Timetable
Directed by Mark StevensCharlie Norman (Mark Stevens) is an insurance investigator dispatched to look into a daring robbery aboard a passenger train. The case is assigned to him in the ordinary course of business; what his employers do not know is that Charlie is the robbery's architect, a man who has spent months constructing a crime he intends to investigate himself in order to stay ahead of the law and collect the proceeds. The ironies of his position are not lost on him, and Stevens plays Charlie with a tight-lipped tension that registers the mental cost of maintaining two identities in close proximity.
As Charlie works the case from the inside, the investigation generates its own momentum. His colleague Joe Armstrong moves along parallel lines without knowing whose tracks he is following, and Frankie Page (Jack Klugman), a killer involved in the heist, becomes an unpredictable liability – a man with his own agenda and no particular loyalty to Charlie's careful architecture. Linda Brucker (Felicia Farr) enters the picture as a complication Charlie does not fully account for, her connection to the case more entangled than it first appears. Back home, Charlie's wife Ruth (Marianne Stewart) occupies the position that noir reserves for women married to men who are elsewhere in every sense that matters.
Timetable is a lean, compressed thriller that wrings considerable tension from the central premise: the investigator as perpetrator, the inquiry as self-incrimination in slow motion. Stevens, directing himself, keeps the procedural mechanics taut and resists the temptation to inflate his material. The film belongs to the late-cycle noir tradition in which the compromised protagonist is not destroyed by a femme fatale or a sudden moral failure but by the accumulated weight of a plan that was always more fragile than it appeared.
