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4[[quoteright:350:[[Series/TheManInTheHighCastle https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/julianacrain_nippon_reich_border_crossing.png]]]]
5[[caption-width-right:350:[[VideoGame/PapersPlease Papers, please.]]]]
6
7->'''Dr Elliot:''' If the border to Zaire is closed, how do we get across it?\
8'''Munro:''' Luck!
9-->-- ''Film/{{Congo}}''
10
11The endgame of RunForTheBorder. An [[EspionageTropes Espionage Trope]], especially during the UsefulNotes/ColdWar what with the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall and other well-guarded communist frontiers.
12
13Sometimes the border is marked by concrete walls, barbed wire, machine guns, attack dogs, and constantly roving searchlight beams. At other times it's merely a stretch of open water or wilderness, but still patrolled at regular intervals.
14
15The Checkpoint Charlie version is when this crossing has to be made at an official border control station. In that case the protagonist [[CoverIdentityAnomaly better hope their papers are in order]].
16
17The real [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_Charlie Checkpoint Charlie]] is now a tourist attraction.
18
19A SuperTrope to CheckpointBluff. Compare MetalDetectorCheckpoint, RoadBlock and WalkIntoMordor. [[JustForFun/NotToBeConfusedWith Nothing to do with]] reaching video game {{checkpoint}}s.
20
21----
22!!Examples:
23
24[[foldercontrol]]
25
26[[folder:Advertising]]
27* In the run-up to the 2006 FIFA World Cup, one commercial featured a man and pregnant woman driving through a border check-point. Just after the guard checks their papers and lets them through, the guards get a phone call. A voice yells, "'''GOOOOOAAALLL!!!'''" just as the "pregnant" woman lets a soccer ball fall from under her dress.
28[[/folder]]
29
30[[folder:ComicBooks]]
31* ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'': In ''Recap/AsterixInSpain'', there is a huge traffic jam on the border between Gaul and Spain due to the Romans checking each carriage. Since they have Pepe, the boy the Romans are looking for, with them, Asterix and Obelix hire a guide to get them across the border without getting seen by the Romans.
32* ''ComicBook/{{Tintin}}'': In "[[Recap/TintinTheCalculusAffair The Calculus Affair]]," after rescuing the Professor and making off with a Bordurian tank, Tintin and Haddock make their way to the border, only to find that the Bordurians have set up a RoadBlock of trucks ahead of them, and there's anti-tank defences on both sides so they can't go around it. With no other option, Tintin drives the tank through the most lightly fortified portion of the checkpoint – [[CarMeetsHouse the customs house]].
33[[/folder]]
34
35[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
36* ''Film/TotalRecall1990:'' Quaid has to go through immigration to enter Mars.
37* ''Film/CharlieMuffin'' (1979). Charlie's superiors set him up to be arrested when he crosses the Berlin Wall. Fortunately Charlie is suspicious and gives his papers to an East German hoping to escape to the West. The German panics when the arrest takes place and gets killed.
38* [[spoiler:Subverted]] in ''Film/{{Monsters|2010}}''. When the protagonists arrive at the huge wall at the US border they [[spoiler:find it abandoned, as the aliens have overrun it]].
39* Spoofed in the 1985 action-comedy ''Film/{{Gotcha|1985}}'' where the young protagonist has to run the gauntlet of Checkpoint Charlie's {{Obstructive Bureaucrat}}s. He [[FlippingTheBird flips them the bird]] once he's safely through.
40* ''Film/BabylonAD''. Vin Diesel has to cross the Bering Strait on a LiveActionEscortMission, despite it being patrolled by {{Attack Drone}}s that kill everything that moves (literally, the drones killed two polar bears).
41* ''Film/JamesBond'':
42** In ''Film/TheLivingDaylights'', Bond arranges for a defector to cross the Czechoslovakian border twice -- first by being shunted through a pipeline and on the second occasion by WeaponisedCar. And a cello.
43** Even more so, ''Film/{{Octopussy}}'' partially takes place around the border sections near Karl-Marx-stadt (Chemnitz). 009 and General Orlov get killed trying to cross it (though not by border guards in 009's case).
44* ''Film/{{Stripes}}''. An Army unit is accidentally led into Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Some members of the unit break into the country through a poorly defended border outpost to rescue them, and break out again through the same outpost.
45* ''Film/{{Machete}}'' begins with a failed US-Mexico border crossing, serving to demonstrate the villain's complete lack of morals (and intelligence, as they capture the whole thing on film, with the US Senator helpfully identifying himself as he shoots a pregnant woman).
46* ''Film/MenInBlack'' starts with K arresting one of the aliens trying to cross the Mexican border, as the alien was trying to disguise as a human illegal immigrant but gets sussed out for not understanding Spanish. MIB headquarters in New York also serves as an immigration checkpoint for extraterrestrials wanting to enter Earth for whatever reason -- unauthorized ship launches or leaving Manhattan tends to draw their attention quickly.
47* ''Film/TheDebt''. The main characters must cross into East Berlin, and then try to cross back.
