Get the Gringo

Adrian Grunberg directs the crime movie “Get the Gringo” (2012). Following the themes of many other film productions in which Grunberg has had a part (Narcos, Going Back to Cali, among others), Get the Gringo comes with a chaotic portrayal of criminal life in Mexico through the eyes of a criminal, but an American one. The Spanish title for this movie is “Vacaciones en el Infierno” (Vacation in Hell), which better reflects what the film portrays. The Hollywood action superstar Mel Gibson is The Gringo, an American criminal captured by Mexican authorities who send him to a local prison called “El Pueblito” (little town) in Tijuana, a city next to the US-Mexico border. “Is this a prison, or the shittiest mall?” Gibson asks himself while walking around the prison’s patio where convicted criminals have set up their businesses, formed families, educated their children, and even keep committing the same crimes for which they were imprisoned in the first place, like they were living in a little town (but much more dangerous), not within four walls.

A former US soldier steals millions of dollars from the United States and drives towards Mexico where he might hide the money and escape to have a beautiful vacation. Though the persecution started on US soil by its police, he is captured on the Mexican side of the border. The corrupt Mexican police take the robber to the worst prison around, “El Pueblito,” and keep the money for themselves. In the border scene, we can see the wall dividing both countries, an old fence that delimits how far American law enforcement can go to.

Being the only American prisoner, Gibson’s character becomes quickly identified as the Gringo. The place is like hell, entire families of criminals, poverty, drugs, sex, music and gambling are everywhere, every day. The prison guards stand around showing a blind eye to all the madness around them because they are getting bribed by a crime lord called Javi who oversees everything from the top of his prison penthouse, deciding over every living being under him, like the devil itself. To survive, the Gringo starts a friendship with a little kid who gives him information about how the place is run. The kid and his mother live in El Pueblito not because they are criminals, but because the father was one, and he took them to live there. In exchange for his freedom, the Gringo leaves the millions he stole to Javi, but after killing the owner of the money he returns to take it back. He kills the bad guys saving the kid and the mother from being killed, and escapes with them to some beautiful beach in Mexico, the real vacation.

From simple things like music and physical appearance to corruption and crime, Mexico and its people are portrayed in stark conrast contrast to what we see of the United States in the movie. As soon as we are taken south of the border, music is one the clearest features that portray the low standards of culture and life with nostalgic songs about gangsters, love, among others. “Tortured by mariachi!” complains Gibson closing his ears with the ends of two cigarettes. And crime itself is different on either side of the border. El Pueblito is a prison, so of course it looks more chaotic and dangerous than anything else shown in the movie. However, it is almost impossible to know which scenes are happening inside of the prison and which are on the outside. From the littlest kid to the oldest grandma, and from the lowliest guard to the highest ranking prison officer, they are all involved or know about the crimes and protect each other, especially from outsiders like the Gringo, (for being family and for being Mexican). The perception is as if the life within the prison is equal to the life in Mexico as a whole. When the plot moves to the US, however, we know that the only criminal on camera is the Gringo, and that the only reason he could get away with his plan is because he could not get caught on US soil.

When we see a narco film, the biggest fear of the narcotraffickers is ending up in the hands of the gringos. No matter how dangerous South America criminal life could be or how likely to get sent to the most awful and unsafe prison (as in this movie), US law enforcement is worse than that. Perhaps not because of the violence or conditions, but because once caught it is impossible to avoid getting the punishment one deserves. This is the same idea that Grunberg depicts in the movie about Latin America, but most important, about the United States, the terror of the criminals. El Pueblito might be chaotic, and it has the worst living conditions for its prisoners, but neither its walls nor those who are supposed to enforce order within it can stop the Gringo from escaping. Latin American law enforcement is useless compared with the United States (they could not even find the real name of the Gringo) or so the movie seems to claim. And using the name of a real example gives credibility to this idea. El Pueblito was a real prison in Tijuana that was closed because of the corruption that allowed entire families and businesses to develop in its patio.

The ways in which law enforcement and security in Mexico are portrayed in the movie could help to justify arguments to support US intervention south the border. Without the old fence that we see at the beginning of the movie that stops the US officers, perhaps the Gringo might have been caught by responsible and honest officers that would have given the stolen money back. There are a lot of ideas that may support the opening of borders for justice and law enforcement North to South; however, South to North is a different story. We see the Gringo crossing over to the United States with a counterfeit passport. We see a criminal crossing without constraints. At the same time that we see the need to open up the border towards the South, we are introduced to this scene in which it seems necessary to close up the border towards the North, or at least a need to make it stronger.

