Crime catches a train in director Peter Hyams’ high-speed thriller that serves as something of a hair-raising tour through the Canadian wilderness. A blind date goes bad when Carol Hunnicut’s (Anne Archer) would-be beau is murdered by the mob, making her the reluctant key witness for Robert Caulfield (Gene Hackman), a no-nonsense deputy district attorney. Soon, they’re on a train en route from Canada to the United States, desperately trying to elude the Mafia hit men sent to silence her; luckily, the duo have something of an advantage in this deadly game of cat and mouse, as the bad guys don’t know what their target looks like. “Narrow Margin” came about when Hyams was going through old films considered solid genre pieces (if not classics) that could possibly use an upgrade; he ultimately went with director Richard Fleischer’s 1952 film noir, “The Narrow Margin” (which featured the somewhat less picturesque journey of Chicago to Los Angeles). Hackman shares the same character name as Elliott Gould in Hyams’ “Capricorn One” (1977), named after the director’s old boss from his days working as a TV reporter. – IFC Staff
Narrow Margin
