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5.6/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.6/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Border Romance remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have an hour to kill and like dusty old Westerns where the logic is a bit... loose, then Border Romance is perfectly fine. It’s mostly for people who like seeing how early talkies handled action scenes before they really knew what they were doing.
If you want a deep story or something that makes total sense, you’re definitely in the wrong place. This is poverty row filmmaking at its most frantic. 🌵
So, Bob Hamlin starts things off by shooting a guy in a cantina. It's supposed to be to save his friend, but the whole thing happens so fast and the camera is so shaky that you might blink and miss the actual reason.
Then, the movie does something truly bizarre. Bob and his pals run away into the night, but then they decide to go back to that very same town just a few hours later for a dance.
Because why wouldn't you go back to the scene of a shooting for some music? It’s one of those plot points that feels like it was written on a napkin during a lunch break.
Don Terry plays Bob with this stiff, heroic vibe that was really popular back then. He has that very specific 1920s leading man look where he seems to be wearing just a little bit too much eyeliner for a cowboy.
He spends a lot of the movie looking intensely at things. I’m not always sure what he’s looking at, but he looks very serious about it.
The real reason to watch this is Armida. She plays Conchita and she has way more personality than anyone else on screen combined.
She was a big deal in vaudeville and you can really tell. When she’s