Sicario

Sicario, a border film directed by Denis Villeneuve clearly portrays the most popular views, stereotypes, and known realities of southern the U.S.-Mexico border or perhaps only the most acknowledged one: a reality of extreme gun-violence, insecurity, and drug cartels controlling every aspect of the area’s politics and society. The shown illegal and unrestrained drug trade in Ciudad Juarez encourages actions driven by the fear of its possible expansion up to U.S. territory.

One of the most engaging themes present throughout the movie is the constant comparison between North and South which is mainly focused on security. The perception of the United States as a safe place versus a dangerous Mexico appears from beginning to end. It is precisely this deep perception of a generally violence-free America that initiates a war on drugs looking South, where the existence of a Sicario seems to be more possible than one working with or for the United States.

In a collaboration to capture Manuel Diaz, leader of the Sonora Cartel, the FBI agent Kate Macer is sent to El Paso and is forced to participate in an illegitimate operation on Mexican soil. When she tries to oppose the intervention which for her is not part of their jurisdiction, her superior, Matt, accepts the invasive nature of their actions, but simultaneously justifies them for being an attempt to reach a higher end, which is eliminating the Cartel´s leadership once and for all. Additionally, the explanatory discourse of Matt intentionally creates an alarming uncertainty about who should be trusted once Kate crosses the border. Surrounded by an atmosphere of plenty insecurity, Kate explicitly shows her fear towards anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or who does not look like one. The mysterious appearance of the Colombian agent Alejandro is an example of that constructed perception concerning Latin Americans.

Once in Mexico, the warnings that were given by Matt, the sounds of gunfire, and the images of cruel crimes intensify feelings of insecurity, stopping Kate from contributing in the killings of drug trade suspects crossing the border South-to-North. Moreover, numerous visual comparisons appear as the plot moves between the two countries. Crossing the border, an uncountable number of cars and buses full of Mexican people travel north to the U.S, including armed drug traders and gangsters, while the road going South is shown almost empty. At night from the safe and quiet United States, Kate is taken to see the “fireworks”, shooting and bombing flashes that just like fireworks one can fearlessly contemplate from home. As the secret operation continues, Kate realizes that there is actual opportunity to catch the Mexican Cartel leader in Texas, however, her superiors prefer to push the danger to the Mexican side of the border. Arresting the drug dealer or investigating its banking transactions in the U.S. could only create airs of insecurity, so it is better to solve the problem where everyone is used to see violence of that scale.

Although dubious about the credibility of the limited information provided and the legitimacy of the plan to destroy the drug cartel in Mexico, Kate again chooses to continue engaged because of the possibility to prevent future crimes. Surprisingly for her, the paradoxical strategy of using another Latin American Cartel leader to combat the closest one to the U.S. confirms her initial reaction concerning Alejandro. “We cannot trust him, he is not American” Kate had said before discovering that indeed he was equally dangerous than the Mexicans. After discovering the reasons for Alejandro’s participation in the operation, neither Americans nor Latin Americans are to be trusted anymore. But there is one more characteristic that is opposite between the Latino and the American: the motivations driving each one to act and how these are used for the benefit of the collective.

Previously in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon A Time in Mexico the craving for revenge after the lives of loved ones are taken was already included as an essential motif of the plot. In the same way, in this movie, the leaders of the U.S operation use the only reliable sentiment among Latin Americans that could make a Cartel assassin collaborate with them, vengeance.

The conservative construction of security at the north of the Rio Bravo dominates most of the plot and wins over any moral questioning. The message of this movie moves towards American exceptionalism and the creation of imaginaries of invasive migration in support of geopolitical strategies to protect national interests. The way Latin America is portrayed in this production implicitly suggest few solutions for the immigration problem including stronger immigration laws, stronger border control, and liberties only for those born within its borders.

Against All Odds

Against All Odds (1984) features the steamy Yucatán Peninsula as its tropical getaway, as an escape from a difficult past, and as a place to be swept off your feet by love. But how long can the blissful warmth of the Mexican sun hide you from your troubles? How long until you realize that you do not belong there? How long until you begin to go crazy? No matter how far away Latin America may seem, your troubles will always catch up to you, and you will have to go home and finish what you've started.

