The Illegal Status Quo

It's hard enough for one person to change his ways late in life, let alone a whole community. That's normal but it becomes a tragedy when normal life is smuggling goods across a dangerous border and the authorities are increasingly cracking down. In 1966's Law of the Border (Hudutların Kanunu), the ragged men of a desolate little village trade gripes as they go about the routine business of getting goods across the Turkish-Syrian border. A new police captain and one citizen's desire for a better life for his son result in a sudden impetus for change. Shot with an eye for sun bleached realism in a bad land, director Lutfi Omer Akad constructs a simple but terrific tale of self-perpetuating violence.

We join the group of local men as they work out the details of their latest exploit. The police captain (Erol Tas) is frustrated in his attempts to stop the illegal activity when he confronts a shop owner about selling contraband. The shop owner immediately produces an invoice showing everything to be above board. It's probably counterfeit but there's little the captain can do. Reluctantly, he realises influencing the hearts and minds of the locals is his only option.

There are two potential agents of change--a pretty young woman named Ayse (Pervin Par) who wants to open a school and Hidir (Yilmaz Guney), one of the smugglers, who saw his father killed by a landmine and doesn't want his own son to follow in his footsteps, so to speak. After watching his son and the local boys in a violent scuffle one day, he reluctantly acknowledges the need for a school and convinces his comrades of the same.

If all this sounds to you like a 1950s Western, you're not alone. Law of the Border in many ways feels like a tragic American Western, especially as the action sequences escalate at the climax.

Restored in 2011 from the only surviving print, the image isn't always of the best quality. But considering all other copies were destroyed in the 1980 coup, we're lucky to have it at all.

Law of the Border is available on The Criterion Channel.