#SON OF SAUL FREE ONLINE FOR FREE#
This year’s abridged virtual festival presents three of these films – Border Incident, Where Danger Lives, and Touch of Evil – for free online over a two-week period. In Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1957), meanwhile, desire and the law are brought into a kind of collusion in the character of Vargas (Charlton Heston), who, under his Mexican name “Miguel,” is the object of interracial desire and, under the American name “Mike,” the agent of a law that roots out racist corruption. But it is also the longed-for way out for those for whom American life has become a trap – an escape hatch from a murder charge in Where Danger Lives (1950), a space for sexual and romantic freedom in Out of the Past (1947), or the threshold to the promise of a normal family life in Gun Crazy (1950). The border is, accordingly, a site to be policed in films like Border Incident (1949), in which federal agents work to bust a human smuggling ring operated by an unscrupulous American farm boss. If, however, the southern border has come to exist in our contemporary political imagination largely as a zone for law’s punitive exercise, then postwar noir instead imagined the border as the object of both law and desire. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival shows that the southern border soon became another – especially following the passage of the Emergency Farm Labor Program in 1942, which permitted millions of Mexican guest workers into the country to cope with wartime labor shortages. As Jonathan Auerbach argues in Dark Borders (2011), however, such alienation needs to be grounded in specific and historical postwar fears about “the inability to decide between American and un-American.” Communism was one source of such fears, of course (as the “House Un-American Activities Committee” indicates). The border has in this way functioned in American popular culture as a shadow zone where categories of legality and illegality are constructed and reconstructed a place, one might imagine, ripe for noir.Ĭinema scholars have traditionally linked noir to themes of existential alienation. can become “contraband” and the citizens of neighboring states “undocumented immigrants.” Yet the border is also a zone through which domestic crime seeks its own escape, evading the arm of U.S. It is a place where goods entering the U.S. The US-Mexico border has long been both a third rail in American politics and a recurrent setting in crime fiction. Managed by Soheil Rezayazdi, Columbia Film Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival Border Incidents: The US-Mexico Border in Film Noir Programmed by Rob King, Film & Media Studies