Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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Last Year in Marienbad (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad) (1961)

 

This French New Wave cinema from 1961, about a man and woman in a hotel trying to sync their memories of their meeting (or not) a year earlier, will either infuriate or mesmerise you depending on whether you are someone who might appreciate floating dream-like through the austere and quiet Marienbad hotel with its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear...or if you are someone who prefers Arnold Schwarzenegger action and care less about sublime cinematics and poetry, give "Last Year in Marienbad" a miss. 

★★★★☆

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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Film noir often ends feeling inconsequential - why did anyone need to know that grubby little crime story? - but this 1946 classic, featuring the debut film performance of Kirk Douglas and another perfectly-cast sneering, icy performance from Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, in a story of guilt, fear, shame, and love spanning decades, is not just cynical and dark but elicits strong interest in the fates of a trio of kids, two of whom harbor a murderous secret.

★★★★☆

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Blade Runner (1982)

This classic film noir, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a gumshoe-turned-bounty hunter tasked with tracking down, in a future cyberpunk-neon Los Angeles of perpetual rain, six runaway replicants, androids built by the Tyrell Corporation replete with emotions and memories, making it hard for Deckard to distinguish them from humans.

★★★★☆ 

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House of Secrets (1936)

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

When the new owner of Hawk's End, a property bequeathed to him in a will, visits the ramshackled house for the first time, he is told by a gun-wielding man and a mysterious blonde to leave and never return, but he repetitively goes back, each time to be told again by the gun-wielding man and the mysterious blonde never to go back, while inbetween times, he and his gumshoe friend postulate explanations for this peculiar state of affairs including the theory the house harbours a three-fingered fugitive on the run, is home to a long-lost pirate treasure, has been set up as a base for a government conspiracy, houses a murderer or, even more ridiculously, that all of these things are true, revealed in the really very silly plot's final ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste (aka 'Phantom Ship') (1935)

The And Then There Were None explanation postulated in this 1935 horror thriller with Bela Lugosi is based, says an opening credit titlecard, on the findings of the Attorney-General in Gibraltar and though history has deemed him, Frederick Solly-Flood, an imbecile, the appeal of this movie is that Flood's account of the unexplained abandonment of The Mary Celeste in 1872, though certainly not presented here convincingly, came not far removed in time from the actual events, unlike so many other fanciful and outlandish theories that have sprung up and combined and morphed over the one hundred and fifty years since, blurring Mary Celeste fact and fiction.

★★★☆☆

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The Conversation (1974)

In writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed 1974 mystery thriller, lonely and anonymous Harry Caul, a man extremely protective of his own right to privacy and secrets, ironically works as a wiretapper able to listen in on the conversations of others no matter what barriers - walls or crowds or bodies of water - stand between him and them; when his work for a shadowy someone surreptiously recording a couple's private conversations looks like it is going to abet violence, he is troubled because of his complicity, of course, but perhaps troubled mostly because the situation accentuates for him the fact that even the latest hi-tech bugging equipment - voice actuators and enormous reels of tape - can't overcome his remove from others.

★★★★★

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Compulsion (1959)

Surely Ttuman Capote, often touted as the pioneer of the true crime novel, was in fact influenced either by journalist Meyer Levin's 1955 novel, Compulsion - a fiction based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case - or by this movie adaptation of it which turns the disturbing subject matter (the 1924 murder in Chicago of a schoolkid at the hands of two Nietzsche-spouting teens) into an utterly compelling thriller, one that keeps so close to fact it really isn't a fiction at all - consider for example the fact that Orson Welles adopts prosthetics to look like real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow.

★★★★★

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The Cat And The Canary (1927)

One reason to watch Paul Leni's 1927 adaptation of John Willard's 1922 stage play is to marvel at just how influential a film it is - the best of the four film adaptations of the play so far (this one, the one in 1930, the funny one with Bob Hope in 1939, and the 1979 movie) and inspiration for a zillion spin-offs and variations (The Black Cat, The Spiral Staircase, House on Haunted Hill, Haunted Mansion...) - and another reason to watch is that it is fantastic - an atmospheric German expressionist silent horror that makes great use of the cinetechnology of the day, spliced as it is with imaginative concrete poetry intertitles and shot with blue and yellow tones to distinguish the lit or unlit scenes, not to mention a handful of shots using a red tone for the creepy or alarming moments - afterall, it is a movie about a group of people trapped for a night in a mansion where they've gathered for a will reading and where they learn almost unbelievably that they are prey to a murderous lunatic somewhere in or around the house.

★★★★★

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Little Women (2019)

One strategy to try and make Louisa May Alcott's obnoxious Little Women tolerable viewing for anyone who has already sat through the seven or eight other adaptations is to populate it with Hollywood's most affected performers and rip through the story at a relentless pace after throwing the scenes into the air and presenting them in the order you pick them up off the floor.