This is what happens to protagonist Terry Brogan, played by a tanned and muscular Jeff Bridges, in his effort to escape the difficulties in his life in Los Angeles. A professional football player who has just been cut from his team, he is left with no future and huge debts. He really needs money, so he takes a job from a local crook, a wealthy, corrupt bookie named Jake Wise. Jake offers Terry $30,000 to find his girlfriend, Jessie Wyler (Rachel Ward), who has disappeared with $50,000 and left him brokenhearted. Curiously enough, Jessie is the daughter of the owners of Terry's football team (and half of Bel-Air, for that matter). Armed with a picture, Terry flies down to Cozumel, Mexico, to find what he thinks will be a spoiled, impetuous 25-year old.

What Terry finds is a complex, damaged, and beautiful woman who is running away from a tyrannical relationship with Jake and a suffocating relationship with her parents. He promptly falls in love with her, and the two spend several weeks in a whirlwind romance in the island paradise of Cozumel. After a while, Terry needs to throw Jake off his scent and spends a few weeks flying around Mexico. He returns to meet Jessie at the Mayan site of Chichén Itzá, where she has been waiting desperately for him. As they wander around ruins together, Jessie admits that she is going crazy in Mexico, and fears she must go home to face Jake, from whose obsessive love she cannot escape. Terry explosively professes his love for her, and she reciprocates. They proceed to express their love in a sweaty sex scene in an abandoned Mayan steam-room, only to be interrupted by Terry's ex-football coach, Sully. Terry is bewildered to find Sully in Chichén Itzá, but soon realizes that Sully works for Jake, and has come to kill Terry and bring Jessie back to L.A. A fight ensues, in which Jessie shoots Sully in order to save Terry from being strangled. Terrified, Jessie flees, leaving Terry alone in the eerie Mayan city to dump the body in a sacred cenote (water-hole). Terry returns to the hotel and finds that Jessie is gone, along with all her things. At a loss, he returns to L.A.

When Terry goes to see Jake, he discovers Jessie there, living with Jake, having told him everything. Jake is enraged that Terry and Jessie have betrayed him, and insists that Terry must do a job for him to gain his forgiveness. Confused and hurt by Jessie's behaviour, Terry reluctantly agrees. The job is to steal some files from the office of a well-known L.A. lawyer. These files contain incriminating evidence of Terry and other football players throwing games for Jake in the past; the lawyer was previously part of the scheme, but now Jake wants him out. When Terry arrives at the office, he finds the lawyer shot dead in the bathroom. But he has no time for shock, because suddenly one of Jake's crooks barges in and tries to kill Terry. Terry manages to kill him first and run away, but he knows he must return to get those files so that he is safe from incrimination. By a stroke of luck, he finds the lawyer's secretary, Edie, in a nearby bar, and asks her to go to the office and retrieve the files. Edie goes back up and tells Jake's crooks, who are guarding the place, that she works for Jake. After removing the safe-deposit box containing the files, she flees safely, and gives the box to Terry. Terry discovers that the deposit box contains concrete evidence proving the corruption of a number of powerful L.A. citizens, including Jessie Wyler's mother and stepfather, Ben Caxton. Terry calls Jake and arranges a meeting to exchange the deposit box for Jessie. Jake brings Caxton, for whom he actually works, and one of his henchmen. The rendezvous takes place in the Hollywood Hills at night. A scuffle and gunplay result in Jessie killing Jake. Caxton, who owns most of Bel-Air, agrees to protect Terry in exchange for the files, but insists that he keep away from Jessie forever. Terry accepts.

In the last scene, Terry arrives unwelcome at a political event held by Jessie's mother and Caxton in the sunny hills above L.A.. He has come to see Jessie, but Caxton stands in his way. Terry promises that he will not let Caxton keep them apart. Phil Collins's hit song "Against All Odds" accompanies the fading image of Jessie's tear-stained face.

This L.A.-noir film criticizes the corruption of the Californian elite and their decadent lifestyle. It seems that L.A. is full of crooks, liars, thieves, and their victims. Even Terry Brogan is one of these, with his past of rigging football games; Jessie Wyler is just as bad, with her theft of Jake's money and her troublesome life. But in Mexico, Terry and Jessie can escape from all the mess they've gotten themselves into. Suddenly, all the crime and corruption of the States seems a million miles away; instead they are surrounded by friendly, colourful locals, idyllic beaches, and magical Mayan ruins. Their love blooms in the Mexican sun. Terry has completely forgotten about football, and Jessie about Jake's possessiveness. However, the escape can only last so long, and by the time they are in Chichén Itzá, they are both crumbling under the stress and fear of what awaits them back home. Jessie screams, "I'm going crazy! We don't belong here!" Almost immediately thereafter, they are literally caught up with by Sully, who turns their romantic dream into a nightmare. The previously romantic and magical ruins of Chichán Itzá become a terrible, lonely place, with vultures circling above and echoes filling the emptiness.

