Law of the Border (1966)

Not rated, but there's a lot of shooting and the movie uses a minefield as a central location.  While people walking through the minefield may be intense, the gore budget is pretty minimal.  No one loses body parts as much as their legs are painted to show injury.  The worst part is that sheep are genuinely scared by explosions in this movie.  It's more sad than it is upsetting.  Still...

DIRECTOR:  Lufti O. Akad

Martin Scorsese is messing with us, right?  This can't be one of the cinematic greats of the world.  I mean, I get it. Turkish cinema has a very specific vibe to it.  But this movie is borderline incomprehensible.  I honestly don't know what I'm going to write about it because it's barely coherent.  I get some major ideas that the movie is pushing, but this is a film that lacks some very basic things that would make it a functional narrative.

The biggest problem that I have with this movie is that it is a film about a setting.  I tend to get really frustrated when a movie is more about setting than character or plot.  It's not that there's no plot or no characters.  I get the loosey-goosey premise of this movie.  It's just that we don't spend a lot of time with any one character to say that there is a protagonist.  I get it, gun to head, I can say that Hidir is the protagonist.  It's just that I know so little about this character.  Part of that comes from the fact that this movie really needs you to enter with cultural context more than anything else.  If conflict is based on two diametrically opposed characters who are stopping each other from getting goals, that's in this movie.  The problem is that so much of this movie is talking about things that are going on instead of developing characters that we're supposed to sympathize with.  For about three-quarters of the movie, I was debating if I was supporting Hidir or the police chief.  I mean, good for Law of the Border making the antagonist a likable character and keeping him away from being a stereotype.  But I need to know what's going on with the movie, so give me some evil traits, okay?

There's something childish about the movie as a whole.  I don't mean to demean an entire culture's film industry, but a lot of Turkish movies from this time period have the same issue. (It's not like I've seen a billion Turkish movies, by the way.  It's just that there are a handful that I've seen that are laughably bad.)  It seems that, at the heart of Law of the Border, there's something vulnerable.  We have the story of a community fighting for freedom in the face of government oppression.  (I think!)  It seems like everyone is going to benefit if this school is built and that the rebels become farmers.  There's this repeated phrase that love grows out of shared work.  Okay, that's the message we're supposed to take.  Now, with a lot of stories with an objective moral good at the center, we have to have something to tear it all down.  That's okay.  But the movie doesn't really give the plan a chance to work.  The characters say that they are going to work the land and become a successful community.  But immediately, naysayers just start murdering everyone.

I said that this was childish and I'll tell you why.  This movie can't wait to get to its gunfights.  When I teach film and I have the kids do projects where they have to show camera techniques, I always have a group of boys who make the most violent gunfights imaginable.  That's what this movie feels like.  Every time there's almost a vulnerable moment in the film, the movie cuts to what looks like improv gun battles.  These aren't even choreographed that well.  It's a bunch of grown men going "pew-pew" to one another. I will concede that there's one gun scene that's really well shot, but it is almost a copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which came out the same year. But Law of the Border has these guys kill each other and I'm not sure who died and who did the shooting.  I'm also not entirely sure how it affects the story outside of acknowledging that the town won't have its school nor it's farming.  There are just these logical leaps that the movie kind of needs to spell out for me. 

I'm not going to write much more.  Anything else I write about this movie is me just filling up space.  Law of the Border, while potentially canonically valuable, is such a ramshackle of a film that it feels almost snobby to say that it's a great film.  I normally try not to be that harsh, but it has more in common with fan films and exploitation cinema than it does a fully realized film.  I honestly felt like I listened to a movie in another room and am asked to have thoughts on it, it's that unfinished.