The Movie That Inspired Gregory Bovino to Join Border Patrol
When Gregory K. Bovino was a boy, he saw a movie called “The Border,” a crime thriller about corruption among U.S. Border Patrol officers working in El Paso. The film, whose executive producer was Bovino’s great-uncle, Neil Hartley, arrived in theatres in 1982. Bovino was eleven. Years later, he would say that the film had inspired him to join Border Patrol. If that’s the case, it’s a little like entering the hospitality industry after watching “The Shining.”
“We all know what that movie was about,” Bovino said, in 2021, on an episode of a podcast produced by the Border Patrol Academy. By that point, Bovino was the chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, which covers a seventy-one-mile span of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Southern California. The film follows a Border Patrol agent, Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson), who gets drawn into a human-smuggling operation by his new partner, the venal and murderous Cat, played by Harvey Keitel. Decent and brooding in the style of a neo-Western leading man, Charlie is stunned by his colleagues’ brutal treatment of “wets,” the migrants whom they sometimes arrest, and sometimes hand over to a human trafficker.
The movie is, above all, about the moral compromise and human costs that come with immigration enforcement. But it is also a commentary on the mythic plenitude of American life; the film prods you into wondering whether that allure is illusory. What seems to have left an impression on Bovino, however, is the film’s unflattering portrayal of immigration officers, which he appears to have taken as an insult that demanded a response. “I thought maybe I’d get a little bit on the other side and take it back the other way,” he said on the podcast.
Today, the whole nation has seen what “taking it back the other way” apparently means. Bovino, who was “commander-at-large” of Border Patrol under President Trump, was recently dismissed by him as the head of the Administration’s immigration-enforcement effort in Minneapolis, after a civilian named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by border agents. (Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, was killed around two weeks after Renee Nicole Good, another civilian in Minneapolis, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.) Like many others in the Trump Administration, Bovino defended Pretti’s killing, claiming that he had violently resisted arrest and had “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite videos suggesting otherwise. As during the 2021 podcast interview, Bovino defended Border Patrol to a public, and a press, that he did not believe understood or appreciated the job. “The victims are the Border Patrol agents,” he said, last month, on CNN.
“The Border” may be the closest we can come to understanding Bovino’s motivations, and the chaos he has engendered. The film is largely forgotten today, a minor effort awkwardly lodged between the grit of New Hollywood, on one side, and the schlocky flash-bang blockbusters of the eighties, on the other. But, along with “Borderline,” a film that premièred two years earlier, starring Charles Bronson as a Border Patrol officer who impersonates a migrant in order to hunt down a human smuggler, “The Border” is a foundational artifact that sheds light on how our culture—not just Bovino—has understood immigration.
“That’s unfortunate,” Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the producer of “The Border,” told me, after I mentioned that Bovino had been inspired by the film. Bronfman said his own inspiration had been a newspaper series about immigration that had run in the Los Angeles Times a few years before the movie came out. One article by the reporter Evan Maxwell, written during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, noted that the Administration had “shown an increasing sensitivity to the rights of illegal aliens.”
Bronfman hired Deric Washburn, who had co-written the screenplay for “The Deer Hunter,” to write the script. (Walon Green, who had written “The Wild Bunch,” was among the other writers who contributed.) “His remit was to try and dramatize the situation at the border, which I felt like nobody really knew about or understood,” Bronfman said, of Washburn. “I didn’t think people understood the nature of, and the desperation of, would-be immigrants. I also understood that the Border Patrol had a very difficult job to do. I asked Deric to try to imagine that into a story.”
Illegal immigration, as we understand it today, was only just becoming a political issue. After the Second World War, immigrants to the U.S. had mainly been from Europe. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act at a ceremony beneath the Statue of Liberty. The law, Johnson said, would “repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice” by lifting decades-old quotas that strongly favored white Europeans.
The year before, Johnson had—with much less fanfare—allowed for the expiration of the bracero program, a formal agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that allowed Mexican laborers, known as braceros, to enter the U.S. legally, on a temporary basis, to work in American agriculture. In the decades that followed, the economies of Sun Belt states exploded, while the so-called Mexican miracle collapsed into a debt crisis. Meanwhile, Americans’ demand for street drugs, especially cocaine, enabled the rise of violent drug cartels. In other words, incentives to cross the border only grew, whatever the laws said.
American politicians noticed. Carter’s leniency was met with a Republican backlash. In 1981, the Reagan Administration unveiled an immigration policy that made employing undocumented workers illegal. “We have lost control of our borders,” then U.S. Attorney General William French Smith said. “We have pursued unrealistic policies. We have failed to enforce our laws effectively.”
For all the scenes of jeeps raising dust in the desert and migrants wading through the Rio Grande, “The Border” is something of a two-hander. Charlie’s prevailing disgust with his fellow-officers, most of whom all but openly take part in a human-trafficking operation, is sharpened when a young migrant from Mexico, named Maria, has her infant stolen while they’re being held in a detention camp. Charlie sets out to retrieve the child, even though doing so will put him at odds with unscrupulous men on both sides of the border.
Elpidia Carrillo, the actress who plays Maria, comes from Michoacán, and lost several of her family members to violence, she recalled when we spoke earlier this month. Carrillo began acting at twelve, but “The Border” was her first American feature. She would have to hold her own against Nicholson, who played the deranged writer Jack Torrance, in “The Shining,” and who had won an Oscar, in 1976, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “I had no idea who he was,” Carrillo told me.
