Stephanie Fuller's The US–Mexico Border in American Cold War Film analyzes eight different Hollywood films produced between 1949 and 1958. Many of these films are already familiar to scholars of genre films. Anthony Mann's Border Incident (1949) is well known among scholars of film noir while Vera Cruz (Aldrich, 1954) is a perennial favorite among critics who discuss the changing character of the Western hero. And it is difficult to imagine a film scholar who has not heard of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958). What makes Fuller's book unique is the way it links these films together. Rather than organizing her analysis around the familiar categories of genre or director, Fuller selects her films based on their shared fascination with the space of the US–Mexico border. Using this border as her defining critical concept, Fuller works across the genre boundaries that scholars have traditionally used to define post-World War II filmmaking. She argues that the US–Mexico border played an important role in America's cinematic and national imagination during this period, serving as a screen onto which Americans projected their desires, fears, and identities. What is displayed in these films is not the reality of the US–Mexico border itself but “the ways in which the United States imagines itself through images of the border and Mexico” (13).

The book is divided into three sections, each consisting of two or three chapters in which Fuller closely analyzes one of the eight primary films in relation to an overarching theme. The “Romance” section highlights the important role of movement and mobility in these border films. The American characters are “traveling subjects whose identities are inextricably bound with movement” (28), and Mexico is framed as an exotic destination that offers an escape from the restrictions of everyday American life. The Americans – who are often criminals or undercover police officers – use the border as a device for self-transformation, easily adopting and discarding different identities as they travel. In contrast, Mexican characters are fixed in both time and place, and their identities are based on stock roles and undifferentiated stereotypes.

The “Revolution” section ties the border's cinematic appeal to Mexico's revolutionary history. Fuller argues that two films traditionally classified as Westerns – Vera Cruz and Border River (Sherman, 1954) – should not be analyzed in relation to American frontier mythology, as scholar Richard Slotkin suggests, but rather in terms of Mexico's own precolonial history and America's practice of intervention in Latin America during the Cold War. The inclusion of scenes filmed at the Mesoamerican pyramids of Teotihuacan (Vera Cruz) and an extended discussion of the annexation of Mexican territory by the United States via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Border River) “question the legitimacy of the United States’ territorial claim on the continent” (71). Just as some leftist filmmakers literally fled to Mexico as a way to avoid blacklisting and persecution, others took advantage of the symbolic freedom offered by Mexico's revolutionary history to create subtle critiques of US policy.

The final section, “Regulation,” emphasizes the power of American institutions – including Hollywood – to make “the border” an inherently criminal space. Chapter 7 draws on an extensive body of scholarship describing the role Hollywood played in creating the image of Tijuana as a city riddled with crime, vice, and danger. The Tijuana Story (Kardos, 1957), Fuller argues, adopts a social realist style that “presents a multitude of mobile, shifting perspectives” (118) as it challenges conventional depictions of border residents as nothing more than lawless criminals. Of the films analyzed in this book, The Tijuana Story comes the closest to offering a truly Mexican perspective of the border rather than an Americanized fantasy.

One drawback of Fuller's organizational framework is that the insights of different chapters are not fully integrated across sections. Only the final chapter explicitly addresses the films that have come before it, asserting that Touch of Evil “must be seen in the context of the whole series of cold war border films” (130). One could also question Fuller's choice of the Cold War as a defining paradigm for her analysis. Issues of military intervention, capitalist exploitation, and identity regulation are long-standing features of US–Mexico relations that have outlasted the Cold War itself. Instead, Fuller's book encourages us to rethink how we study postwar film, identifying the border as a key site for further critical inquiry and highlighting its powerful influence on American culture.