The Tall Target

We were surprised to read that this exciting, superior thriller was not a box office success, and in fact flopped. Maybe some inexplicably negative reviews are to blame. Bosley Crowther led the attack, panning the thriller plotwork and dismissing the show outright for not sticking 100% to historical fact. Since when had Hollywood films been accurate with their history?  We are tempted to theorize that reviewers in 1951, the hottest year for the HUAC blacklist crackdown on Hollywood, were particularly harsh on any film with even a vaguely liberal viewpoint.

The suspense thrills of The Tall Target play out in the U.S. just before Lincoln’s inauguration. The nation is divided into furious political camps, and the President-elect Abe Lincoln may be the most hated man in America. Several states have already seceded from the Union and troops are being moved about in an attempt to quell violent protests. Southern interests claim that the election was a fraud, and that ‘their’ President is Jefferson Davis. Open war is being talked about seriously.

In other words, this show now feels 100% topical — scary topical. A divided, non-functioning union with an insecure future:  Check.  Insurrectionist conspiracies afoot:  Check.  An election contested as a rigged, fraudulent:  Check.  The attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate by high-powered rifle, narrowly avoided:  Check.

The taut screenplay invents the particulars of a plot to shoot Lincoln in Baltimore. But some of the story is real. A New York police agent named John Kennedy (!) was tasked with protecting President-Elect Abraham Lincoln just prior to his inauguration. That was a difficult assignment in a country about to be torn in two and plunged into a Civil War. A cross section of railroad passengers reflect the jittery mood. Civilians and officials joke that Honest Abe getting shot dead might be a good thing, and some of them are only half-joking. How a movie made in 1951 can be more relevant today, we honestly don’t know.

America’s Civil War is only 7 weeks away. 

The unusually intense proceedings begin in New York. NYPD detective John Kennedy (Dick Powell) has detected a threat to Abraham Lincoln, who is scheduled to speak in Baltimore before his impending inauguration in Washington. But police superior Simon Stroud (Tom Powers) scoffs at Kennedy’s report, and refuses to assign more security for the President-elect’s upcoming train trip to Washington. Kennedy quits outright, and hops a midnight train south. His direct attempts to warn Lincoln’s people are thwarted by telegraph problems.

Once on the train John Kennedy realizes that his partner, another detective, has been murdered. A leering thug (Leif Erickson) has stolen Kennedy’s identity papers, his gun and his train ticket. Only the intervention of another passenger, a newly-minted Army Colonel (Adolph Menjou) prevents conductor Crowly (Will Geer) from booting Kennedy off the train. Various passengers express strong sentiments pro- and anti- Lincoln regarding secession and slavery. Kennedy’s attention soon focuses on South Carolinan Army officer Lance Beaufort (Marshall Thompson), a hothead who has quit West Point to join Jefferson Davis’s pending rebellion. He is accompanied by his sister Ginny (Paula Raymond). Their maid Rachel, a slave (Ruby Dee), wants to tell John Kennedy something… perhaps that Lance is carrying a fancy rifle with a new-fangled telescopic sight?

The Tall Target is another in a series of excellent thrillers from director Anthony Mann, then making his name as one of Hollywood’s hottest new talents. In three years with MGM Mann had made the noirs  Border Incident,  Side Street and the ‘noir’ western  Devil’s Doorway, plus second-unit work on spectacular scenes for  Quo Vadis. Mann was loaned out to Paramount and Universal for two more ‘dark’ westerns,  The Furies and the phenomenally successful  Winchester ’73  (Coming from Criterion in January).  Mann’s gritty style is very much in evidence. The story is told with great economy, and camera angles are always dynamic, even in the cramped confines of an 1861 passenger train.

The director’s signature can also be read in the film’s touches of extreme-for-the-time violence. In Mann’s earlier  Raw Deal a killer tries to impale a man’s face on the antlers of a stuffed deer’s head; in The Tall Target John Kennedy holds a villain’s head on a railroad track as the train is starts to roll.  ↑  Another man shoots a sleeping victim point-blank in the face, through a newspaper.

Anthony Mann had substantial stage experience, and was known for eliciting fine performances. Dick Powell is excellent as the principled cop, who realizes that the chaotic political situation has left the President-Elect with inadequate security. After working undercover inside a secret band of seditionists, Kennedy is convinced that assassins aim to kill Lincoln when he makes a public address in Baltimore. Powell’s dialogue dials back the smart-talk he’d perfected in tough-guy gems like his previous film  Cry Danger.

Second billing is given to Paula Raymond, even though the film has no love interest and her character only figures in two or three scenes. Ms. Raymond is now best known for her role in the Harryhausen Sci-fi film  The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Marshall Thompson is appropriately uptight-hostile as the young secession fanatic, and perfect assassin material. Some of the secessionists cite economic reasons to want Abe Lincoln dead, but it becomes obvious that Lincoln’s support of Abolitionism is a major move toward social justice.

