The first two minutes of The Tall Target are more inventive than the entirety of any average Best Picture Oscar winner. The credits creep slowly but surely, with a stately, methodical gait evoking both a reportorial matter-of-factness – a ripped-from-the-headlines present-tense – and a fatalistic timelessness, as though whatever is about to happen is on an inexorable march to eternity. This credit crawl tells not of a galaxy long ago and far, far away that still feels like the future but, rather, a century of American history compressed into the tightest cloister and pushing, like a piston, right up against America’s present.

The train on which the film is set functions as a kind of metaphor for modernity itself: an intersection of inevitability and contingency that marks the vehicle as both a beacon of an imminent, impending, unavoidable modernity and, paradoxically, a herald of an uncertain world and a country whose obsession with national redemption and unearned consensus had been fissured and cracked open.

Thus was history itself. The Tall Target tracks an aborted assassination attempt that may not have existed – may be not only pure chance but pure fantasy – but that still feels inevitable. The film seems to know that the efforts of its hero John Kennedy (Dick Powell) to fend off an attempted assassination plot on Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his inauguration are both necessary and pyrrhic. The film’s thrills and double-crosses ask us to invest in the discovery of one potential sniper even as it implies that twenty other assassins are on their way, and that the real effort to stop them is already foreclosed, out of our hero’s hands: whether his letter to warn Lincoln has gone through is uncertain, but he can’t do anything about it once the film has started. The Tall Target has the – well, the word they would have used at the time would be chutzpah – to remind us that we are watching a quest to stop a history that might be inevitable regardless.

Indeed, The Tall Target celebrates that paradox: humans must act to change the world, in as many avenues as people, for we do not know which will ultimately find the right occasion to become meaningfully historical. Kennedy’s initial letter fails, but his investment in a better nation secures history through the meeting of determinism and contingency when his efforts happen to fall on the ears of an interested party, a fellow conspirator acting sympathetically, another atom hoping to find the temporary arrangement that would make her efforts meaningful.

If The Tall Target doesn’t linger long in the filmography of director Anthony Mann, it nonetheless casts a tall shadow. It is mostly forgotten, perhaps, only because it came out immediately before Mann switched genres to Westerns, bringing his tenebrous gloom to the bullish confidence of the Wild West and transforming the genre in the process. He understood the way that a good B-picture could, like train steam, traverse the thinnest of margins from basement-dwelling coal to transcendent ether, could crawl through the underbelly of reality and still achieve something meaningful because it strenuously avoids attempts at transcendence.

In this respect, The Tall Target is like the man whose title the film references: disarmingly unassuming, spare and spartan, wily and cunning, spirited of vision but attentive to variability and ready to act. It is a veritable philosophy of history because it doesn’t philosophize, anticipating something about American pragmatism’s later anti-abstractionist texture and deflationary (but also enlivening!) view of truth as mobile and mutable and responsive to flux in circumstances prey to chance. Like a cramped train barreling toward a national crisis, cloistered and lacking in breathing space yet complex and overflowing with narratives suddenly pushed together,  it contains multitudes because it seems to have no room at all.

Unlike Mann’s Reign of Terror, his earlier, implicitly anti-revolutionary historical noir about the French Revolution that completely cosigned the mid-century assumption that political change inevitably leads to totalitarianism, The Tall Target recognizes that certain forms of social inertia and inequality may demand a powerful counter-acting force. Change, immediate reform, hangs over The Tall Target as a political imperative even when others decry authoritarianism. For a film released the year before HUAC went into full swing, The Tall Target is oddly appreciative of the need for mass-scale social overhauls. It’s also oddly respectful of the viewer’s intelligence. It assumes, for instance, that viewers know that the Republicans were the pro-federal, pro-civil rights force during the mid 1800s, and that they were interpreted by Southerners as unwieldy, power-mad despots asserting dominance over and against the confederative spirit of the U.S. Or, perhaps, it assumes we know nothing but simply that we can pick things up if we’re as quick and cunning as its protagonist.

The specter of death hangs over The Tall Target, of a political reckoning descending upon the nation whose fate is played out in backrooms and meetings of chance and fate. When one character, connecting an unfortunate gamble with a national transformation, mutates the phrase “lost a bet” into “lost a country,” he is, for better or worse, exposing the connection and the difference between pure, momentary chance – a dexterous gamble as a meeting of risk and fortune – and event-like significance. He exposes a history in which something seemingly minuscule can seal the fate of a nation, in which a hairline fracture can become a faultline. Mann nails this hair-trigger uncertainty in some of the wooziest, slyest camera movements imaginable, such as one where a man’s curious, nonchalant traipse through a train-car, an apparent respite, suddenly mutates into a nervous, life-or-death struggle with one sly, sinuous camera move from his face to his lower back. This is such a masterful, unassuming gesture, in which the simple, graceful slide of a camera from one angle to another suddenly, quietly drops the bottom out of a character’s movement and expression. Mann’s film is a smooth operator and a worrisome conspirator, clarifying for us how little we can know, how adept and responsive we need to be to what is going on before us, and how suddenly the fate of a nation can change, even – especially  –  when we aren’t even paying attention.

Score: 8/10