MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Narrow Margin’s’ Thrill Is During Its Train-Top Chase

“Narrow Margin”(selected theaters) is a rip-roaring movie if you like train chases--or smoke. If you like a growing attraction between consulting adults; nice, salty or even unsalty banter, or any sense of richness of character you’d be better off home with a good Hitchcock.

Peter Hyams is writer, director and cinematographer here, reworking Richard Fleischer’s 1952 B-movie suspense classic. In this, Carol Hunnicut (Anne Archer), a recently divorced publishing company editor with an off-screen young son, lets herself be fixed up on a blind date with hot-shot lawyer Michael Tarlow (J. T. Walsh).

In a decidedly marginal device for this day and age, he invites her up to his hotel suite, pre-dinner, while he picks up an important phone call and, wonder of wonders, she goes. It is a lovely suite; what it has in common with the movie’s other interiors, district attorneys’ workmanlike offices, club cars, tiny Canadian railroad stations or remote mountain cabins is that it’s filled with this darn smoke.

We probably have Ridley Scott to thank for the popularity of this effect, in movies like “The Duellists” or “Blade Runner” it made perfect sense. But “Narrow Margin” (rated R, apparently for violence) is nothing if not a hard-edge train thriller and to swathe it in so much atmospheric murk that audiences are going to suspect the premature arrival of cataracts seems counterproductive, at the very least.

Archer freshens up interminably in that hotel bathroom, enough for her date to be dispatched by his gangland associates and for her to witness it, unseen. Terrified, she leaves for a remote Canadian cabin, tracked by a resolute L.A. deputy district attorney, Robert Caulfield (Gene Hackman), determined to persuade her to come back and testify.

The cabin is less safe than anyone--but the audience--imagined it would be, and the chase is on. Hackman and Archer manage to get on a train winding through the spectacular Canadian Rockies, but so do two of the baddies. At least two, although just which one of the passengers or crew might also be involved is part of the suspense. The other part is that the mobsters still aren’t sure what Archer looks like, leading to possible confusion with another attractive passenger (Susan Hogan), desperate to pick up the unattached Hackman.

Hackman, who’s never without his wire-rimmed glasses nor his consummate, incorruptible professionalism as a D.A., dodges, distracts, shoots and even debates with the mobsters, led by the urbane, bearded James B. Sikking. There are few actors around better at steely small talk than Hackman, but what he can’t do is breathe a breath of life into his supposedly deepening conversations with Archer; it’s simply not there on the page. At one low level in script common sense, Hackman even appropriates a toy gun from a pint-size fellow passenger, coaxing the boy in a conversation that would have been overheard by everyone else in the sleeping car--villains included.

However, there is the train chase, and it’s a beaut. All very well in his action thrillers to have Sean Connery leaping from car to car--somehow that’s part of the territory. Hackman we’ve followed through some pretty hairy physical action, from Popeye Doyle on out. But Anne Archer is the quintessential us up there, riveted to the spot or looking sensibly terrified in some of the undoubled scenes on top of the train. This stuff is marvelous, and there isn’t a wisp of smoke in sight.

‘NARROW MARGIN’

A Tri-Star Pictures release of a Carolco Pictures production Producer Jonathan A. Zimbert. Executive producers Mario Kassar, Andrew Vajna. Director, screenwriter Peter Hyams, based on the RKO picture “Narrow Margin,” screenplay by Earl Felton Jr. from a story by Martin Goldsmith, Jack Leonard. Editor James Mitchell. Music Bruce Broughton. Sound Ralph Parker. Production design Joel Schiller, supervising art direction David Willson. Art directors Kim Mooney, Eric Orbom. Stunt coordination Glenn Wilder. Co-producer Jerry Offsay. With Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, James B. Sikking, J. T. Walsh, M. Emmet Walsh, Susan Hogan, Nigel Bennett.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (moderate violence).