Contrabando (1930s) - A dusty, slow border drama with some funny mistakes

Look, if you are into dusty, creaky 1930s border dramas where people spend half the movie staring intensely at cacti, you might find some charm in Contrabando. But anyone looking for actual pacing or a plot that makes sense for more than ten minutes will absolutely hate it. 🏃‍♂️

It is one of those early talkies where everyone speaks so slowly you could probably go make a sandwich between their lines. The plot is simple enough: this rich guy named Hernández wants to start a revolution in Mexico, so he decides to smuggle a bunch of guns from the US side.

Honestly, the guns look like they were borrowed from a local high school theater department. They have this weird, shiny wooden look that makes you think they might snap if someone holds them too hard.

Dorothy Sebastian and the Weird Border Vibes

The main reason I even sat down for this was Dorothy Sebastian. She was just in The Divorcee around this time, but here she feels like she stepped into a completely different universe. Her eyes are doing a lot of heavy lifting because the dialogue is just... not great.

There is this one scene where she has to look shocked, and the camera just zooms in and stays there. Like, it stays so long I thought my screen froze, but then she finally blinked. 👁️

And let's talk about Hernández's mustache. It is so perfectly straight and dark it looks like somebody drew it on his face with a piece of charcoal right before the director yelled action.

Small things I wrote down in my notebook:

• The sound quality is so fuzzy it feels like you are listening to the movie through a wet blanket.
• A guy in a big hat walks past the camera three different times in the same scene, probably because they ran out of extras.
• The "uprising" they keep talking about feels like it involves about six guys in a small room.

The writer Fernando Méndez clearly had some big ideas here about borders and politics. But the budget just was not there to back him up, so we get a lot of people sitting around tables talking about "the plan" instead of actually doing anything.

It gets slightly better near the end when things finally start happening, but by then you might have already fallen asleep. Still, there is a weird, cozy vibe to how bad the sound editing is.

It is definitely not a masterpiece. But if you like finding weird, forgotten bits of film history where the actors look slightly confused about where to stand, it is worth a look on a rainy Sunday afternoon.