Latin America can provide a romantic and blissful escape from life, but never indefinitely. Whatever you are running from, it will catch up to you in Latin American; it just may take a little longer. Whatever you are trying to suppress will always emerge, and whoever you're trying to hide from will find you. Again, it just may take a little longer.

Desperate Cargo

Crime thriller Desperate Cargo (1941) is focused entirely on action; the dialogue does nothing more than advance the plot and the settings are neither specific nor believable. Evidenced by the two settings in which the film takes place, the fictional cove Puerto Nueve of an unnamed Caribbean island, and a seaplane with warped interior dimensions, both place and space have minimal importance in Desperate Cargo; what matters is catching the crooks and getting the girl.

The opening sequence occurs in a balmy Puerto Nueve hotel and lays the groundwork for the crime around which the film revolves. Two men named Ryan and Dessler show up to see a man named Carter; maintaining his disguise even before the hotel staff, it is assumed he is a notorious crime boss. Carter has planned a heist and has hired the others to pull it off; their objective is to steal close to half a million dollars stored in a safe on a Trans-Caribbean Airways plane, which is due to arrive soon in Puerto Nueve. This may be peanuts for modern Hollywood thieves, but the figure elicits an awed whistle from Ryan.

Later we are introduced to leading man Tony Bronson, an American playboy who enlists bellboy Jose to drive away two flirtatious Latin women when platinum blond Ann Howard catches his attention. When Howard and her friend Peggy Morton, a self-proclaimed gold-digger, go out to dine with Morton’s long-time love interest and New York newspaper correspondent Jim Halsey, he invites Bronson along. The girls work their charms on Bronson, who happens to the Trans-Caribbean Airlines purser, lying that they must get back to their Broadway jobs in order to secure their passage back home. As they wait for the delayed plane there is some romantic chemistry between Howard and Bronson, but he is enraged when he catches on to her deception, accustomed to being the player rather than the one played.

Despite his wounded ego Bronson does not cancel the tickets, and all board the Trans-Carribbean Airways seaplane. Its lengthy corridors and spacious cabins demand a suspension of disbelief, but the action quickly distracts from volumetric details. The thieves from the opening scene brandish their guns before the passengers, who oddly seem more inconvenienced than terrified, and proceed to empty the safe. They land on water and tie up the crew, revealing their plan to escape via another plane and set this one alight. The passengers, led by the stoic Bronson, acquire a gun which leads to skirmishes and shootouts. Bronson saves the day by exiting the plane, swimming to where the crew is held, and leading the men in a surprise attack on the villains. The near death experience prompts Bronson and Howard to become enamored once again, and catalyzes a romantic relationship between Morton and Halsey. They arrive in Miami, we are informed by a diligent crew member, only four hours late. Not bad!

Some characters are in Puerto Nueve for business: the would-be thieves, Bronson, and Halsey. Others are there for pleasure: the vacationing Howard and Morton. However, the reason why this generic island has such a transient and diverse American presence is taken for granted, until one line of dialogue reveals the big picture in a flash. We hear Halsey, in mid-phone conversation to New York: “. . .and it’s encouraging to note the effect of the American Good Neighbor Policy in such a small town of Puerto Nueve. That’s all for today. I’ll cover the cotton angle tomorrow.” In contrast to the rest of the dialogue in Desperate Cargo, this line offers concrete geopolitical details; the island has recently and conspicuously been absorbed into the U.S. sphere of influence and its primary goods are of economic interest.

However, one wonders what this “effect” is, and how it might be experienced differently by Americans versus Caribbeans. The affluent hotel and smartly dressed Latin women suggest that American money has been infused into Puerto Nueve, but the only other evidence of American presence is a surge in crime and violence, from a knife inexplicably launched at Halsey, to a bar brawl involving Bronson, to the thieves hiding out while planning their heist. Interestingly, the film explores some murky ethical territory in heated exchanges between Morton and Howard, the former arguing that gold-digging is a perfectly equitable exchange of a woman’s entertaining presence for a man’s wealth and influence, and the latter morally opposed but resigning to necessity. In a film situated on an anonymous island into which U.S. free trade policy is embedding its claws, a discussion on the ethics of gold-digging is not entirely out of place.

