The Narrow Margin

A film noir that takes place almost entirely on a train. The job given to detective Walter Brown looks simple: escort the widow of a murdered mob figure from Chicago to Los Angeles. She is going to testify, and the ledger she carries will bring the organisation down. The problem is that the other side is on the same train. All of the tension comes from the space: narrow corridors, people forced to squeeze past each other, adjoining compartments and voices heard through a door. Nobody can get away because the train does not stop. It was made as a low-budget studio picture, with no established star and a running time held to seventy-one minutes. Even so it is counted among the best examples of its genre and was Oscar-nominated for its story. Charles McGraw plays the detective and Marie Windsor the woman. Richard Fleischer directed. It was remade at the end of the 1980s. An economically constructed masterwork of its genre for anyone who likes noir and confined-space suspense. For a viewer expecting visual display, the production is small in scale and built entirely on dialogue and space.