The Border (1982) on Netflix
Immigration agent Charlie Smith wants to provide for his wife Marcy, whose taste for luxury pulls him into his partner Cat's smuggling. Maria, a Mexican mother, loses her baby to abductors.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.4/107,718 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes65%
Trailer
Plot summary
Charlie Smith works in immigration enforcement and lives in a trailer in California with his wife, Marcy. She wants a richer life, so the couple moves to El Paso, Texas, into a duplex where her friend Cat, another border agent, lives as well. Marcy opens charge accounts and fills the new place with costly things, a water bed among them. Cat runs a human smuggling operation with Red, their supervisor, and slowly draws Charlie into it. Charlie turns him down at first, then joins once the bills pile up. Maria, a young Mexican mother Charlie has noticed, is held in custody, and a driver working for Cat takes her baby for an illegal adoption.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Border (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The Border's original ending, in which Nicholson's character bombed the Border Patrol headquarters and went to prison, tested so badly with preview audiences that the studio reshot a new ending a full year after principal photography, at an added cost of about $1.5 million.- Jack Nicholson only landed the lead in The Border after original star Robert Blake dropped out, and once Nicholson signed on the budget jumped from $4.5 million to $14.5 million and kept climbing.
- Just two weeks into shooting in El Paso, the 1980 actors' strike shut production down for eleven weeks, and by the time filming resumed original cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond couldn't return, so Ric Waite replaced him.
- Jack Nicholson turned down a role in Miloš Forman's Ragtime in order to portray the character of Charlie Smith in The Border instead.
