In short: The Tall Target (1951)

1861, just before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. New York police sergeant John Kennedy (Dick Powell) has discovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln during a pre-inauguration speech in Baltimore. Nobody wants to believe his report on the matter, so he takes it upon himself to get on the night train to Baltimore to try and get the information into the hands of people who’ll take it seriously.

On the train, it becomes clear very quickly that Kennedy isn’t wrong. At least, somebody likes his ideas so little, they attempt to murder him. For the rest of the night Kennedy tries desperately to survive murder attempts, manoeuvre through very dramatic versions of more quotidian problems like the lack of a train ticket, and finds himself hindered and helped by various characters on the train, like Colonel Caleb Jeffers (Adolphe Menjou), a very dutiful train conductor (Will Geer), and an enslaved girl named Rachel (Ruby Dee, who steals every scene she is in). Someone certainly is part of the conspirators against Lincoln. Kennedy’s life isn’t made any easier by the fact that he ended his last meeting with his boss by throwing his badge into the man’s face, making the small bit of authority he usually has rather shaky, and impossible to prove.

As far as I understand, The Tall Target is one of the first films of Anthony Mann not made for the B-slot in an evening at the movies, so he could work with a budget of about a million dollars here, which must have opened up some possibilities.

The resulting film is a pretty fantastic example of what we’d today call a thriller in the Hitchcockian vein, where a mostly normal guy stumbles into a situation that’s really rather out of his depth, but fights on regardless. Sure, Kennedy may be cop, but he has no authority beyond his word, and even has to try to beg, steal, or borrow a gun. And while he has some experience with violence, the traits that help him survive are tenaciousness and sheer luck. So, the film would make a pretty great double bill with the (later) North by Northwest.

Mann here is particularly great at creating a sense of place, the feeling of spending a rather dangerous time in the very enclosed space of the train, as emphasised through the pretty spectacular looking work of DP Paul Vogel. Because most of the film takes place by night, even the handful of scenes taking place outside share the feeling of claustrophobia, of darkness hanging over and enclosing Kennedy, a darkness that will not always turn out to his detriment in moments of danger.

There’s no fat at all to the script by George Worthington Yates and Art Cohn – every scene, every character interaction, every shot carries import and meaning, helps the plot along, defines the characters Kennedy meets along the way, and creates just the right amount of historical context. As a result, The Tall Target is a tight, enormously suspenseful film, yet one that never feels too breathless.