Borderland Films by Dominique Brégent-Heald

Author:Dominique Brégent-Heald [Brégent-Heald, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030 Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780803278844
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2015-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

7. Advertisement for Over Niagara Falls (1914). Source: MPW, 3 January 1914, 109.

In The Boundary Rider (1914), produced by the Ithaca-based Wharton film company, the aqueous border region of northern New York State was not merely scenic but proved central to the plot. According to the reviewer Hanford C. Judson, “The chief feature of the picture is the clever way in which the smugglers get their contraband across the boundary. A mountain torrent flows from the Canadian side and, a mile or so across the border, falls over a precipice, and under this is a grotto where men can stand and, screened by the curtain of water, collect the logs full of opium sent down stream by confederates across the line.”174 New York State revenue agents investigate an international opium smuggling ring led by a “certain Chinaman,” and their legwork takes them from Chinatown’s opium dens into the Northland, which Variety describes as “a wild country where water, cascades and caverns mark the boundary line [and] rough men are engaged in smuggling opium.”175

A clerk employed by a brokerage firm belonging to the drug distributor is falsely accused of murdering his boss. The clerk flees north and joins the fearless Boundary Riders, becoming an “agent of law and order.” With the help of a female undercover U.S. government agent, who infiltrates the smuggler’s headquarters by disguising herself as a “Chinaman,” he successfully uncovers the smuggling ring. The synopsis concludes, “This exonerates the clerk and puts added power in the hands of government men.”176 As such the film acknowledges the expansion of state control over a once fluid borderland as a positive development.

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