All Aboard! (Again)

Some movie buffs may get a sense of deja vu when “Narrow Margin” pulls into theaters on Friday. The Tri-Star release was inspired by a 1952 film of the same title, about a man and a woman (Gene Hackman and Anne Archer in the remake) attempting to flee danger by train, who become trapped when their stalker comes aboard.

But producer Jonathan Z. Zimbert tells us that’s where the similarities end, partly because of changing times.

When the original RKO film was made--directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor and Jacqueline White--rail travel was the norm. The script set the action aboard a Chicago-to-L.A. express.

But, asks Zimbert: “Who rides the train anymore?”

So, in the new version, the filmmakers devised a plot ploy making the train the only transportation available--then gave it a route across wilderness “so there’d be no place to get off.”

The train now journeys through the Canadian Rockies. The filmmakers toyed briefly with the idea of setting the train ride in Mexico. “But we found out that a lot of the riders are peasants, some of them transporting cattle and chickens,” says Zimbert. “Our characters wouldn’t exactly have blended in.”