In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.
Dear Wife and I love older movies, especially the film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. Film noir means literally “black film,” and these are typically black & white crime dramas with lots of shadows that take place at night in the dark places of men’s and women’s hearts.
Things never turn out well for our anti-heroes and heroines, in large part because the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) said that criminals could never get away with their bad behavior – they always had to pay. In some of the movies we will look at in later editions of this series we’ll see that the writers and directors sometimes had to go to elaborate (and fascinating) lengths to come up with an ending that would satisfy both audiences and the Code rules.
This time I’d like to talk about one of our favorites from our year of movies:
The Narrow Margin, 1952, directed by Richard Fleischer; starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor and Jacqueline White. We saw it, as we so often do, on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley program with an introduction and afterword from host Eddie Muller, one of the leading writers on noir.
Narrow Margin is the story of an LAPD detective sergeant who is assigned to protect a mob boss’s widow who is traveling by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify in a trial. Throughout the movie the detective, his colleagues, and the widow are all menaced by assassins who will do anything to stop her from testifying. If you are going to watch this movie, don’t do any digging about the plot before watching. You don’t want to spoil any of the numerous twists and turns it takes.
The film goes at a breakneck pace, with much of the action taking place within the narrow confines of a transcontinental train. It also moves quickly because it has a running time of only 71 minutes – impossible to believe today in this age of bloated, over-long movies. Narrow Margin was considered a “B movie” with a low budget, fast shoot, and a cast of relative unknowns, but it rises above its humble roots to be one of the most exciting movies we saw in 2021.
In March of this year Dear Wife and I also got to see the 1990 remake of The Narrow Margin by thriller director Peter Hyams; starring Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, James B. Sikking, J.T. Walsh and M. Emmet Walsh. The plot is roughly the same as the 1952 original, but it’s moved up north with much of the action taking place in the Canadian Rockies. Although the movie bombed in the box office, we still thought it was a lot of fun. And with a 97-minute run-time, it mostly maintains the tight pace of the original.
Coming up next: 8, 10, 39!