The great Ruby Dee gets 5th billing as Rachel, a maid well aware that freedom is something she should have been born with.  ↘  The small but significant part would have been called ‘racially sensitive’ when new, but Rachel is presented in an historically accurate way — she doesn’t directly challenge or contradict the Beauforts. Rachel deftly deflects the patronizing questions of an Abolitionist (Florence Bates), who is obnoxious despite being on the right side of history.

↖  Leif Erickson is excellent as the boorish thug who steals Kennedy’s identity; we now know him best as the possessed father in  Invaders from Mars. A bit player from that movie, Barbara Billingsley, has a slightly larger part as another train passenger, the mother of a rambunctious child (who?). The future TV mother of Beaver Cleaver goes unbilled, as do the familiar supporting actors Percy Helton, Tom Powers, Jeff Richards, Will Wright and an unrecognizable Regis Toomey.

The train’s engineer Gannon is played unbilled by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Victor Kilian, whose busy career would be stopped cold for seven years. Hollywood’s political divide stands out with the casting of two excellent actors. The reactionary Adolphe Menjou can be seen in newsfilm of HUAC hearings condemning Red influence in Hollywood and urging harsh punishment. The major blacklist victim Will Geer was at this time on the cusp of bigger stardom, but the blacklist kept him off screens for a full eleven years.

Adolphe Menjou and Will Geer play numerous scenes together, proving that a good movie role (paying work!) was much stronger than political differences — good actors often worked with other actors they didn’t like. Ward Bond was hated and feared by half of Hollywood, yet nobody claimed that his performances were no good.

The movie achieves a period feel without resorting to ‘quaint’ references. New York and Philadelphia of 1861 are busy places with businessmen and officials attending to their affairs as seriously as they do now. Railroad officers resent the train being held up by governmental orders. Dick Powell’s suit and hat may be a tiny bit too modern, but other possible anachronisms go unnoticed, like the fact that train cars have sleeper units. Less than fifteen or twenty years after the advent of railroad transportation, the New York train terminal is an enormous indoor pavilion. The giant building also appears to be illuminated by incandescent electric light bulbs.

Train corridors of 1861 were reportedly a patchwork of small, competing lines. Railroad lovers will laugh at the scene where the entire express must be pulled through downtown Baltimore by teams of horses. The local ladies pushed through an ordinance because locomotive soot soiled laundry hung out to dry. Victor Kilian’s Engineer Gannon looks very forlorn, leaning out the window of his engine as it is dragged backwards through the streets.

The train-bound drama manages some suspenseful twists and turns. The writers are associated with noir gems and later Sci-fi escapism. Geoffrey Homes wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay for the classic  Out of the Past, and is credited on  Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  George Worthing Yates wrote a score of Sci-fi thrillers starting with the noirish classic  Them!

A couple of story elements remind us of Hitchcock & Bennett’s train-bound  The Lady Vanishes. The direct assassination theme brings in a hint of the paranoid future with  Suddenly and even  The Manchurian Candidate. Those last two movies actually depicted sniper assassins drawing a bead on their prey. We have to think that in 1951, the Production Code would have rejected such a scene for Tall Target, as being in terrible taste.

Who copied Whom? 

One question confused us for years. 1951’s The Tall Target seems closely patterned after Richard Fleischer’s classic noir  The Narrow Margin — but how can that be, when Narrow Margin was released months later, in 1952?  Thank Alain Silver, Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode for the answer:  Narrow Margin had actually been completed in the summer of 1950. RKO owner Howard Hughes held up its release for almost two years. Director Fleischer wrote that prints of Narrow Margin circulated on the in-house studio screening circuit, earning special praise and giving Fleischer’s career a big boost, more than a year before its release to the public. Producer Stanley Rubin told me that he received a career boost in the exact same way.

Maybe ‘Margin’ and ‘Target’ are a little more than just ‘similar.’ 

Is it possible that word of mouth from those closed-door industry screenings of The Narrow Margin inpired MGM’s production of the very similar Tall Target?  In both films:

•  Neither films uses a soundtrack score, only source music.

•  Two detectives rush to a train to protect a mystery passenger.

•  One of the detectives is murdered by agents determined to kill the mystery passenger.

•  The remaining detective is harassed and helped by the bratty young son of a pretty female passenger.

•  The train conductor tries to help the detective but is confused by the clever assassins.

•  The detective’s official role is doubted: one has no credentials and the other’s honesty is constantly placed in question.

•  The detective fights with more than one assassin; the bolder of the thugs makes his presence known out in the open.

•  A mystery passenger stays hidden in one of the closed compartments.

•  That passenger’s actual identity is deliberately kept ambiguous.

•  Both the detective and the killers rush to make important telegraph communications at stops.

•  During the climax, the detective learns crucial information by looking through the window of a moving train car.

•  In both movies various good guys and bad guys board the train and attempt to search the cabins. In the last act of each movie, a bad guy identified as particularly heinous boards the train. Both villains are played by the same actor, Peter Brocco!

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Were there any justice in Hollywood, The Tall Target should at least have been a sleeper hit. It now feels like a proto- James Bond adventure, with an idealistic cop risking his career and life to save the life of a great man everybody seems to want dead. Film noir criticism revived the show’s reputation, yet it’s not that well known. We enthusiastically recommend it.