Category: Articles

A very enjoyable B thriller from a crew with strong film noir credentials. Director, Richard Fleischer, is ably supported by cameraman, George E. Diskant, and the movie features a strong cast of b-liners, with the tough Charles McGraw and the exciting Marie Windsor in the leads. A nice plot twist propels the tension to the end. From the dramatic opening credits of a train screeching through the night, The Narrow Margin, has you hooked.

One of the best on-a-train thrillers, this movie starts off in noir mood but develops into a smart thriller with few noir pretensions. The direction is sharp, the dialog snappy, and the cast top-notch. The early night scenes before the action switches to a train trip from Chicago to LA, are brilliantly filmed and edited, with stark lighting and shadows, and low angles.

On the train, tension is heightened by judicious cuts to the steaming train running aggressively from right to left across the screen. There is a nice piece of montage worthy of Eisenstein half-way through the trip which gives a cut to the train even added tension: the action cuts from Marie Windsor frantically filing her nails to the churning wheels of the steam engine.

For me this film is all about Marie Windsor as the dame in trouble scrapping with her cop protector. She dominates every scene with her aura of sex, excitement, and nervous fear. Her great lines are delivered flawlessly with great rolling of her incendiary eyes and almost always with a cigarette in her mouth or hand. You don’t want this vixen to leave the screen.

She is brutally bumped off towards the end, and to my exasperation is never alluded to again. This cheapens the rest of the story for me, because she is the one character who is exposed to the most danger, and merits the greatest kudos. To be simply forgotten is almost misogynistic.

This weakness aside, the closing scenes are classic compositions which accentuate the escape from the claustrophobia of the train while remaining on the “straight and narrow”:

Boomerang, an early movie from director, Elia Kazan, is famous for its then innovative quasi-documentary style. Based on a true story, it is a sharp and well-acted film where a small-town DA in a novel reversal of role determines the innocence of a troubled WW2 vet wrongly charged with murder. The movie feels dated but the story of integrity in the face of political corruption and police expediency remains strong.

How others have classified this picture as a noir has me stumped. Yes, the accused is a war veteran struggling to catch up in the “parade of life” after 5 years in the army, but this is peripheral and does not a film noir make.

I caught up with Detour (1945) today, and must say I think director, Edgar G. Ulmer, is taking us for a a ride. The whole affair is hard to take seriously. The story of a guy so dumb he blames fate for the consequences of his own foolishness. Though fun to watch is Ann Savage, asVera, the street-wise dame, who incredulously falls for the sap. A camp oddity, but hardly serious noir.

I am very ambivalent about Detour. I can see the craft and that it is unlike any other Hollywood film of the period, but the story is so sappy that it irks. The story is based on the pulp novel by Martin M. Goldsmith, and the plot is essentially lifted straight from the book, which is pretty naif and while having a certain charm epitomises cheap pulp.

Ann Savage’s portrayal of Vera is memorable . She is no femme-fatale, she is a dame on the skids and desperate for any scheme to get here out of the hole she is in, and by the way she is dying, and knows it. She is not from hell. She is tough but she is also a woman. She does not ‘make’ Haskell but scrapes the skin off his hands with her fingernails when he gets fresh. She is vulnerable and needs love as much as the next dame. Look at when we see her on the highway hitching for a ride, and then in the scene in the hotel room just before she dies. The woman is tainted yes, but she has an integrity that shines through the cheap bravado.  My poem for Vera is here Vera: No Detours.

Another issue. To understand Hollywood noir you have to understand b-movies. I love to quote Jean Renoir on this. In the book, The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut by Wheeler Dixon (Indiana University 1993), there is an interesting section that deals with the obvious influence on Truffaut of Hollywood b-movies, particularly film noir. According to Dixon, Truffaut and even his mentor, Jean Renoir, preferred b-features over a-productions.

In a 1954 interview, Renoir was quite emphatic:

“I’ll say a few words about Val Lewton, because he was an extremely interesting person; unfortunately he died, it’s already been a few years. He was one of the first, maybe the first, who had the idea to make films that weren’t expensive, with ‘B’ picture budgets, but with certain ambitions, with quality screenplays, telling more refined stories than usual. Don’t go thinking that I despise “B” pictures; in general I like them better than big, pretentious psychological films they’re much more fun. When I happen to go to the movies in America, I go see “B” pictures. First of all, they are an expression of the great technical quality of Hollywood. Because, to make a good western in a week, the way they do at Monogram, starting Monday and finishing Saturday, believe me, that requires extraordinary technical ability; and detective stories are done with the same speed. I also think that “B” pictures are often better than important films because they are made so fast that the filmmaker obviously has total freedom; they don’t have time to watch over him.”

This is where the skill and artistry of Ulmer’s Detour are to be found.