Richard Fleischer

THE NARROW MARGIN: murderous hide and go seek on a train

by
Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
Photo caption: Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN

The overlooked film noir masterpiece The Narrow Margin (1952) is a taut 71 minutes of tension. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target. It’s on my list of Overlooked Noir, and it’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, November 27 – set your DVR.

McGraw plays a cop assigned to protect a gangster’s widow on her way to testify against the mob. He immediately loses his partner to an ambush and will have to protect his cargo all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles by himself. His only edge is that the hit men don’t know what his target looks like.

The Narrow Margin has two very special elements. The first is the hardboiled dialogue between McGraw and Windsor and their performances. The second is director Richard Fleisher’s imaginative staging of the woman-hunt up and down the tight corridors and compartments of the train.

The screenplay is easily the best of veteran Earl Felton’s career, and he was nominated for an Oscar for this B picture. When McGraw, still in shock, reflects on the sudden death of his longtime partner, Windsor hisses, “Some protection they send me – an old man who walks right into it and a weeper”. McGraw resents having anything to do with her: “Sister, I’ve known some pretty hard cases in my time, but you make ’em all look like putty”. Later he snarls, “He’s dead and you’re alive. Some exchange.” But they’re both trapped together, and they’re not the kind to make the best of it – the great lines just keep coming: “Relax, Percy, I wouldn’t want any of that nobility to rub off on me”.

The Narrow Margin opens with trench coats and fedora, cigarettes and shadowed faces; when there’s gunfire, we know for sure that we’re in a noir. But then Fleischer moves it all onto the train, and we hear the sound from railroad airbrakes. Fleischer makes an early use of handheld cameras to maneuver around the tight spaces. There’s an especially innovative moment when a fight breaks out in a cramped train restroom – the bottom of a shoe flies up to camera level, then we’re under the sink as head is banged into wall.

The cast is uniformly good. I especially like David Clarke as a (gay?) hit man and Paul Maxey as a very fat traveler who keeps blocking the narrow corridors.

Of course, this is all fifty years before cell phones, and there’s a retro lo-tech moment where a slow-moving train leaves a message via hook to be wired.

Fleischer was a very versatile (and underrated director). When he shot The Narrow Margin, he was a 35-year-old rising director. The Narrow Margin was his sixth noir in five years. After The Narrow Margin, he moved to epics (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Vikings, Barabbas). He later made one of the very best WW II movies, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the ahead-of-its-time dystopian sci-fi cult favorite Soylent Green. He even made the second Schwarzenegger Conan movie. His noir body of work (Bodyguard, Follow Me Quietly, Trapped, Armored Car Robbery, His Kind of Woman) is impressive, and, in my opinion, The Narrow Margin is his masterpiece.

The Narrow Margin plays frequently on Turner Classic Movies. It’s available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.  (Don’t confuse it with the inferior 1990 remake, Narrow Margin.)

xxxx
Director Richard Fleischer’s use of reflection

VIOLENT SATURDAY: desert noir in De Luxe color

by

VIOLENT SATURDAY
VIOLENT SATURDAY

Richard Fleischer is one of my favorite directors, but I was unfamiliar with his Violent Saturday (1955) until the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller programmed it for the 2017 Noir City film festival.  Unusual for 1950s noir, it’s filmed in glorious CinemaScope and De Luxe color on location in the bright desert of Bisbee, Warren and Lowell, Arizona.

Three hoods spend a few days casing a bank in a remote mining town.  The movie doesn’t center as much on the actual heist as on the characters of the robbers and the townspeople.  The smug leader of the gang is Stephen McNally (Dutch Henry Brown in Winchester ’73).  The nasty, edgy guy who hates kids and uses an inhaler is played by Lee Marvin with inhaler.  J. Carroll Naish plays the no-nonsense crime veteran in the crew.

The townspeople are:

  • The sensitive mine manager (Victor Mature);
  • The self loathing alcoholic mining heir (Richard Egan), besotted with his straying wife (Margaret Hayes);
  • The timid bank manager and nighttime peeper (Tommy Noonan);
  • The town hottie (Virginia Leith);
  • The Amish farmer (Ernest Borgnine in full Amish beard!); and
  • The librarian with a practical approach to her money troubles (veteran Sylvia Sidney).

Unfortunately, the dialogue in Violent Saturday is pretty lame and often downright soapy: “I’ve been cheap and rotten but I’ve always loved you” and “please leave me alone for a while – I don’t want you to see me cry”.  And the ending ties everything up a little too neatly – including for the peeping tom.

But the cast did the best they could with the characters, especially McNally.  Virginia Leith is a silky and sensuous presence; her career died just a year after Violent Saturday when she wasn’t renewed by Fox (per IMDb); she’s now best known for playing the disembodied Jan in the Pan in the cult fave The Brain that Wouldn’t Die.

Violent Saturday was Richard Fleischer’s fourth film after his noir masterpiece, The Narrow Margin.  Indeed, the best thing about Violent Saturday is Fleischer’s expert direction. You can tell that this isn’t by-the-numbers directing when we see the shots of the robbers casing the bank, the dancing in the bar, when the hoods approach Amish with guns drawn and, especially, when the peeper edges past the hottie in the drug store.

[Here’s one thing that confused me about the title: the robbery takes place during regular business hours, and in the 1950s, banks were not open on Saturdays.  Maybe the robbery was on Friday and the final shootout is the next day?  Help me here somebody.]

Violent Saturday is available to stream on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: HIS KIND OF WOMAN – he knows the deal is too good

by

HIS KIND OF WOMAN
HIS KIND OF WOMAN

Here’s a selection from my list of Overlooked Noir – His Kind of Woman. Robert Mitchum plays a down-and-out gambler who is offered a deal that MUST be too good to be true; he’s smart enough to be suspicious and knows that he must discover the real deal before it’s too late. He meets a on-the-top-of-the-world hottie (Jane Russell), who is about to become down on her luck, too.

They are stuck in the confines of a Mexican beach resort with a full complement of shady characters, played by noir standard-carriers Charles McGraw, Jim Backus and Philip Van Zandt. And there’s the star of movie swashbucklers (Vincent Price), who is hiding out from his unhappy marriage. Tim Holt (Treasure of the Sierra Madre) shows up as another guy who isn’t what he seems. And, anchored just offshore, is the ruthless Italian crime lord (Raymond Burr at his most pitiless).

What makes this a noir classic is the complete amorality of the very sympathetic Mitchum and Russell characters. They’re not bad people, but they are playing the hands that they have been dealt. Neither questions the justice of their situations – they don’t feel sorry for themselves, they just deal with it. And they don’t worry about sleeping around or breaking a few laws if they have to. They may not be lucky, but they are determined to survive.

Reportedly, studio owner Howard Hughes fired the director John Farrow and replaced him with noir-master Richard Fleischer (Cry Danger).

His Kind of Woman plays on Turner Classic Movies and is also available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.