Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, who has died aged 88, had a little-known connection to Marilyn, and a film noir classic. As Brian Kelly reports for the Sault Star, Engel played a bit part in Niagara – uncredited at the time, but now noted on IMDB – as ‘Man at Bus Stop’. It’s possible that he may be the man seated on a bench and holding a cigarette at the bus station, who briefly looks up as Marilyn hurries by, hoping to catch a bus to Chicago. However, this man looks older than his early twenties, as Engel would have been at the time.
A second possibility is that Engel was the man leaning on the pillar, who observes the commotion as the bus is cancelled. You can see his face more clearly at the left of this still photo, which shows the other players in this tense scene – including a disgruntled husband and wife, and two sailors involved in the police search for Rose Loomis (Marilyn.) Engel became a high school teacher and community theatre director, before launching his series of mystery novels featuring detective Benny Cooperman with The Suicide Murders (1980.)
