The Narrow Margin 1952 Why Isn't This Film Better Known?

 

One of the heartaches of being a fan of Golden Age movies is that there are only so many Golden Age movies. When you get to be my age you've seen most of the ones worth seeing. And it's more than that. I was introduced to Golden Age Hollywood movies by watching a small, black-and-white TV in my crowded family childhood home. No one told me that Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" was the granddaddy of all romantic comedies, or that Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were trading barbs penned by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon and directed by George Cukor, all behind-the-scenes legends. I didn't realize that John Ford was, well, John Ford. Or Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges or Cecil B. DeMille were who they were.

 

I just knew I liked old movies. I could turn on TV at one in the afternoon, or 4:30, or 11:30 p.m., and there'd be some movie that I'd never seen that would mesmerize me.

 

That magic. Of having no expectations whatsoever and seeing the filibuster scene from "Mr. Smith" or the escape-by-waterfall scene from "Unconquered" and just being wowed – I haven't had that experience in years because it's been a really long time since I've seen a Golden Age film about which I knew absolutely nothing.

 

I ventured back into the Wayne Public Library for the first time since late winter, 2020. They shut down for a long while, and then they were only servicing Wayne residents.

 

I walked up and down the DVD shelves searching a movie I'd never heard of. I found one. "The Narrow Margin." I looked at the DVD box. "Starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, and Jacqueline White." I had never heard of any of those actors. Directed by Richard Fleischer. No idea who he was. Earl Felton wrote the screenplay. Again, no idea. This was virgin terrain. Had I never heard of it because it wasn't any good? Wait, what's this? Audio commentary by William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection"? Wow. I think I found my drug of choice.

 

I want people to seek out and watch "The Narrow Margin" so I won't say too much about it in this review. Someone called it "The Best B Movie Ever Made," and that's accurate. This movie knocked my socks off. It is a B movie. You can see that it's low budget, with actors who aren't big stars. But it is so close to perfect it deserves to be much better known.

 

"The Narrow Margin" is a film noir. It is black and white. Many key scenes take place at night. There are hard men with hot guns. There are beautiful dames with sordid pasts. There are brushes with overwhelming forces of evil. Everyone is a fast talker and you just wish you could talk like they do. I have no use for "Talk like a pirate" day but "Talk like a film noir character" day would thrill me. There are a couple of shooting deaths. But the film is so stylized that the violence is bearable.

 

The bare bones of the plot: a cop is escorting a mobster's widow to grand jury testimony. They are traveling by train, and menace lurks. There is no music soundtrack. The train itself provides semi-musical accompaniment.

 

From the very first scene, I was thrilled. The lighting, the acting, the set design, the dialogue, were all perfect exemplars of noir. Charles McGraw, an actor I'd never even heard of, was granite-faced, hyper masculine, embittered, and a cross between straight-and-narrow decent cop and man ready to be tempted by Satan's proffered hand.

 

I'm really sorry I'd never heard of Marie Windsor before. Her performance as the mobster's widow was Academy-Award worthy. She's kind of a street, worldly version of Scarlett O'Hara's dark side. Knowing, powerful, cynical, sexy. She meets a man and blows smoke in his face, an act both erotic and contemptuous. He says she nauseates him; she snaps "Use your own sink."

 

McGraw and Windsor have insane chemistry. All they do is insult each other. There is never a non-hostile look or word or gesture. And yet you just know that they would tear each other's clothes off if only the movie would let them.

 

There is a truly evil character who does a truly evil thing and I don't want to spoil the scene for you. Let's just say this character extends the same style of invitation that the snake extended in the Garden of Eden. This character pretends to be utterly harmless and defenseless, and only interested in the wellbeing of the man he is trying to seduce. But he's inviting his victim into a world of corruption, filth, degradation, shame, and regret. The scene floored me. Evil is so rarely done well onscreen. It's either too deadpan or too melodramatic. This was just accurate. Evil is often quiet, polite, making only the tiniest of demands of us (at first), and it appears to be taking care of us.

 

Paul Maxey, a very plump actor, uses his girth to excellent effect in suspenseful, claustrophobic, train hallway scenes. You can't tell if he is a bad guy acting ingratiating, or a good guy acting suspicious that the other is the real bad guy.

 

The chase scene in "The French Connection" is considered to be one of the best movie chase scenes. In the voiceover narration, Friedkin said that "The Narrow Margin" inspired the chase scene in "The French Connection." In "The Narrow Margin," a car chases a train, just like in "The French Connection."

 

Friedkin also pointed out that in film noir, the actors were never the drop-dead gorgeous type; rather, they were people you could pass in the street and not be distracted by. If a matinee idol like Errol Flynn passed you by, or a great beauty like Ingrid Bergman, you'd notice. But even though Charles McGraw had rugged good looks, and Marie Windsor had huge eyes and a model's figure, their level of attractiveness was more that for a normal person.

 

I'm going to say one thing about this movie that I wish were different, and to do that I have to reveal a spoiler. If you want to be as surprised by his movie as I was, and I hope you do, you should not read the following spoiler comment.

 

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

 

Marie Windsor is the fast-talking, sexy, slightly ominous mobster's widow. Except she's not. It's revealed later in the film that she's not the mobster's widow at all, but a Chicago police officer being used as a decoy, to protect the real mobster's widow. She's also spying on Charles McGraw, to see if he'll accept bribes from mobsters. In short, she's a hero.

 

The movie betrays her. Close to the end of the film, mobsters break into her train compartment, slap her around, and shoot her dead. And she is never mentioned again. This is so wrong. She's a heroic cop and deserves honor by the script. In fact I'd rewrite the script so that she doesn't die; but for that to happen, she'd have to save herself from the mobsters, and film noir is a male genre, and it has room for male heroes, but not a woman hero who would overshadow Charles McGraw.