Noir Watch: The Narrow Margin (1952)

Watched:  04/06/2025

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Richard Fleischer/ William Cameron Menzies

I've only mentioned this movie twice on the blog from what I can tell.  Once in 2010, and once in 2018.  That seems nuts, because I'm sure this was more like the 5th or 6th time I'd seen The Narrow Margin (1952).  

Personally, I love this movie.  I'm shocked I didn't get to it during the podcast.  I think SimonUK and I talked about double-billing it with the Gene Hackman-starring remake, which I still haven't seen.

The movie is pretty straightforward.  It's an RKO flick, so it's a bit more rough and tumble, a bit sexier and sassier, and the sense of danger a bit higher.  There's a whole backstory to the movie that stars Howard Hughes being out of his mind and thinking Jane Russell should really be in everything and also not getting how his own movies work.  You can look it up.  Today is not the day I make this a film history blog.

A police detective played by the lantern-jawed Charles McGraw has to get the widow of a mob-boss from Chicago to Los Angeles, starting at a safe-house and making it to the train.  But they know there are hired guns out to get her.  McGraw has to sniff them out on the train, and accidentally involves a young mother and her son travelling on the same train - maybe making the assassins target them instead. 

There are innumerable highlights.  

Let me cut to the chase and say:  the primary highlight in this film is Marie Windsor being astoundingly acerbic while managing to be tremendously sexy at the same time (I will work this out on my own time).  But, holy smokes, is she all right in this movie.  

I feel like stills undersell Windsor, so here's a clip:

McGraw is the apotheosis of the noir cop in this movie - tough as hell, raggedy with a moral center, and containing his own brutal violence.  And, of course, torn between his Freudian concepts of good girls and bad girls.  

There's a fight in a train bathroom in this movie that is *wild*.  It's intensely violent for a movie from this era.  

I'm not sure there's anything subtle or particular deep in this film.  It's all pretty surface level, but it's a lot of fun to watch.  It also runs about 71 minutes.