48* In ''Franchise/StarWars: Film/ANewHope'', Obi-Wan Kenobi gets his party through a Stormtrooper-manned checkpoint in Mos Eisley because [[JediMindTrick those weren't the droids they were looking for and they didn't need to see their identification]].
49* The climax of ''Film/{{Argo}}'' is one of these, made much more dramatic than it was in the real story. In this case the airport in Tehran serves as the border crossing.
50* ''Film/{{Congo}}''. The expedition tries to surmount this problem by flying over the Zaire border, only to be shot down by army units armed with heat-seeking missiles.
51* The RealLife Checkpoint Charlie is a critical locale in ''Film/BridgeOfSpies,'' as it is where [[spoiler:American student Frederick Pryor is released, allowing the spy exchange to take place.]]
52* In the climax of ''Film/TheSoldier'', the title character has to drive through Checkpoint Charlie, but is recognised and pursued by a US marine who's encountered him before. Fortunately his CrazyPrepared Mossad allies have set up a RampJump so he can get over the Berlin Wall the hard way.
53* ''Film/TheBourneIdentity'': A version where Bourne is being pursued by Swiss police officers and barely manages to make it into the US embassy -- at which point he is almost immediately pursued by the marine guards there.
54[[/folder]]
55
56[[folder:Literature]]
57* ''Literature/TheSpyWhoCameInFromTheCold'' opens with the Checkpoint Charlie version. It doesn't go well -- the spy is gunned down right in front of the protagonist Alec Leamas. At the end an escape route is organised across the Berlin Wall, but the LoveInterest is gunned down in a pre-arranged setup, as is Leamas [[AlwaysSaveTheGirl when he goes back for her]].
58* Happens several times in the Literature/{{Quiller}} series, and often mentioned as a NoodleIncident.
59* Creator/ErnestHemingway's ''Literature/AFarewellToArms''. Frederic Henry and his LoveInterest have to row across an Italian lake in a storm to Switzerland in order to escape arrest. They see a Guardi patrol boat, but fortunately it doesn't see them.
60* ''Literature/{{Friday}}'' by Creator/RobertAHeinlein. ActionGirl Friday has to cross the DividedStatesOfAmerica. In one case she knocks down someone repairing a border fence, only for him to follow after her because he wants to escape as well.
61* ''[[Literature/BernardSamsonSeries Game, Set & Match]]'' by Creator/LenDeighton. Bernard Samson is haunted by the memory of a friend who performed a HeroicSacrifice while crossing the Berlin Wall, enabling him to escape. This scene is shown in the TV series, as is another incident in which a defector is smuggled across by lying in a [[BuriedAlive coffin-sized box with oxygen feed in the bed of a dump truck, which is then filled up]].
62* ''Film/FuneralInBerlin'', also by Creator/LenDeighton, has a defector being smuggled by faking his death and being taken across the Berlin Wall in a coffin. The idea has been reused several times, such as in the TV series ''Series/JasonKing'' and ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}''.
63* ''Literature/TheDogsOfWar'' details how guns are smuggled across the French border -- they can either take the random risk of a permanent customs point, or try a forest road that could be manned by a flying customs check that searches every vehicle. To reduce the risk they send another vehicle first; if it fails to return in a certain time, they know it's been stopped and searched.
64* The Literature/ModestyBlaise short story "The Giggle Wrecker" has Modesty and Willie trying to sneak a Soviet defector past the Berlin Wall.
65* ''We the Living'' by Creator/AynRand ends with the protagonist being killed by a border guard as she tries to escape the Soviet Union.
66* Literature/TheGirlWhoCircumnavigatedFairylandInAShipOfHerOwnMaking features a gnome as a border guard for Fairyland who enforces the entry requirements of the Marquess (including allowing Ravished humans in without a visa) and keeping out wind spirits who haven't been granted citizenship yet. She works from inside a kind of {{Steampunk}} gargoyle, since it embodies the authority that makes people willing to put up with customs inspections in the first place (and also doubles up to make humans a bit sensitive to the {{Glamour}} of Fairyland).
67[[/folder]]
68
69[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
70* ''Series/TheSandbaggers'' has repeated crossings of the Iron Curtain. In one memorable instance in season 3, one of the main characters gets out of Russia on dodgy papers by going for his passport and accidentally-on-purpose showing the officials a sheaf of dirty photographs instead; they're too busy laughing at him to check his actual passport very thoroughly.
71* One episode of ''Series/MacGyver1985'' has a ColdOpen in which Mac is attempting to get out of an Iron Curtain country concealed inside a coffin.
72* ''Series/MythBusters'' tested a myth where illegal border-crossers attempted to use a giant portable slingshot to fling people over the U.S. border. The reality of the situation was that any device that ''could'' fling a person as far as the myth stated (300 yards) would have to be implausibly large and not portable at all (the [=MythBusters=] version, which used ''radio towers'', couldn't fling a person that distance), and that doesn't even get into the injuries the people would suffer in making the transition. Long story short: myth Busted.