Out of the Past

In "Shades of Black and Brown: Visions of Mexico and Mexican-Americans in 1940s Film Noir", Eric Enders comments that for Jacques Tourneur's classic noir Out of the Past "Mexico provide[s] a momentary escape from the harsh realities of urban America," and that the movie's protagonists, Robert Mitchum's Jeff Markham and Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat, spend much of the film "trying to, as Greer’s character puts it, 'go back to Acapulco and start all over as if nothing had ever happened.'"

Again, then, Latin America functions as a place of escape, a potential utopia untouched by the law or, as a consequence, by crime. Enders quotes James Naremore's observation that "during the 1940s, noir characters visited Latin America more often than any other locale, usually because they wanted to find relief from repression." But as we've seen in the neo-noir The Long Goodbye (let alone Touch of Evil), things are seldom that simple. Noir characters may be endlessly crossing borders, as Naremore also observes: "to visit Latin America, Chinatown, or the 'wrong' parts of the city" ("American Film Noir" 15), but in part thanks to such endless criss-crossing, they also destabilize those borders and the comfortable distinctions such frontiers are supposed to uphold.

Precisely such a destabilization is played out within one of the Mexican scenes in this film. Markham has gone down to Acapulco in search of Moffat on the order of seedy gambling kingpin Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Moffat, Sterling's mistress, had fled leaving him with a bullet in the stomach and $40,000 poorer. Markham catches up with the broad but soon falls for her, and so after a brief paradaisical romance in and around the Mexican resort, they determine to flee onwards, to ensure that Sterling can't trace and come after them. On the day of their departure, Markham hears a knock on his hotel room door. Opening it expecting his visitor to be Moffat, he discovers instead Sterling plus henchman Joe Stephanos. Markham is forced to do a visible double take: he'd expected something quite different on the other side of the door. But instead of romance and the promise of escape, he finds trouble and a reminder of all he had thought to have left behind. In short, you never quite know what's on the other side of a border, behind the door.

And though it might be nice to imagine, as Moffat suggests, that Latin America represents the one site of relief and sunshine (when she and Markham first meet in an Acapulco cantina, she is described as "coming out of the sun"), noir trades in uncertainty, leaving no respite even far from home. After all, can we even believe Moffat's utopian promises? Her line to Markham is just one among many: she's endlessly stringing him along, and as likely as not to turn on him once again in an instant. The discourse of Latin utopianism is figured clearly as yet another element in the complex web that North American characters weave among themselves.


So the point is not (as Enders suggests) whether noir movies portray Latin America benignly or otherwise. The point is how they self-consciously present discourses of Latin Americanism (or, here, also either small town or rural contentment) as one more means by which US modernity consoles itself with the possibility of an outside, even as it destroys any such division between inside and out.

Image Link: a very extensive collection of stills.
YouTube Link: the scene in which Moffat declares "I want to go back to Mexico".

The Long Goodbye

Private Eye Philip Marlowe is woken in the small hours by his hungry cat at the opening of Robert Altman's neo-noir The Long Goodbye. He tries to fix him something to eat, but the cat will have nothing but his preferred brand of food. Marlowe stumbles out to the all-night supermarket, taking an order for brownie mix from the hippie girls who live next door, but the store is all out of Coury-brand catfood. He buys another brand and tries to fool the cat by spooning it into an empty Coury-brand can. Unfooled, the cat slips away and out of Marlowe's life through a catflap marked "el porto del gato." The pet is, it seems, some kind of Anglo-Hispanic hybrid.

This scene is intercut with shots of a guy in a sportscar, curious cuts to his face and bruised knuckles, heading out of an exclusive Malibu enclave. It turns out he's making his way to his old friend Phil's: Terry Lennox has a favor to ask; can Marlowe drive him down to Tijuana? They jump in the car and Marlowe drops Lennox at the border. "You take care of yourself," Marlowe says. "Don't worry about me," Lennox replies. "Hey, vaya con Dios, huh?" he adds before himself slipping away and also out of Marlowe's life.

