Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson) gets a job with the Texas border patrol and goes from scrounging in a California trailer park to living the high life in a duplex in El Paso.  His wife (Valerie Perrine) is looking forward to spending all the money that he’ll be making as a border agent.  But then Charlie discovers that his bigoted superior (Warren Oates!) and his partner (Harvey Keitel) are running a human smuggling ring.  When the baby of a young Mexican woman (Elpidia Carrillo) is kidnapped and sold to an illegal adoption ring, Charlie is finally forced to take a stand.

The Border seems to be one of Jack Nicholson’s forgotten films and it really can’t compete with some of the other movies that Nicholson was making around the same time.  Compared to films like The Shining, Terms of Endearment, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Border really does feel and look like a poorly paced made-for-TV movie.  British director Tony Richardson doesn’t really seem to know what type of movie he wanted The Border to be or what he wanted to say about immigration.  This is the type neo-Western that Sam Peckinpah could have worked wonders with but Tony Richardson just doesn’t seem to have any feel for the material.

Still, Jack Nicholson is pretty good here, playing the type of weary character that he specialized in during the pre-Batman portion of his career.  I especially liked the scenes that he shared with Valerie Perrine, who gave a good performance as someone who viewed buying a waterbed as being the height of luxury.  Harvey Keitel’s performance sometimes felt too familiar.  He’s played a lot of similar villains but he and Nicholson act well together.

And finally, Warren Oates in this movie, bringing his rough-hewn authenticity to his role.  This was the last of Oates’s films to be released before his premature death.  Blue Thunder and Tough Enough were both released posthumously.  Warren Oates is an actor who was only 52 when he died.  Whenever I see him onscreen, I think of all the great performances he would have given if he had only made it through the 90s.