The Narrow Margin

Here's an overlooked classic that more than holds its own over five decades after its release. Two-fisted detective Charles McGraw must protect a crucial witness (Marie Windsor) on a train trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. Since keeping a secret is hard, bad guys who aren't so keen on Windsor's testimony are also on board -- and will stop at nothing to silence her. Further complexities are added to an already tense situation when the hit men confuse another passenger as their target.

"The Narrow Margin" is known as a B movie, but you'd never know it from watching it. True, the film isn't flashy, but it does make the most out of everything it has. The story is original and full of twists, the suspense terrific and the acting memorable. With its creative take on what should be a simple story, and with its colorful characters and sharp direction, it's all more than a bit reminiscent of the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock. You won't regret picking this one up now that it's available on DVD.

Charles McGraw plays edgy cop Walter Brown. His job is to protect a dead racketeer's wife, Mrs Neil (Marie Windsor) from the mob. She's a key witness in a grand jury probe, and also has a payoff list linking gang members to the LAPD. Most of the film's action takes place on board the train taking Brown and Neil to Los Angeles, where she will testify.In Mrs. Neil, played to perfection by Windsor, the queen of B movies, the tough talking, wise-cracking Brown meets his match. On the way to meet her, he glibly tells his partner, Gus Forbes that "She's the sixty cent special. Cheap. Flashy. Sticky poison under the gravy." When he and Forbes, both from Los Angeles, first meet her, she says, "How nice. How Los Angeles." Then looking Brown up and down, she snarls, "Sunburn wear off on the way?" My favorite wisecrack occurs after Brown has finally had enough of her wise remarks and lashes out, "You make me sick to my stomach." Her retaliation is a gem: "Well, use your own sink." Unlike the banter between Nick and Noira Charles of The Thin Man series, there's nothing the least sophisticated about the way Brown and Neil talk each other. Director Richard Fleischer uses inventive camera work, the sounds of the train rather than a music score, and the train's claustrophobic atomsphere to create and sustain tension. An RKO picture, The Narrow Margin is an unpretentious, taut low-budget thriller, a minor classic far superior to the 1990 Gene Hackman-Anne Archer remake.

The Narrow Margin is excellent. It's too bad more of our new directors have forgotten how to make a great film with a minimal budget, using instead inventive camera angles, good characters and dialog, and some surprises along the way. I really loved Marie Windsor as the mobster's wife who's going to LA to sing to the Grand Jury. She's one of the toughest broads I've ever seen! Charles McGraw does his standard tough cop role and turns in a performance that sets the standard by which all others are judged.

This is the original, and beats the heck out of the re-make.....

Trains have it all over ships and planes when it comes to creating a microcosm. On an airplane, everybody's crammed together; nobody can sneak on or leave (except by parachute or defenestration). An ocean liner has its private staterooms and public spaces, but, again, is an island, entire onto itself. But trains stop regularly to take on and disgorge passengers, and they run along their fixed and earthbound course, with windows looking out on rivers and highways, at big cities at high noon and small towns in the dead of night. And so they've always been the preferred vehicle for suspense, with countless thrillers using the rails as their setting. One of the tautest and most toothsome, in its modest, low-budget way, is Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin.

It opens in Chicago, where a pair of Los Angeles police detectives are to escort the widow (Marie Windsor) of a recently slain gang leader back to the coast to testify before a grand jury. She's a hard case (`a 60-cent special...poison under the gravy'), and guarding her is a dangerous job. Sure enough, one of the cops takes a fatal bullet in the stairway of her low-rent apartment house (she shows scant sympathy). Windsor's finally smuggled aboard the train, in a Pullman car's locked compartment adjoining that of her custodian Charles McGraw. Almost certainly, one or more mobsters followed her. It's up to McGraw to smoke them out before they kill Windsor, who knows too much. But he slowly learns that some vital information has been deliberately kept from him....

Fleischer makes inventive use of the jostling in the cramped passageways – and of the all but vanished rituals of club cars and dining cars. He packs the train with seasoned character actors, notable among them Jacqueline White, Paul (`Nobody loves a fat man') Maxie, and Don Beddoe. The closely worked script, by Earl Fenton (based on a novel by Martin Goldsmith, who also penned the original material for Detour), doesn't stint on gaudy patter for them to spout (it's a moveable feast of salty epigrams).

Best of all, The Narrow Margin offers the addictive Marie Windsor her meatiest role, showcasing her tough-gal talents. Rolling her huge and extraordinary eyes, she aims her exhaled smoke like a stream of deadly gas and hard-boils her lines into hand grenades (to McGraw: `This train's headed straight for the cemetery. But there's another train coming along – a gravy train. Let's get on it.'). It's one of Hollywood's more perplexing secrets why Windsor toiled exclusively, with the possible exception of her Sherry Peatty in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, in the B-movie ghetto. But she helped make that ghetto the liveliest part of Tinsel Town.

Fast, smart and tough. A real treat. Masterfully paced and scripted. Wow. Holds up very very well. This movie sucks you in from the opening credits and never lets go. It's also a bit of a mind game, with an interesting moral dilemma at its center and a beautiful plot twist towards the end. Nobody tells a hysterical dame to "shut up" quite like Charles McGraw and few femme fatales can blow cigarette smoke quite like Marie Windsor (who looks astonishingly like the present day actress Illeana Douglas). The two of them have great smoldering chemistry together. Richard Fleischer's direction is nearly flawless. A joy to watch. Can't wait to see it again. There's a lot going on in this one. By no means, a routine thriller.