Time Table (1956)
An insurance investigator assigned to track down the culprits behind a meticulously planned half-million-dollar train robbery is secretly the mastermind who planned it, and must keep his own partners, and his wife, from unraveling the scheme.
Time Table was directed by, produced by, and stars Mark Stevens, who built the film around a train-heist plot with a clockwork sense of procedure that mirrors its title; its chief pleasure is watching Stevens play both the investigator hunting the thieves and, in effect, the thief writing his own investigation, a dual structure that gives an otherwise modest programmer real narrative snap.
Background
Time Table was directed, produced, and headlined by Mark Stevens, who plays insurance investigator Charlie Norman; it was released February 8, 1956, with a screenplay by Aben Kandel from a story by Robert Angus, and runs 80 minutes. The plot opens with a train robbery staged by a man posing as a doctor, who escapes an Arizona-bound train with a $500,000 payroll along with a fake “patient” and the patient’s supposed wife, Linda. Felicia Farr plays Linda, King Calder plays railroad investigator Joe Armstrong, and the cast includes an early appearance by Jack Klugman.
What to watch for
The investigation that follows is undercut from the start for the audience, since Norman, the insurance man assigned to catch the thieves, is revealed to be the one who planned the robbery; his job becomes managing an inquiry he already knows the answer to while keeping his accomplices, and his own wife, from putting the pieces together. The title nods to the procedural precision of the heist’s planning, and Stevens stages the back half as a quiet cat-and-mouse game where Norman has to out-investigate himself without tipping his hand to Armstrong or Linda.
