A simple, tightstrung drama taking place mostly on a train ride from Chicago to Los Angeles, The Narrow Margin didn’t have a big budget or name-brand talent, even by 1952 standards, but it’s an engrossing noir thriller backed by crackly Oscar-nominated writing.
I couldn’t help but think afterwards that if the same film had only starred A-list actors, it’d be better known today, instead of bearing the could-be-worse consensus “best of the B-noirs.” Katie and I popped over to the Film Forum tonight to catch it, another installment in the movie house’s excellent six-week series of gritty, second-billed mysteries and crime dramas spanning the mid-’40s to the mid-’50s.
Charles McGraw plays the overworked, underpaid flatfoot Walter Brown with jangled nerves and a voice of grimness and gravel. He’s charged with protecting and transporting one Mrs. Frankie Neall, a take-no-guff moll who has switched sides and is on her way to a trial at which she’ll name names in her slain husband’s operation. “She’s a 60-cent special,” rumbles Brown. “Cheap, flashy, and strictly poison under the gravy.” About the actress who plays her, Marie Windsor, Katie and I independently had the same thought: she’s a ringer in style, sass and substance for Allison Janney of The West Wing fame. See for yourself:
Director Richard Fleischer makes best use of suspense and action within the train’s close quarters, while flooding scenes with the harsh light and dark shadow of A-list noir. He steadily introduces aboard a series of mugs disguised as businessmen who have been hired to put the hit on Neall without arousing suspicion and maybe bump off Brown while they’re at it. Seemingly peripheral characters are folded into the mystery, all of whom Brown is initially loathe to trust. One is a comely mother (Jacqueline White) whom Brown takes a shine to as he fends off her mischievous, untrusting young son. Another is a mysterious overweight fellow, played by Paul Maxey, who admits, “Nobody loves a fat man, except his grocer and his tailor,” as passengers try to shy past him in the train’s narrow passageways. Clever twists culminate in a final act cunning enough that even the New York Times critic of the day kept as mum as an M. Night Shyamalan reviewer, admitting “to elaborate here would be to ruin an ingratiating swindle.”