The Bottom of the Bottle (Beyond the River)

Van Johnson, Joseph Cotten, Ruth Roman

Patrick Martin (Joseph Cotten), known as P.M., is a wealthy attorney and rancher big-man-in-town in the border town of Nogales, Arizona. He returns home to find his brother Donald (Van Johnson)hiding ...( read more  )in his garage. A former drunkard, Donald had been sent to the penitentiary five years previously for killing a man in a barroom brawl. It was in self-defense but P.M. hadn't defended his brother and he was convicted. Donald has escaped and wants his brother to help him across the Santa Cruz River into the Mexico-side Nogales, where his wife (Shirley Patterson)and children (Kim Charney and Sandy Deschler) are in dire straits. Things get worse when P.M. tells him the river is flooded and it will be days before anyone can cross. And P.M. is all a'twitter because his wife Nora (Ruth Roman), whom he married after Donald had gone to prison, doesn't know about his jail-bird brother. He introduces Donald to Nora and the rest of his Cadillac Cowboy and ranch society colleagues as an old friend, and is kept busy trying to make sure old Donald doesn't find anything harder than ginger ale to drink. Meanwhile, Donald gets a telephone call telling him that his family has gone from dire straits to destitution, and when P.M. won't get some money to them through his contacts on the Mexico side of Nogales, Donald knocks him down, grabs a couple of bottles of whiskey, and dashes out of the house into the rain.