The Narrow Margin

The Narrow Margin follows Charles McGraw’s tough-as-nails detective Walter Brown as he’s tasked with protecting a mob witness (Marie Windsor’s Frankie Neall) during a cross-country train ride, with complications inevitably ensuing as several assassins make their way aboard the locomotive and embark upon a methodical search for Windsor’s sassy figure. It’s a stripped-down premise that’s employed to watchable yet far-from-enthralling effect by director Richard Fleischer, as the filmmaker, working from a screenplay by Martin Goldsmith and Jack Leonard, delivers a deliberately-paced thriller that’s ultimately unable to sustain one’s interest for the duration of its short (yet somehow not short enough) running time of 71 minutes – with the film’s wheel-spinning midsection contributing heavily to its less-than-gripping atmosphere. There is, nevertheless, little doubt that The Narrow Margin does boast a small handful of admittedly captivating sequences, including a fairly riveting interlude in which a slick villain attempts to bribe McGraw’s straight-and-narrow figure into giving up Frankie. It’s clear, too, that the movie benefits from McGraw’s stirring performance and the ongoing emphasis on appreciatively hard-boiled bits of dialogue (eg Neall’s character is referred to as “cheap, flashy; strictly poison under the gravy”), while the comparatively spellbinding final stretch, which boasts an impressively unexpected twist, ensures that the whole thing concludes on a positive note – which cements The Narrow Margin‘s place as a passable noir effort that could (and should) have been so much better.

**1/2 out of ****