★★★☆☆

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The Black Cat (1941)

The not very funny jokes come thick and fast in this madcapped romp - a The Cat And The Canary variation more CarryOn comedy than Hammer horror - starring Basil "He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes" Rathbone, Hugh Herbert and Bela Lugosi as just some of the beneficiaries of widow Henrietta Winslow's will, gathered in her gothic mansion full of cats, antiques, secret passages and a growing number of dead bodies (murders committed by a shadowy someone whose identity you don't really have a chance of guessing given everyone appears to be making the plot up as they go).

★★★☆☆

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Laura (1944)

Like Hitchcock's Rebecca released four years earlier, the title character of this Otto Preminger-directed mystery thriller, Laura, casts a spell over everyone and like Rebecca, she's dead at the movie's outset but nonetheless presides over every scene, particularly as there is a portrait of her that watches over her apartment where Dana Andrew's detective, a man in a fedora who calls women 'dames' (for this is pessimistic film noir, not Du Maurier's romantic thriller) is investigating Laura's murder at the hands of one of her society friends.

★★★★☆

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Detour (1946)

"An ordinary healthy guy" (a piano player in a bar) hitchhikes across America to reunite with an "ordinary healthy girl" (who used to sing in the bar) but when the man who gives him a ride winds up dead, the piano player finds himself on a grim film noir detour from the happy life with his girlfriend that awaited him, instead driving around in a stolen car trying to dream up ways out of his predicament before the body turns up and before the grimfaced femme fatale he has picked up gets her own ideas about benefitting from the situation.

★★★★☆

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Dressed To Kill (UK: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code) (1946)

By 1946, Basil Rathbone had starred as Sherlock Holmes alongside Nigel Bruce's Doctor Watson fourteen times and perhaps some weariness is on display in this last one, Dressed To Kill, but to be fair, the plot about a criminal gang's race to obtain three identical wooden music boxes, based on Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, gives Sherlock Holmes no opportunity to dazzle with his brilliant methods of deduction because the audience knows pretty much what it needs to know right from the beginning and remains always several steps ahead of the great detective.

★★☆☆☆

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

In director Fritz Lang’s 1944 film noir full of great moments but dopey on the whole, a psychology professor played by Edward G Robinson has to dream up a way out of a terrible pickle when the woman whose portrait in a shop window he admires turns up in real life, invites him back to her apartment for a drink and before you can say, “What would your wife and kids think of this?”, the two become embroiled in murder, body disposal and blackmail!

★★☆☆☆ 

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Burning (Beoning) (버닝) (2018)

Lots of thrillers featuring writer's block-stricken main characters are let down when it turns out the thrills are just metaphorical (it was in their imagination, an author's struggle manifest, or worse, just a dream) (Swimming Pool, Secret Window, etc. etc..) but that's not the case here with this beautifully acted, chilling, thrilling Murakami Haruki short story adaptation in which North Korean propaganda announcements, porsches, dilapidated shacks and swanky apartments are the all too real indications of the divides that exist between the have-nots (like wannabe-writer Jong-soo, who doesn't even have a mother in his life and looks like losing Hae-mi, the girl he is interested in) and the haves like Ben (a mysterious playboy who seems to be coming between Jong-soo and Hae-mi) and greenhouses, stones, and fires suggest what is being written is something real that thumps in your chest and strips you bare; the trick in the end is that this thriller leaves you devastated, wishing it were just a metaphor or, even better, just a dream - please, just wake up.

★★★★★

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The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

The byline promises it, but not only did I not "feel the heat" or even vague chemistry between the leads, I even felt my body temperature drop a degree or two at the sight, at one point, of Jack Nicholson's pancake derriėre and at the film's persistence in showing over and over hands clawing at Jessica Lange's crotch, moments added, I suppose, along with Technicolour and a bewildering circus visit, to justify this remake of the 1946 James M Cain adaptation, but neither is a terrific film because no matter which way you tell it, at the heart of the story Cora and Frank's murder of Cora's husband, roadside-diner owner Nick, never feels remotely necessary.

★★☆☆☆

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To Catch A Thief (1955)

All the ingredients of a ripping Hitchcock comedy thriller are here - the exotic French Riviera setting beautifully photographed in VistaVision; a book's ripping plot with Cary Grant starring as "The Cat", a retired jewel thief wrongly accused of a string of copycat robberies; Grace Kelly as the blonde who wavers between suspecting and loving the hero; experimental camerawork using colour filters; a cameo by the director; and yet reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia is a more exciting thing to do than watching this, one of Hitchcock's most tedious movies, repetitive, low on suspense, and to the end unthrilling.

★★★☆☆

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