The Narrow Margin (1952) – DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Don Beddoe
screenplay by Earl Felton
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Narrow Margin is the kind of minor classic that makes a few of the major ones look puny. Possessing a careful, Artful Dodger deviousness, the film pulls the rug out from under you before you even notice it was there–it refuses to waste time on speeches or showboating and simply gets down to the business of blowing your expectations right out of the water. It's also a strangely affirmative noir in its insistence on overturning surfaces to see the individual beneath the bluster, a testament to the cleverness and thoughtfulness of screenwriter Earl Felton. If Felton's efforts lean more towards chamber piece than grandiose masterwork, he's still clever enough to suck you in and unpretentious enough not to pat himself on the back for this triumph of art over budget.

Det. Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) is the conduit for this exploration in appearance-busting, which starts with his distaste for gangster's moll Mrs. Neall (Marie Windsor). The recently-widowed Mrs. Neall is the subject of much attention, as she's about to be transported from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she will testify against a raft of criminals. But she's rather recalcitrant, utterly callous, and completely uninterested when Brown's partner Forbes (Don Beddoe) dies in the crossfire before they've escorted her out of the building. Thus Brown is peeved to have to babysit her, especially since there's a golden-haired mother Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White) on board to distract him. In a perfect world, the moll would be expendable and the mother would have his undivided attention.

But the film does two things to frustrate Brown. The first is to constantly force him to protect someone we might consider unworthy of protection: a whiny, coarse, self-interested woman who insists that circumstances alone led her to help. Not only does Brown hate his beneficiary, he's also got to submerge his own identity to assist her–meaning he can't speak plainly to Sinclair's suspicious son, or be friendly to kindly fat man Sam Jennings. The second, however, is to ensure that nobody actually plays the part they've copped to–everybody has a secret identity, including Brown, and so it becomes that much harder to simply communicate or seek assistance when the thugs show up. Hell, in The Narrow Margin, is other people.

It really wouldn't be cricket to reveal the surprises that make this film special, but I can say that it's a skillful deployment of writerly details cleanly presented by journeyman director Richard Fleischer. Movies can no longer pull off a line like "Nobody loves a fat man–except his grocer and his tailor," and they've definitely lost the ability to bring a huge number of character threads together without streamlining it into incoherence. The kind of ingenuity shown in The Narrow Margin has been lost for American cinema, and though it isn't the pinnacle of film craft, it demonstrates curiosity and an ability to think on its feet. The picture doesn't want to tell you how good it is–it's content to merely demonstrate it to the best of its ability.

THE DVD
Warner takes that rare tumble in their catalogue career with the DVD release of The Narrow Margin (available individually or as part of the studio's five-disc "Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 2"), whose full-frame image is unfortunately bedevilled by compression artifacts, which, while not exactly running rampant, still detract from an image that's otherwise creditable in terms of detail and definition. (The print also has a couple of minor specks on it–nothing terribly debilitating.) The Dolby 1.0 mono audio is generally better, if not quite as sharp as many a Warner title has led one to expect. As for extras, there's a yak-track with William Friedkin that's more fanboy gush than genuine meat: he says the most obvious things about film noir despite being asked to remark on a title that only a noir fancier would really know about; The Narrow Margin cries out for a more esoteric commentator. Excerpts featuring Fleischer pop up occasionally, though they're relatively few and rather vague regardless. Rounding out the package: the film's trailer.

71 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner