Movie Details
| Title: | The Narrow Margin | |
| Director: | Richard Fleischer | |
| Year: | 1952 | |
| Genre: | Noir | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.04.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- The Don is Dead
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.04.06 | DVD | Another tight short noir (71 minutes) that takes wonderful advantage of its limited budget. Bulldogish Charles McGraw plays a cop assigned to escort a gangster's moll from Chicago to LA in order to testify. Pretty much the whole thing takes place on the train between cities, with Marie Windsor (who looks like that woman on The West Wing but 20 times hotter) hidden away in McGraw's side room, and several goons looking around the train for her, aware that McGraw's a cop but they don't know what Windsor looks like. Unfortunately, This other girl starts innocently talking to McGraw and the hitmen mistake her for the target. Tension ensues. It's pretty effective use of keeping all the players confined to limited space and forcing them to appear civil even though McGraw knows who the hitmen are and the hitmen know who McGraw is. There's a pretty cool fight scene at one point played near silently since a gunshot would disrupt the passengers and send the whole train into freak outs. Meanwhile, little plays involving telegrams and a mysterious car that keeps up with the train along a side road are also used to good effect. And then there's this little turn toward the end which works rather well. Solid noir. Good times. I actually probably could've used another 5 or 10 minutes at the end but whatever... |
