Another Man's Poison (1951)

This noir introduces us to Bette Davis' crime novelist, living in a gothic mansion by a windswept moor, who, we discover from the opening scene's whispered telephone box conversation, is having an affair, and from this strong thriller set-up, the movie proceeds as if trying to check off every thriller box imaginable - a dead body in a study,  an imposter and a fake marriage, a bank robbery, a criminal on the loose, not to mention animal murder and even My Cousin Rachel-style vehicle tampering - and more and more, until it runs wildly away with itself, though thankfully Davis seems aware of the absurdity and plays it for all it is worth.

★★★☆☆

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Burnt Offerings (1976)

It's The Shining before there was The Shining: a star-studded movie released in 1976, one year earlier than Stephen King's brick, about a writer (Oliver Reed), his wife (Karen Black) and their young son (Lee Montgomery) - oh, and Bette Davis as an aunt - who move into a holiday retreat (a summer rental too good and cheap to be true, not a hotel) and fall victim to strange goings-on - weirdness that probably stems from upstairs where the mysterious octogenarian Mrs Allardyce resides behind a closed door - but in this movie, the effect of this paranormality upon the family is just a whole lot of family bickering - whose dad hasn't played too rough with them in a pool? - and it doesn't just affect dad but first dad, then dad and mum, and then, weirdly, just mum who becomes house-obsessed - dad for some reason gets a reprieve - and then poor Bette Davis' aunt becomes ill...and all this not very scintillating stuff - fights then remorse then fights then remorse -  never ends up making a word of sense, so in that respect too Burnt Offerings is very much like The Shining.

★★★☆☆

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Phone Call From A Stranger (1952)

We spend so much time with "The Four Musketeers", a self-named group of not terribly interesting - and in the case of Keenan Wynn's Eddie Hoke, a novelty salesman, downright annoying - plane passengers thrown together by chance, that it comes as a bit of a shock when the plane crashes, killing three and leaving the fourth, Gary Merrill's dullard lawyer, to take up the others' unfinished business - unfinished and very melodramatic business involving guilt, shame, love, betrayal and other overwrought stuff that only a movie-final appearance by Bette Davis can neatly, patly resolve.

★★★☆☆

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The Scapegoat (1959)

Daphne du Maurier can carry off an unlikely plot like that of The Scapegoat (a man finds himself thrust into the family life of his doppelgänger) but this 1959 movie can't, especially with Alec Guinness playing so wet a lead character that the film's entirety is infected with his dreariness; rather than a suspense thriller that ratchets up tension, this plodding movie is a cartoony melodrama sans the complexities of du Maurier's plot, full of holes and unanswered questions.

★★☆☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile (1978)

Agatha Christie wrote Death On The Nile while staying in Aswan, Egypt at the Old Cataract Hotel overlooking the Nile, in the 30s, so watching this film version of her book with its rich period detail - cream linen suits, cloche hats, pearls, pith helmets, cravats, stockings, against the dust and dry of Egyptian ruins or in the colonial opulence of saloon bars and cigar lounges - it is easy to imagine Christie is in it or that the film depicts a moment in her life, and beneath the stiff social propriety of the British characters aboard The Karnak, a river paddle boat to Cairo, runs a terrific thread of suspense as someone kills off several of those aboard; it is up to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot to determine who the murderer is among characters played by the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury.

★★★★☆

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The Nanny (1965)

Before it succumbed to garish mod and technicolour excess in the 70s, the Hammer Film Productions company produced some psychological thrillers like this grotesque but clever, twisty-turny one starring Bette Davis as a no-nonsense Mary Poppins in a household scarred by tragedy - an uneasy peace in the home is shattered when the family's ten-year-old 'bad seed' of a son, Joey, is released from institutionalisation.

★★★★☆

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What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

The first of a series of three What Ever Happened...? horror-thrillers and the movie credited with giving rise to the dreadfully termed 'hagsploitation genre', this piece of grotesquery, like a Southern Gothic Sunset Boulevard with Hammer Film aesthetics, features Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as elderly sisters, one of whom (Baby Jane (Davis)) keeps the other (a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Crawford)) locked in an upstairs room while she plots doing away with her entirely, and the whole thing is like an exercise in bad taste.

★★★☆☆

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Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

As a kid I sat up into the early hours secretly watching this grisly 1960s southern gothic horror and the story of traumatised Charlotte with her Lizzie Borden-style childhood gave me the worst nightmares a movie has ever given me! 

★★★★☆

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