The Narrow Margin

Shot in just 12 days in 1952, Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin is a brilliant and exciting film noir.  Set on a train, the movie's title is atmospherically meaningless (film noir have names as interchangeable as the titles of Ozu pictures) -- but the notion of "narrow" is integral to the film's plot and staging.  Fleischer keeps everything as tight as can be.  A fat man's girth as he blocks train corridors is a central plot feature.  For an hour of the film's 71 minute length, the action is confined to the interior of a train speeding cross-country.  Fights are staged in tiny washrooms, places so small that, in one sequence, a figure flailing about actually kicks the camera. There's a gunfight with combatants firing at one another at a range of two paces and, in the film's final shot, the surviving characters liberated from the train, nonetheless, remain trapped in a tight corridor -- instead of using the city sidewalk to reach the Grand Jury room in the Courthouse, the characters slink through a narrow underground tunnel.  It's all obsessive and claustrophobic -- Fleischer doesn't use very many close-ups because he knows that shots of this kind are, paradoxically, expansive:  a face is a landscape and a close-up can open the picture up into a vista of eyes and lips and mouth that seems to burst the limits of the film.  Accordingly, Fleischer opts for extremely tight two and three-shots, characters arranged on the screen in close-packed diagonals, or jammed together in tiny sleeper cars.  There's no music in the film; the action is scored to the panting, throbbing, clanging rhythm of the train itself.

The best action films emerge from a simple, mythic plot:  in The Narrow Margin, two cops are dispatched to escort a murdered gangster's moll from Chicago to LA.  The woman is in possession of some sort of list that is explained once and, then, serves as the MacGuffin generating the narrative.  Various bad guys want the list and are willing to kill to get it.  After a tense opening in which the hero's partner is gunned down, the surviving cop and the dead mobster's dame board the cross-country train.  Three killers follow them and, for the rest of the film, the cop and his adversaries play cat-and-mouse on the speeding train.  This simple and satisfying plot is complicated by a couple of plot twists, one of which is truly staggering.  The bad guys try to bribe the cop, who turns out to be incorruptible, and, then, the mayhem begins.  The cross-country adventure involves encounters with a huge fat man, a figure who shows up at the most inopportune times to block corridors or slow pursuits and escapes, as well as typical, perky 50's housewife who is traveling to LA with her annoying and noisy seven year old and another older woman.  The film nods in the direction of a romantic relationship between the hero and the housewife, always shown in white, and there is also a suggestion that, perhaps, the protagonist will warm to the brutally cynical, bad girl, the mobster's wife who slinks around the train half-naked in black lingerie.  (She does her best to seduce the hero.) The gun moll is spectacularly vicious and heartless, smoking chain cigarettes, and amusing herself by lolling in her bunk listening to jazz music on a little phonograph.  She is so wicked as to be a caricature, but exudes raw sex appeal.  Perhaps, unfortunately, the film proceeds at such a breakneck pace that there's really no time for romance to flower.

SPOILER ALERT! -- I'm about to reveal plot twists central to the film:  Richard Fleischer was the son of the great Max Fleischer, the animator who invented Popeye, Betty Boop and Koko the clown, as well Superman.  Richard Fleischer directs with crazy conviction and he keeps the film accelerating while always maintaining adherence to the rules of the film -- once on the train, we stay on the train.  Thus, a penultimate scene in which some bad guys rendezvous with a car that his been speeding along parallel to the train and, then, are captured by the Highway Patrol is shot from the back of the train -- as the train pulls away, we see the gunman meet his confederates in the sedan and, then, watch as police cars surround the bad guys and arrest them:  all of this immaculately staged in a pool of light that recedes from us as the train picks up speed.  (The geometry of other shots is mind-boggling -- to show what is happening, Fleischer has sequences engineered around what people can see in mirrors or reflected in window panes.  The film is a very system of reflecting surfaces -- a velvet light trap.)  The film's sheer velocity, however, creates holes in the plot that a couple lines of dialogue could fix -- but the movie moves forward without giving the audience some of the information required to process the plot.  The gun moll turns out to be a Chicago city cop from the vice squad and her exaggerated world-weary cynicism is just play-acting -- although it's play-acting with bizarre conviction; the gun-moll is enjoying herself with her cruel asides a little too much.  The pale lady in white turns out to be the gangster's actual wife -- a plot point foreshadowed early in the movie.  To make this plausible, the audience needs a tiny bit of backstory -- someone has accused the hero-cop of corruption and, of course, the fake gun-moll is trying to test the cop's virtue:  this is why we see her listening so ardently when the thugs try to bribe him on the train.  In other words, the fake gangster's wife is trying to implement some sort of perverse internal affairs investigation into the integrity of the hero.  To make this clear, and believable, we need a couple sentences in the dialogue about the fact that someone has made an unjust accusation of corruption against the hero.  In a modern remake of the film, the list of names harbored by the gangster's widow would include the several high-ranking police officers and, at the end, we would learn that the cops who appear to rescue the hero and the widow are, in fact, colluding with the villains and that everyone wants to the widow (and her MacGuffin list) to disappear.  This is a bow to modern cynicism -- in the 1952 film, the corruption doesn't go that deep and, in the final shot, the hero and the gangster's widow, now redeemed by her cooperation with the Court system, are walking down a tunnel toward the courthouse, a presumably happy outcome.