Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
This superb thriller was the sleeper's sleeper hit of 1952. It launched Richard Fleischer as an
A-list director and even paid off for its screenwriter Earl Felton, working from a story partly
written by the scribe behind Edgar Ulmer's
Detour. Charles McGraw's
gravel-voiced hardboiled cop verbally spars with acid-tongued Marie Windsor, the queen of
sultry B-movie dames
(Force of Evil, The
Killing). The tension never lets up for a moment, and the claustrophobic setting of a
moving train becomes a character unto itself.
If a DVD fan doesn't want all of the discs in the new Warner Film Noir 2 package, this is the one to go for.
Synopsis:
LA detective Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) has a nail-biting assignment:
bring the wife of a slain mobster back from Chicago to testify before a grand jury. She's Mrs.
Frankie Neil (Marie Windsor), a cheap-talking cookie for whom Brown forms an instant dislike.
Their lack of harmony doesn't
make it any easier when two killers show up on the same train, snooping to find Mrs. Neil's hiding
place or to bribe Brown to give her up. A mysterious overweight man (Paul Maxey) exhibits a suspicious
interest in Brown as well, making it difficult to hide anything in the narrow corridors. The
detective makes a big mistake when he strikes up a dining-car friendship with the beautiful Ann
Sinclair (Jacqueline White) - the bad guys get the idea that she's their target
for the day.
The Narrow Margin is one of the cleverest cat-and-mouse games made in the noir style. It
sets up its tense situation with admirable ease and can rightfully be said to keep audiences on the edge of
their seats - there are not ten seconds of slack time in the whole show. One policeman must quietly
fend off an unknown number of probing hit men on an LA-bound train, while not attracting attention
to himself or the woman he's protecting. He's dealing with intangibles on all sides - who are the
bad guys? Can he be sure that the thug with the pencil moustache is one of them? How about the 'fat
man' in the corridor? In the close confines of the train, Sgt. Brown has to pretend that he's alone
when the attractive Ann Sinclair notices him behaving strangely, and her precocious son Tommy (a
hilariously raucous Gordon Gebert) immediately figures out that he's not on the level: "Hey, he's
hiding a gun! I bet he's a robber!"
The underpaid and overburdened Brown can't hide his nerves and weakens at least momentarily when
propositioned to take a bribe by the oily Vincent Yost (Peter Brocco, later Dr. Wu in
Our Man Flint). It is clear that
the odds are all on the side of the mob and that the use of witness intimidation and murder to
obstruct justice is routine activity. In a world this pitiless, Brown's gratingly hardboiled attitude is a
rational response. He has to stay on task. There's a
narrow margin between success and failure, and a equally narrow margin between being an honest cop
and becoming the bought pigeon of the mob.
This brings us to the marvelous Charles McGraw/Marie Windsor duo, a pairing that makes for some of the best tough-talk
patter in the movies. Every line that comes out of this couple is a smart remark or cynical
jibe. Windsor's Mrs. Neil is impossibly selfish and cold, and McGraw's Brown sounds as if he's
ready to start hitting her at any moment. He's risking his life to protect a woman he clearly
despises, a contradiction that shifts The Narrow Margin onto the unstable moral ground of
the best of film noir. Nothing seems to be simply black or white anymore. Are all our energies
being expended in the wrong directions?
The Narrow Margin has some major twists worthy of the best detective fiction, that I won't
risk by discussing the plot any further. But this movie packs surprises that are still difficult to see
coming, 50 years later.
The production was the talk of the Hollywood technical community, just as Gun Crazy had been two
years earlier. Following the same ideas used in
Das boot thirty years later, the
claustrophobic feeling of a train interior's passageways and cramped compartments
is maintained even with a big 35mm camera in use. The use of rear projection for the window views
is also excellent, sustaining a clear illusion of motion and landscape, especially when a car begins to
follow. Only one time do the RKO process crew have to cheat the rear projection - when we see a vehicle
driving backwards on a roadway.
There is no soundtrack score, and only railroad noises are heard behind the titles. Natural
railway sounds provide a constant audio bed, and adds punctuation when director Fleischer takes a moment
to highlight Paul Maxey as a potential bad guy. The film abounds in fun little tension-building touches, like
the cut from Marie Windsor anxiously filing her nails to the identical rhythm of the locomotive's tie rods
chugging away. The lighting is excellent -plus; in the daytime
stop somewhere in Colorado, the sunshine on the station platform is blindingly bright. Elsewhere,
clever tricks with reflections in windows and shiny surfaces add dimension to scenes. A reflection in the
windows of a train on the next track figure strongly in the audience-pleasing dramatic climax. 2
As I've written once before, Ian Fleming must have been a film noir fan when he wrote the
James Bond movies, for he lifts an entire plot structure from
White Heat for his
Goldfinger. That book uses a saying involving the words Happenstance, Coincidence and
Enemy Action that seems in part inspired by a dialogue line from this film. But Fleming transposed
The Narrow Margin into a trip on the Orient Express in his
From Russia with Love. Bond's flight from Turkey with Tatania Romanova is practically a carbon
copy, complete with Bond trying to communicate at various whistle stops, killers
leaving and boarding the train surreptitiously, and a brutal fight in a train compartment. McGraw's battle
with a killer isn't quite the slugfest between 007 and Red Grant, but it comes close. It has a great
dialogue exchange - Thug: "I think you knocked a tooth loose!" Brown: "Wanna try for none?"
I need to discuss a spoiler, and will do so in a
footnote.
Warners' DVD of The Narrow Margin looks great, far better than the old Image laserdisc from
the 90s (that we spun frequently in the Erickson burrow, I don't mind saying). George Diskant's
moody photography, half of it in deep-focus and the other half a special process effect of one
kind or another, looks great. The soundtrack is first-generation rich.
RKO's 1952 promotion was pretty cheesy, judging by the authentic but crude poster on the
package cover and the even duller trailer. It has quite a few alternate takes, including Charles
McGraw calling a guy "Jingle Jaw" in his inimitable gravelly voice.
The big extra is a commentary from William Friedkin, who has a lot of enthusiasm for the film but
not much to offer besides a running descriptions of scenes and generalizations about film
noir. He's done a little more homework than John Milius on Dillinger, although you
can almost hear both commentators turning pages they've downloaded from the IMDB. On Fury
Peter Bogdanovich sometimes sounds a bit bored, but we know we're hearing authoritative information.
The Narrow Margin is a superlative film noir. Along with The Killing, Savant often springs
it on people adverse to old B&W movies, just to show them what they're missing.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
The Narrow Margin rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: trailer, commentary with director William Friedkin
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: June 24, 2005
Footnotes:
1. Spoiler - don't
read until you have seen the film! Anyone who has seen
The Narrow Margin will forgive the slight lapses in logic here and there, such as why Brown
never attempts to enlist any ouside help in his train ordeal. The movie is just too fast and too rewarding
to worry about things like that. What does disappoint us is the way one character (and its real hero) is simply ignored
after being killed performing a noble and thankless job. At the fade-out, Sgt. Brown is shown ministering to
one woman who has been coming on to him fairly strongly since the beginning of the train trip. He's apparently
forgotten all about the other woman, who we miss a lot more. As William Friedkin says in his commentary, with
the addition of just one soulful shot of a contrite Brown paying his respects to a fallen comrade
The Narrow Margin would become a classic. Return
2. (Spoiler) This reflection gag (and also the concept of identity
concealment for an important person on a train trip) is borrowed from an earlier RKO noir by Jacques
Tourneur called Berlin Express. Return
DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson
|