valerie Perrine, move into their new house, a monstrously unimaginative tract home, and she overspends on an expensive new water bed, a swimming pool. They argue over the fact that she's spending all their money and more, and Perrine breaks down and weeps. claiming she's only doing it for him, after offering him his choice of frozen dinners -- regular or "Hungry Man." (He replies dejectedly, "Hungry Man.")
Before long, Keitel begins testing Nicholson to see if he's up for smuggling some illegal labor into the country from Mexico. (Nobody in this movie is a genius, but at least Keitel doesn't suggest doing it the other way around.) Nicholson, due to financial pressure, agrees to allow some of the wetbacks to get through. Elpidia Carillo, a beautiful young mother, is one of them. Alas, a glitch occurs and she winds up in jail where someone steals her baby, worth $25K to rich white Americans. Keitel is also responsible, it seems, for one or two murders along the way, which enrages Nicholson who draws a line in the sand avant la lettre and shouts at Keitel -- "You see this line? That's as far as I go! NO MURDERS!" "Okay," replies Keitel smoothly, "I can respect that." Well, Nicholson rescues the baby and sees to it that all the bad guys are dead.
So far, so routine. What's new about this crime/action movie? Well, there are some things in fact. First of all there's a rather neat musical score built around solo guitar, contributed by, among others, Ry Cooder. Next, the photography is good. The unpaved back roads with Border Patrol vans bouncing from side to side and raising clouds of dust. The polluted trickle of murky water, brimming with garbage and discarded tires, that is the Rio Grande. The constant sun of summer. And the art director did splendidly too. That new white-brick ranch house Nicholson and Perrine move into is so depressingly ordinary. And once across the border into what must be Juarez but looks like the kind of red light district that used to be called "Boy's Town" outside of Tijuana, or "Cherry Hill" outside of Villa (now Ciudad) Acuna, a neon-lit, shadowy place filled with noise, poverty, whoring, dope, treachery and blood. Nicholson gets himself clobbered here while trying to rescue Carillo from a fate worse than death. She's an interesting actress, by the way, with a wide pretty face, the spindly calves of a Yaqui Indian, at least minimal acting talent, a graceful carriage, and an appealing on-screen presence. No wonder that during a moment of high tension Nicholson's wife shouts at him, "What exactly IS your relationship with her?"
The script may be more or less by the book, but the director and editor make no mistakes with it. There is an exciting scene in which the Border Patrol vans are in pursuit of an old truck carrying illegals. Banging around corners and bouncing over ruts at high speed. The director gives us one brief shot of the horrific beating the aliens are taking inside the locked truck. Finally the truck gives a final acrobatic leap and lands on its side in a ditch. The director wisely holds on the shot of the upended truck, with dust settling around it, although it must have been tempting to show us the shrieking aliens slamming against the walls and against each other. But he doesn't do it because it's not necessary. We can imagine the "Typhoon"-like horror the trapped "backs" have gone through.
Both Nicholson and Keitel turn in fine performances, as one would expect. Neither of them has any scenes in which they make the viewer's hair stand on end, but the story doesn't give them much of a chance to stretch. This isn't high tragedy. It's an ordinary tale of how informal norms develop within a highly structured bureaucratic system. The rules are organized so as to cover every possible contingency, but as anyone knows who has tried to do things "by the book," they are impossible to follow to the letter. Everything would grind to a halt and the agency would never achieve its goals. Corners are inevitably cut, rounded off so to speak, and niceties overlooked in order to get the job done. This movie explores the issue of just how far personnel can go in getting things done while still preserving their sanity. How many rules is one allowed to break before that expediency turns immoral?
Not that there aren't weaknesses that anchor this film firmly to the level of the routine. The bad guy, J. J., at the "drop point" is not just breaking the law. He's positively evil. He taunts Nicholson at their first meeting by suggesting Nicholson's mother was likely a whore that he, the bad guy, tangoed with in San Diego, then pulls a piece on Nicholson and says, "Just a push, son, just a push." There's no motivation involved here. The point is simply to rob the bad guy of any touch of humanity so that when his head is blown off at the end we feel only satisfaction. It's a push, but a rather cheap touch.
Still, overall, this is an enjoyable movie. No romance, although there is domestic comedy, a solid middlebrow script, just enough action, and good performances. You'll probably not kick yourself for having watched it.
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