Ross v Ross

Anyone turned on the TV lately?

It’s bloody awful out there, isn’t it? Critics who drone on about how we live in the golden age of television clearly haven’t switched one on in the last ten years or so.

I’m not talking about the endless options on streaming – which, lately, is its own problem – but the daily shovelling of crud you are fed if you are unlucky or, like me, stupid enough to try to find something to watch on terrestrial telly.

I was in Ireland earlier this month, where, secret payment scandals aside, viewers are lucky enough to have good old RTE. For those of you reading this in the UK, RTE is like BBC, only useful, and not totally beholden to the endless ream of sewing, repairing and masterchefing shite that is served up nightly.

This is because RTE has discovered that there are these things called… ‘films’. And that people might want to watch them during primetime hours in the middle of the week. And don’t get me started on Film4… showing Taken 3 once every fortnight does not make you a movie channel.

Either RTE1 or RTE2 had a film on every night when I was there, so I lapped up In The Name Of The Father for the first time in years (still brilliant, especially that moment when the late great Sinead O’Connor’s track kicks in), Official Secrets (am I the only one who loves Keira Knightley? Go watch The Duchess or Never Let Me Go if you still need convincing) and a wonderful little Irish movie called Herself, about a woman who builds a house in her elderly friend’s back garden (it sounds terrible but it’s actually great).

While Irish TV is a haven for movie lovers who like to stumble on to their film fare rather than scroll through Netflix for longer than it takes to watch what they eventually choose, in the UK it’s slim pickings on the old Freeview.

But then, out of the blue, on an August bank holiday Monday night, strides Gene fecking Hackman, on a little channel up in the number 30s or 40s called Legend. Now, I dunno what the hell Legend is, but I know I will be coming back to it.

That’s because it was showing a Gene Hackman movie at the blissfully ordinary time of 9pm.

The film in question was Narrow Margin, a 1990 thriller in which Hackman plays an assistant district attorney forced to chaperone a witness to a mob murder to safety on board a train hurtling through Canada. It’s like Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, but, you know, a real film.

As a bonus, it was also a Hackman film I had never heard of. That may be something to do with its lousy box office and middling, but fairly accurate, 6.6/10 rating on IMDb.

But who cares?! It has everyone in it – there’s Anne Archer, perhaps unfairly best known as the wife in Fatal Attraction and Patriot Games; there’s Harris Yulin, whose role here is a neat precursor to his memorable turn in the Frasier episode, A Word To The Wiseguy; there’s the late JT Walsh, the original ‘Hey! It’s that guy!’, who played memorable slimeballs in everything from Red Rock West (man, I need to watch Red Rock West again) to Breakdown and The Negotiator; and there’s M Emmet Walsh, who is simply in every great film ever made.

Narrow Margin is also the only film that has both JT Walsh and M Emmet Walsh, so, I mean, come on.

I won’t give away any of the plot – not that there’s much of one – but there is some brilliant in-camera action that still holds up three decades later.

Technically a remake of the 1952 movie The Narrow Margin, which writer/cinematographer/director Peter Hyams caught on TV late one night (wonder if he was watching RTE?), the 1990 version has some fighting stunt work that I genuinely preferred over the much-lauded, but, in my opinion, strangely flat, top-of-train sequence we got recently in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

On a side note, I did want to write here about the sadly disappointing time I had with Mission: Impossible 7, but I have a feeling I may be kinder to it on a repeat viewing.

I had known Hyams mainly as the director of the one good Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Timecop, and the very underrated Arnie v Gabriel Byrne’s devil flick, End Of Days, and Narrow Margin showcases his great flair for action.

And yet the film’s more quiet moments are the most memorable, as in almost all of the interaction between Hackman’s surly deputy DA and Archer’s tough publishing editor, as they inexplicably avoid the cardboard cutout bad guys while on the train, and in the wonderful opening blind date scene between Archer and JT Walsh, which pulls you right into the movie from the off.

It’s Hackman’s film, however, and he obviously enjoyed playing a lawyer, as he stayed in court for 1991’s Class Action (damn, when is that going to be on TV?) and 1993’s Cruise missile The Firm.

Narrow Margin definitely belongs up there in the pantheon of two-worded Gene Hackman films whose titles mean almost less than nothing, along with Under Fire, Uncommon Valor, Split Decisions, Extreme Measures, Absolute Power and Under Suspicion.

So if you are lucky enough to have Legend on your telly box, keep an eye on the TV timetable for when this train pulls back into the station.