73* In an episode of ''Series/MissionImpossible'', one of the agents (Barbara Bain) is captured in East Berlin. After she is tortured and tells them nothing, the team's leader (Peter Graves) manages to talk them into releasing her. He gives her an overcoat against the cold and they start across to West Berlin when the Germans behind them open fire with machine guns, apparently killing them. They are quite satisfied that it no longer matters who they were or what they were after. When it is clear the agents get up and he explains that he anticipated that and used bulletproof coats. She laughs and says "I thought it felt heavy."
74* In ''Series/WhiteRabbitProject'' the team construct a hot-air balloon from scrap metal and sailcloth based on a tale of an East German family escaping over the Berlin Wall that way. They fared much better than the Mythbusters border catapult, as not only did the reconstruction work properly, but the research confirmed that the real people made their escape.
75* A 1983 TV movie ''Film/LoveIsForever'' is the BasedOnATrueStory of an Australian journalist who helped his Laotian wife escape her country by having them swim the Mekong River underwater using scuba gear. This is pretty dangerous even before the border guards start shooting at them; there's a strong current that makes it impossible to swim directly across and carries all kinds of debris, and thanks to the dirty water you can barely see where you're swimming and thus might not see an object before it hit you.
76* ''Series/TheManInTheHighCastle'': In season 2, Juliana Crain realizes that she's no longer safe in the JPS and defects to the Reich by crossing a border checkpoint at their San Francisco embassy. The Kempeitai troops standing guard attempt to stop her when they see what she's doing, but she manages to cross safely.
77* ''Series/TheProfessionals''. At the start of "Dead Reckoning", Bodie is shown leading a man into the woods as if to be executed, only to end up on another road where the Bulgarian SecretPolice are waiting to hand over a DoubleAgent in exchange. After the spy swap has been made the local border patrol turn up, so everyone has make an undignified run for it.
78* ''Series/ElChapulinColorado'': One episode involves a small group of people trying to escape from Nazi Germany, and their truck getting stuck in the mud ''two meters'' away from the border's line. After some wacky hijinks as they try to get past, El Chapulín saves them [[LoopholeAbuse by moving the sign that marks the border to behind the truck]] right before the Nazi soldiers come for them.
79[[/folder]]
80
81[[folder:Podcasts]]
82* ''Podcast/FriendsAtTheTable'': "Sangfielle": Before the Blackwick Group can enter Sapodilla, the largest city in Sangfielle, they first have to go through customs in a special intermission episode. Adapting the rules of ''Inhuman Conditions'', a game inspired by the Voight-Campff Test from ''Film/BladeRunner'', each member of the group is subjected to an invasive, cryptic, and dehumanizing interrogation regarding their identity and reasons for visiting, as the Glim Macula, Sapodilla's police force, seeks to bar anyone insufficiently normal (by the Glim Macula's [[AntiMagicalFaction standards of normal]]) from entry. One of them doesn't make it through and gets thrown in a dungeon, most of the rest are arbitrarily restricted from entering certain parts of the city, and none of them ever learn why.
83[[/folder]]
84
85[[folder:Music]]
86* Mentioned in the song "Oliver's Army" by Music/ElvisCostello.
87-->''There was a checkpoint Charlie\
88 He didn't crack a smile\
89 But it's no laughing party\
90 When you've been on the murder mile\
91 Only takes one itchy trigger\
92 One more widow, [[UsefulNotes/TheTroubles one less white nigger]]''
93[[/folder]]
94
95[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
96* ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}''. Several adventures feature the runners having to pass through heavily defended borders, either through force or guile.
97* Hero Games
98** ''TabletopGame/{{Champions}}'' supplement ''Red Doom''. In one of the adventures the superhero {{PC}}s have to smuggle a defecting superhero out of the Soviet Union. If the {{PC}}s head west they'll probably end up trying to cross the East/West German border.
99** ''Espionage'' adventure ''Border Crossing''
100* ''TabletopGame/TopSecret'' module "Operation Fastpass". The spy {{PC}}s must help a defector escape from behind the Iron Curtain. In order to do so they must get across the border into friendly territory.
101[[/folder]]
102
103[[folder:Video Games]]
104* The ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' multiplayer includes a level named "Berlin Wall", based on the TropeNamer, where the Soviets have abandoned subtlety and smashed the wall with tanks.
105* In the Nomad lifepath story from ''VideoGame/Cyberpunk2077'', Nomad V is tasked with smuggling corpo contraband across the border from the [[DividedStatesOfAmerica NUSA state of South California]] to Night City. Because the world of Cyberpunk is a CrapsackWorld, the border guard's response is to rat them and Jackie out to Arasaka, the corp that owns the contraband, leading to a chase across the Badlands of North California.
106* ''VideoGame/PapersPlease'' is a game all about playing a faceless official manning one of these in a fictional Communist nation. With the extra tip of the checkpoint being between [[UsefulNotes/BerlinWall East and West Grestin]].
107* ''VideoGame/EuroTruckSimulator'' features the most mundane version of this trope possible, with you needing to go through customs when travelling between countries outside the Schengen Area. You will never fail these border checks, though there is a rare chance at some border crossings where you may be pulled over for x-rays and physical searches.
108** ''VideoGame/AmericanTruckSimulator'' features an even more mundane example with the agricultural control stations you must go through when entering California.
109[[/folder]]

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