Narrow Margin

Narrow Margin is a 1990 crime thriller film directed by Peter Hyams and released by TriStar Pictures, loosely based on the 1952 film noir The Narrow Margin. It tells the story of a Los Angeles deputy district attorney who attempts to keep a murder witness safe from hit men while traveling through the Canadian wilderness aboard a train. The film stars Gene Hackman and Anne Archer.

Plot

Carol Hunnicut (Anne Archer) goes out on a blind date set up by her friend, in a restaurant hotel in Los Angeles with Michael Tarlow (J. T. Walsh), a lawyer about whom she knows very little. When Tarlow receives a message during dinner to call a client, she accompanies him to his hotel suite while he makes the call. While she is in the bathroom, the client, gangster Leo Watts (Harris Yulin), arrives in person with one of his hit men, Jack Wootton (Nigel Bennett). Watts accuses Tarlow of stealing money from him. After a fearful Tarlow admits that he did, Watts tricks him with promise to spare his life, but lies and has Wootton shoot him to death. Carol witnesses Tarlow's admission that he stole the money and the murder itself from an adjacent room, but Watts and Wootton do not detect her. After they leave, she waits for almost an hour before fleeing the scene. Fearing for her life, Carol does not report the murder to the authorities.