For the next we know, Terry is dead, an apparent suicide in a small Mexican town somewhere to the South. His death seems to clear up a mystery: who killed Lennox's wife that night that he called in on Marlowe to help him across the border. But it opens up a new question: what happened to the suitcase full of money ($355,000 in all) that a bunch of LA hoods had charged Lennox with couriering down to Mexico City?

Marlowe doesn't believe that Lennox killed either his wife or himself. Nor does he have much clue as to the location of the money, though the hoods soon turn up on his doorstep convinced that he does. Adding to the confusion, a woman from the same Malibu community wants someone to track down her husband, Roger Wade, an alcoholic blocked writer who has also disappeared.

Fast forward. Wade returns but only to drown himself in the Pacific surf after yet another argument with his wife Eileen. Soft on Marlowe, it seems, Eileen suggests that it was Roger who had done away with Mrs Lennox. The gangsters turn the screws in their efforts to recover their mislaid cash, but the money shows up just in time to save our hero from yet another loss, as a knife-wielding side-kick is about to cut off his private dick. On the street outside, Eileen Wade doesn't want to stop her convertible long enough to talk. And it turns out she's moved out of her beach house in something of a hurry.


Everyone, the police, the hoods, even the widow, is now happy that things are resolved. Everyone but Marlowe. And to find the truth he sets out again for Mexico... where he indeed discovers his old pal Terry, swinging in a hammock and apparently unconcerned about the trouble Marlowe had undergone while defending his good name back in LA. And Marlowe decides that he has had enough of such fair-weather friends.

At the time this film came out, Nina Van Pallandt, the Danish actress who plays Eileen Wade, was best known as the mistress of infamous hoaxster Clifford Irving. Irving, like Roger Wade something of a failed writer, had forged Howard Hughes's autobiography. And once the hoax started to unravel, it was Van Pallandt who "drove the nail in his credibility coffin by insisting that Irving had been vacationing in Mexico with her at the time he was supposedly picking Hughes' brains". So in life as in filmic fiction, a trip to Mexico proves to be a fraudster's undoing.

As with the cat slipping through his "porto del gato," the fantasy of losing oneself in Latin America, disappearing, hiding out, faking or actually committing suicide, is a constant temptation for those who live the North. It's as though the region offered a succession of dead-ends, false finishes, hidden refuges. The dramatic ending to The Long Goodbye suggests, however, that such farewells can only be postponed; they drag out, but in the end even in Mexico a sort of justice can be done.

YouTube Link: the movie trailer.

For the Common Defense!

For the Common Defense! is a short and rather frantic tale of espionage and dodgy dealing in wartime Latin America.

Presented as a dramatized true story, and introduced by a man who it is claimed is a subprefect from the Chilean Bureau of Investigations, the film's blatantly propagandistic motives depend upon generating some verisimilitude. At the same time, however, all its conventions are taken pretty much directly from film noir. A criminal on the lam and hiding down South from his disreputable past up North is trapped by German and Japanese agents into taking a cargo of counterfeit currency up to Colombia. He's found out and the plot is ultimately foiled thanks to the smooth collaboration between Chilean, US, and Colombian police services.

Hence the moral of the story: crime doesn't pay; and hemispheric cooperation will "ultimately smash and obliterate any foreign criminals who may try to undermine our liberty and our way of life."

But the demands of entertainment and the demands of propaganda are at some odds. Indeed, the propaganda message is somewhat incoherent and ill-focussed: the criminal here is not, after all, "foreign"; and it's not at all clear to whom the film is addressed. After all, the US public were no doubt already alert to be suspicious of Germans named Adolf who praise the news of Japan's Pearl Harbor strikes. Perhaps the real message is that if you try to escape the law by fleeing to Latin America, you may wind up with a stickier end than that prescribed by any US courthouse. So Latin America is not the safe haven it appears: the long arm of the law reaches even down to Chile, and there people are likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

At the same time, we can't help but feel some sympathy for Dutch Mullner, aka James Buckley, the criminal protagonist. He did after all first get angry with Adolf the photographic assistants' anti-American sentiments. And then he tried to refuse the mission that the Axis agents pressed upon him. Indeed, if the film were much longer it might become a full-blooded noir vehicle, in which ambivalence would dominate over the cut-and-dried message that the War Department otherwise wanted to put across.

So this is a curtailed movie, whose Latin Americanism is cut short just as it threatens to get going. And this in itself says something about the ways in which filmic Latin Americanism subverts even the most insistent of official discourses.