There’s nothing less interesting than a film nerd raving about film noir, I suppose, but just when my sense of discovery is waning, and when I start to feel that I’ve seen the best and brightest of the noirs from the 40s and 50s, I stumble across one that’s simply terrific film, and proof of the joys of a well-scripted, well-shot 70-minute B movie. The Narrow Margin is such a film. The premise is clever enough: a mobster’s ex-wife is planning to testify and two police detectives are in charge of transporting her to LA. Only three men from a crime syndicate, who recognize the policemen but don’t know what the woman looks like, are out to kill her before she can make it there. A cat and mouse game ensues, one that in true noir form casts philosophical doubt on right and wrong, normalcy and disruption of social order.
Today, by the way, Matt Yglesias makes the claim that historical-political dramas should be based on moral ambiguity of the political issues itself:
one has to imagine that a cinematic depiction of those events that took a "moral clarity"-laden pro-Israel line would, in fact, be phenomenally boring. Such a story would, if fictional, just be regarded as pretty silly action movie fodder where the white hats hunt down a bunch of black hats. The only reason you might think the historical events were an appealing subject for a film would have to be that you thought there was something morally complicated about them.
As a statement against party line film criticism, his rejoinder to TNR movie critics is appreciated, and in fact a moral clarity thesis-film might well be boring. But it strikes me as a woefully narrow and New American Cinema-centric principle. If there’s anything instructive about noirs, it’s that one can invoke all sorts of narrative and moral complexity in the midst of a white hat vs. black hat story. On one hand, you have a proliferation of Maguffins: thrillers of all sorts use politics as a hook that’s quickly discarded. On the other hand, sometimes it’s not the historical event or political cause that’s complicated but the character’s psychology in relation to them. In The Narrow Margin, the rightness of Det. Sgt. Brown’s work is never in question, but the behavior of the DA’s office is. Furthermore, the syndicate stands in as subtle (?) allegory for machinations of capitalism itself. Brown acts not out of deep moral conviction, but because he gets paid to, just as the syndicate thugs are paid to do their work.
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