Rent The Narrow Margin (1952)
3.8 of 5 from 81 ratings
1h 11min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Charles McGraw stars as Detective Walter Brown, a cop with a simple mission - get mobster's wife Frankie Neale (Marie Windsor) on the train and take her to the grand jury in Los Angeles, where she's going to testify against her late husband's colleagues. But the mob don't want her to spill the beans and they'll stop at nothing to stop her taking the stand; Brown realises they've planted assassins on the train with them and it's up to him to keep her safe. It's going to be one hell of a journey...
- Actors:
- Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Queenie Leonard, David Clarke, Peter Virgo, Don Beddoe, Paul Maxey, Harry Harvey, Gordon Gebert, Peter Brocco, Ivan Browning, George Chandler, James Conaty, Don Dillaway, Franklyn Farnum, Bess Flowers, Don Haggerty, Clarence Hargrave, Art Howard
- Directors:
- Richard Fleischer
- Producers:
- Stanley Rubin
- Writers:
- Earl Felton, Martin Goldsmith
- Studio:
- Odeon
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Thrillers
- Collections:
- All the Twos: 1902-62, Cinema Paradiso's 2022 Centenary Club, Remembering - A Special Spring Tribute: Part One, Remembering Gene Hackman, Top 10 Films About Trains: Thrillers, Top Films of 1990: Vol. 1
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- Not released
- Run Time:
- 73 minutes
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Reviews (2) of The Narrow Margin
A Whistlestop Ride - The Narrow Margin review by CH
Has there been a better jump-cut than the one from Marie Windsor vigorously filing her nails to a railway engine's going full pelt along the track?
This is but one of the many delights of the seventy minutes which find her - a gangster's widowed moll - aboard a train in the company of policeman Charles McGraw who is there to protect her from mobsters hellbent on preventing her from testifying before a Grand Jury and producing a list of top-notch firms implicated in widespread slayings and corruption.
A train always heightens drama, and there is no higher one than this masterpiece, directed by Richard Fleisher (whose memoirs are a fascinating read).
One could quote some of the fast and salty dialogue but it is better springing from the lips of the cast than this keyboard. A treat in store - however many times you watch it.
3 out of 3 members found this review helpful.
Cheap Ticket, First-Class Suspense - The Narrow Margin review by griggs
Seventy-one minutes, one train and apparently nowhere on Earth Charles McGraw can stand without looking like he’s about to arrest somebody. The Narrow Margin is what happens when a B-movie refuses to waste a single foot of track.
Richard Fleischer keeps recycling the same corridors and compartments, and somehow makes each one shrink a little more. Someone just squeezing past you in a carriage turns weirdly alarming — I found myself flinching at people opening doors. McGraw’s voice sounds quarried out of a mountain, pure gravel. Marie Windsor turns up looking like she’s wandered in from Central Casting wearing a sign reading NOIR WOMAN: TROUBLE, then spends the whole film gleefully justifying it.
The plot needs a couple of lucky coincidences, and it loses a little pressure once the big reveal lands. At barely over an hour, though, Fleischer never gives any of that enough room to matter.
Cheap ticket, first-class suspense — and Charles McGraw’s scowl alone looks load-bearing.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.