Verdict
Summary
An artfully directed and shot thriller from Peter Hyams, Narrow Margin is as thrilling today as it was when I saw it theatrically in 1990, and it’s aged remarkably well and holds up to the best the genre has to give. Kino Lorber has just reissued Narrow Margin onto a premium 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray combo package, and the picture quality is incredibly sharp and clear, up to the highest standards that modern technology has to offer.
Plot:
A witness to a murder is being hunted on a train, with her only hope of survival being a Deputy District Attorney who desperately tries to bring her to safety to testify.
Review:
Set up on a blind date, book editor Hunnicut (Anne Archer) meets her date, a high powered attorney (J.T. Walsh), in the lobby of a nice hotel where things go well until he invites her up to his room to take a phone call. While she’s freshening up in the bathroom, one of the attorney’s clients, a big-time gangster (Harris Yulin), stops by with a hitman and murders him while she observes from a corner of the room. Not realizing she’s there, they’ve left a huge loose end and a witness to the murder, and when a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney named Caulfield (Gene Hackman) realizes through careful, under-the-radar investigating that there was a witness to this crime that could put the untouchable gangster behind bars for life, he tracks Hunnicut down, but as soon as he reaches her, hitmen who’ve been tracking him to get to her show up and try to assassinate her. The two of them barely escape to a train headed through the wilderness of Canada, headed to Vancouver, and at least two assassins are also aboard, hunting them, not knowing what they look like. Caulfield carefully and skillfully must keep Hunnicut alive while even more hitmen board the train at various stops, and with time running out and nowhere to run, Caulfield’s chances at keeping his key witness unscathed and delivered to her destination narrow by the minute.
An artfully directed and shot thriller from Peter Hyams, Narrow Margin is as thrilling today as it was when I saw it theatrically in 1990, and it’s aged remarkably well and holds up to the best the genre has to give. Hackman gives a pretty physical performance (though he does get a stunt double for some of the key stunts scenes where his character crashes through windows or traverses the top of a speeding train), and Archer is solid as the witness running scared. Bruce Broughton composed the taut score, and the film was produced by the guys at Carolco. Hyams adapted the screenplay from the 1952 film of the same name.
Kino Lorber has just reissued Narrow Margin onto a premium 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray combo package, and the picture quality is incredibly sharp and clear, up to the highest standards that modern technology has to offer. Previously produced special features from the previous Blu-ray release include two audio commentaries (one by Hyams, another by a film historian), a making-of feature, a trailer, and some B-roll footage.
