Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock's noirish thriller about a detective hired by a friend to follow his wife, who dies, hinges on an obsessive and controlling relationship that develops between James Stewart's detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson, and Kim Novak's character who resembles the wife and it is hard to swallow, first, that the actor James Stewart plays this kind of weirdo and, second, that Novak's character Judy Barton would allow things to progress to the point that Ferguson does creepy things like dye her hair and dress her up, but innovative dolly zooms and flashing primary colour filters coupled with some Freudian psychology about obsessional love and second chances help turn these problems into trifles in another Hitchcock masterpiece.

★★★★★

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