**SPOILERS** Even though the movie "Borderline" is about a serious subject drug smuggling, and has a number of people killed in it, it comes across more like a 1930's type screwball comedy. Johnny McEvoy aka MacKlin and Madeleine Haley aka Gladys LaRue, Fred MacMurray & Claire Trevor, are working undercover in Mexico and unknown to each other who they really are. Each one thinks that the other is a criminal trying to get each other arrested by the US border police after they cross into California with a load of illegal drugs.
It's amazing to me that a criminal sharpie like Pete Ritchie, Raymond Burr, couldn't spot these two undercover US law enforcers, posing as a gangster and floozy, as soon as he laid his eyes on them. Ritchie must have either been high or suffering from brain damage from the drugs he was smuggling.
After ripping Ritchie off of his drug stash the two are on the run to get to the Mexican border with the drug shipment only to get each other arrested by the border police. All this without realizing that they both play for the same team the US Custom Services, Macklin, and the L.A Police department, Haley.
I couldn't get over the fact that the two fell in love with each other, which was obvious at the end of the movie, yet were more then willing to turn each other over to the authorities where they could have gotten long prison time for drug trafficking? Doesn't true love mean anything to these two? Couldn't they just let each other get away and concentrate on the capturing the major dealer and head of the drug smuggling ring? The FBI let Sammy "The Bull" Gravono, who admittedly murdered 19 people, walk away Scot-free in order to get his boss John Gottie behind bars with his testimony and nobody, as far as I know, in the FBI was madly in love with Sammy!
The two crime fighters are now together in their efforts to stop the drug smuggling gang led by Mr.Big himself Harvey Gumbin, Roy Roberts. Harvey wasn't that much smarter then his Man in Mexico Pete Ritchie by not realizing who this McEvoy really was, an undercover government agent. In the end there was an incredible shootout at Harvey's hideout, where McEvoy brought the drug shipment. McEvoy himself urged on Harvey's gangster to shoot it out with the police, in order not to blow his cover, endangering not only himself but the very police that were coming to his rescue! The best way to enjoy the movie "Borderline" is to watch it only for unintentional laughs.