A peasant girl dressed in a canvas smock, Maria is mostly expressionless and mute, pulled to and fro like a dry leaf on a high wind. Aside from expressing her maternal instinct, she seems to have no will of her own, no capacity for sophisticated thought. Nor do the other migrants in the film stand out, the way even the most inconsequential white characters do. They are merely a mass of brown bodies, always in motion.
Carrillo took exception to this depiction, and told as much to the director, Tony Richardson, an Englishman. “The way you tell this story, this very humble woman, that’s just completely for you,’’ she recalled saying. “We’re not like that. We know our roots.”
“I was not happy to play that role,” she told me. Carrillo added that she didn’t think Bovino’s great-uncle, Hartley, liked her much. “He actually wanted another girl to play the role.”
Once, Carrillo said, Nicholson “playfully” tapped her buttocks in rehearsal. She said that she kicked him in return, and he lost his balance. (A representative for Nicholson did not respond to requests for comment.) When things settled down, Richardson approached. He told her to channel her rage about the role into her character. “That’s exactly who you are,” he told her. “You’re going to fight for your baby.”
In his posthumously published 1993 memoir, Richardson devotes several passages to Nicholson, whom he described as “meticulously prepared.” He lambasts Valerie Perrine, who played Charlie’s wife, Marcy, as “a difficult and needlessly bitchy and offensive woman to most of the people working around her.” (A representative for Perrine strongly disputed that characterization and said that “everybody who’s worked for her had high praise for her on sets” and that “she was very professional about her work.”) Carrillo is simply “an unknown Mexican actress,” in Richardson’s telling, whom he “found.”
Some of the most effective scenes in the film have nothing to do with the border. Charlie is at first working in Los Angeles, but Marcy persuades him to move to El Paso so that they can live in a two-family duplex with her high-school friend Savannah, who’s married to Cat. Soon enough, they are pulling into the driveway of the new house, in a bleak suburban subdivision wrested from the West Texas scrublands. Reunited, Marcy and Savannah perform a saucy cheerleading routine in front of their husbands, which ends with the promise of fellatio. Charlie laughs, but there is something like embarrassment, or unease, on his middle-aged, mustachioed face. Cat has no such reservations. “Charlie, I feel you and me have scored the best damn pussy in the whole state of Texas,” he informs his new colleague.
However awful Richardson thought that Perrine may have been on set, she perfectly conveys the cheerful despair of the classic American striver, always on the move, ever on the make. She buys a waterbed. She dreams of a television career (perhaps staying in Los Angeles would have been the better idea). Charlie grows furious about her spending. “No more is no more,” he says. She doesn’t understand, and so he hits her across the face.
These domestic sequences are bracketed with scenes on the border. In effect, the film seems to imply that the migrants are risking their lives for plastic-covered couches and daytime soap operas. Of course, it’s not that simple. They are escaping abject poverty and repressive regimes. Charlie, though, is trying to keep them out of a country that thoroughly repulses him.
“The Border” divided film critics. “It’s a solid, impressive movie,” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, adding that Carrillo “suggests a dark, adolescent Ingrid Bergman.” But, in the Times, Vincent Canby characterized the film as “an angry, brutal melodrama” in the “shape of a made-for-television movie.”
The film indeed ends in melodramatic fashion, with Nicholson killing Cat in a shoot-out. He retrieves Maria’s baby, who is unharmed, handing the child to her as they both stand ankle-deep in the Rio Grande. The movie was supposed to end even more violently; Richardson explained to Rolling Stone that he originally planned for Nicholson to blow up a Border Patrol headquarters, but preview audiences bristled. “It became too romantic,” Bronfman, the movie’s producer, said, of the final cut. “It wasn’t enough about the reality of the situation.”
Whatever Bovino took away from the film, it certainly wasn’t the unexpected benevolence of its ending; during the recent immigration raids in Minneapolis, he was heavily criticized for the decision to put Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old boy, into detention. “We will continue to take these bad people, bad things, off the streets,” Bovino said, at a press conference, afterward. (Ramos and his father were released from custody and returned to Minneapolis earlier this month.)
Ultimately, Richardson would acknowledge the film’s shortcomings in his book. He liked the new upbeat ending, but knew that the movie was missing something. “Perhaps the border is just too big and too living a situation to be contained in the form of any story,” he conceded. Bronfman voiced nearly the same sentiment many years later. “It’s difficult, in a film, to sometimes have as much nuance as you’d like,” he told me. “It wasn’t everything I had hoped it would be, but I felt like we did a pretty good job.”
It could be that the film’s lurid and relentless action—a fight in a strip club, car chases, a drunken party—vitiates any true moral force it could have had. And maybe that was the point. It is as if the scriptwriters, and Richardson, do not quite want to say what needs to be said. They pull their punches because, if the punch lands, their own hands will bleed.
Carrillo, for her part, would go on to star opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator,” and to work on many other films. She recently starred in “Solidarity,” a film about a garment worker in downtown Los Angeles. These days, she lives in Southern California. She told me that, despite her initial qualms, she is proud of “The Border,” and hardly sees it as an advertisement to sign up for U.S. Border Patrol. “I don’t see how people could misunderstand the movie right now,” she said. ♦