The "Esther" Kerfuffle.

A few months ago, a radio panel discussion (exploring issues of the moment) was nearly derailed when one of the panellists brought up the name Estes Kefauver as part of a larger point he was making.

"Wait," said the interviewer. "Did you just say Esther Kerfuffle?"

There followed a brief pause while the panellist in question had to pick himself up off the floor and regain some semblance of composure.

Perhaps he was "Esther Kerfuffle" to his friends. We may never know...

To anyone who had been a sentient life-form in the US in the early 1950s, Estes Kefauver would have been a household name; instantly recognisable. He was a Democratic politician (a Congressman, then a Senator) who ran for president several times, and was briefly a vice-presidential candidate when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower. (Spoiler alert: Eisenhower won the election, so instead of vice-president Kefauver, we got vice-president Richard Nixon. Good times.)

But Kefauver would have been known to the general public chiefly for the "Kefauver Committee" (as it came to be known) of 1950-51.

The United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (let's just keep calling it the Kefauver Committee, shall we?) was a very high-profile investigation into the extent to which Organised Crime had taken over American society. 

The fact that Organised Crime was rampant in the US should have come as a surprise to no one (Bootleggers, anyone? Al Capone? James Cagney movies? Any of that ring a bell?) but this committee had an advantage that no previous investigation had been able to offer: it was on television.

The Kefauver investigations were broadcast in their entirety just as television ownership was exploding in the US, and the result was that Americans were treated to a gripping, episodic exposé of the nefarious and sinister hidden organisations that were running rampant all around them. Dozens of "mob bosses" were compelled to give testimony (live on television) and TV audiences were thus given a crash course in Mafia terminology. It was thanks to the Kefauver Hearings that terms like "Hitman" and "Taking out a Contract" entered the popular vocabulary. 

And Senator Estes Kefauver, presiding over these hearings, became a TV star in his own right.

The film I plan to screen this week was released in 1952, but it had been filmed almost two years earlier, when the American media was awash in the Kefauver hearings.

The Narrow Margin is often cited by critics and film scholars as very nearly the perfect "B" Movie. Short, cheap and with no big-name stars, it tells the story of a pair of plain-clothes detectives who have been given the assignment of transporting a semi-hostile witness to the courthouse, where she will testify to the Grand Jury about her (deceased) mobster husband. 

The widow is a hissing, wise-cracking cliché of a gangster's moll (much to the scorn and disgust of the two detectives) and of course the mob have sent an apparently unending string of "hitmen" after her to ensure that she never reaches the witness box.

Most of the action takes place on the train, as detective and witness play a cat-and-mouse game with various hired killers who are happy to use threats, coercion, subterfuge and of course graft to get her into their sights.

All of this would have been practically "ripped-from-the-headlines" in the early 50s as the Kefauver hearings paraded witness after witness to spill the beans on the mechanisms of the Mafia before an enraptured TV audience.

The Narrow Margin is usually referred to as a "noir" by critics today, and it certainly has many of the trappings. But it also marks a subtle shift that was to become more obvious as the 1940s gave way to the 50s.

Much of the "dark cinema" of the 40s had focussed on the tragic hero who must usually pay the price for violating natural law and the Hays Office. The Narrow Margin (and many films that came after) concerns itself with an authority figure (a cop, in this case) who works to keep us safe from the Dark Forces that constantly threaten to destroy our great society from within.

The witness he is transporting bears all the hallmarks of a Femme Fatale, but she is neither tempting nor desirable to anyone in the narrative (certainly not to our hero). On the contrary, she is presented as loathsome and reprehensible, and not worthy of those who give up their lives to keep her safe. 

Except the situation is not nearly that simple, as you will discover on Thursday...

This is Mid-Century Noir, for an audience that was learning to be wary of mobsters, Communists and other secret threats that walk among us, working to undermine everything that, well, Makes America Great.

And this was also the era when Hollywood itself was beginning to feel the pressure, and studios were prepared to be a little less inflexible about previously taboo subjects, if it meant enticing audiences back into the movie theatres.

The Narrow Margin is still very much a movie of the Studio era, and a shining example of what a skilled director can do with a modest budget and a tight plot. But there are tell-tale signs that society itself was beginning to shift... as societies are wont to do.

Burt Lancaster said "I did something wrong... once..." at the beginning of The Killers in 1946. The protagonists of films like The Narrow Margin have different problems to deal with, and their stories follow a very different trajectory.

This is "Dark Cinema" of a slightly different colour.

We will screen The Narrow Margin at 7.30 on Thursday, the 15th of May at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.