THE NARROW MARGIN (1952)

I watched this little (70 min.) film noir because it stars Marie Windsor, my Favorite Femme Fatale of the Fabulous Fifties (she and Sterling Hayden are the two whose movies I'll never pass up). She plays the widow of Frankie Neall, a big time mobster, who's on her way by train from Chicago to LA to testify before a grand jury. She's being guarded by LAPD Det. Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw), who knows that other mobsters are on that train, planning to kill her. Windsor is at her hard-boiled best and gets most of the many snappy lines in the script. (You thought Eileen Brennan wrote the book on Tough Dames? She's a den mother compared to Windsor.) McGraw is just as hard-boiled and plays his part convincingly with his gravelly voice and bent nose (he was a boxer), looking like a cross between Kirk Douglas and real-life tough guy Lawrence Tierney. Filming is brilliant in the deliberately claustrophobic confines of a train, and the supporting cast, especially Jacqueline White as a seemingly innocent mother, is superb. There are plenty of surprises and twists in the story. But, the plot is too improbable to be convincing--starting with having only one cop guarding a critical witness, and all the times that Brown abandons Neall to generate dramatic situations. I liked it a lot, but it's still a B-movie.