Talk about a politically incorrect movie. BORDERTOWN has German-born actor Paul Muni playing Mexican, in a made-up tan and fluctuating "accent". Although this isn't the worst of it -- hardly -- as much as when Margaret Lindsay, Warner Bros. reliable secondary leading lady, tells him off near the end just before she gets creamed by an oncoming car off-screen that he's a "savage brute" who belongs to "another tribe". Being Latino, I found myself a little bemused instead of bothered by these lines, but I'm aware of how the times were back then and Hollywood has always found itself playing catch-up with other cultures. One only has to see how wrong and off the mark the industry was in portraying Blacks and Asians on camera to get the point.
Anyway, the story of a Mexican lawyer who gets involved with a murderous female while having his own attraction to a patrician socialite (Lindsay) is a better than average crime-drama that would be remade less than ten years later as THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Made at around the time that OF HUMAN BONDAGE had been released, Bette Davis manages to out-act Paul Muni in her portrayal of a very wicked woman with little to no scruples, but despite her manic energy on screen and the blackness of Marie Roark, she remains fairly suppressed down to the moment her character spins out of control in a key scene. Her rendition of a femme fatale is less bosomy, less hushed, but close to a she-dog able to commit an act of horror for the love a man she can't have.
Anyway, the story of a Mexican lawyer who gets involved with a murderous female while having his own attraction to a patrician socialite (Lindsay) is a better than average crime-drama that would be remade less than ten years later as THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Made at around the time that OF HUMAN BONDAGE had been released, Bette Davis manages to out-act Paul Muni in her portrayal of a very wicked woman with little to no scruples, but despite her manic energy on screen and the blackness of Marie Roark, she remains fairly suppressed down to the moment her character spins out of control in a key scene. Her rendition of a femme fatale is less bosomy, less hushed, but close to a she-dog able to commit an act of horror for the love a man she can't have.