With its celebrated opening sequence—required viewing for each new generation of cineaste—Orson Welles’s final American studio production is a minor masterpiece of genre filmmaking and a dramatic tour-de-force unmatched in his truncated career. Set on the Mexican border during a tense period in the drug war, this taut tale of corruption and deceit invests the police procedural with a prescient examination of ethnic, class, and political differences. Beneath the suspense, Welles crafts a frightening portrait of personal degradation in his singular role as the dissolute police chief still nursing a passion for an aging bargirl, memorably played by Marlene Dietrich.