The killer moment: In front of a wanted poster, a dark silhouette appears. Lang also turned Edvard Grieg's ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ – whistled by Beckert, but not Lorre, who couldn't whistle – into an instant signature of aural menace. (Filmed under the working title Murderer Among Us, Nazi party members refused Lang studio space.) The movie is immortal for Peter Lorre's career-defining performance as Hans Beckert, trapped by sweaty urges and a dragnet of cops and mobsters. M is cinema's darkest landmark: a portrait of awful appetites that was revolutionary for also being an oblique mirror on society at large. ![]() Berlin's most moneyed and celebrated director, Fritz Lang, was drawn to the subject, which would become the spine of his first sound film, in many ways the commercial birth of the modern psychothriller. Several real-life child murderers, cannibals and serial killers – their nicknames are grisly enough: the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Düsseldorf – terrorised Germany in the 1920s. The killer moment: It has to be the crop-duster sequence, which begins like a Western standoff and ends with the suavest man in cinema face down in the dirt. But it’s Grant’s movie: a Hollywood A-lister happy to be the punchline when the scene calls for it. And the cast? Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau and Jessie Royce Landis – heroes, villains and worried mothers, they’re all having a ball. ![]() It’s all a tribute to Hitch and his ensemble of behind-the-camera talents, including screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Saul Bass (designer of the iconic title sequence) and Bernard Herrmann, whose score lends menace and levity in equal measure. ![]() Of course, making a movie this effortless is hard work. The greatest joy in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy caper is how effortless it all feels: a gliding magic-carpet ride from New York to Mount Rushmore, via Chicago and a Midwestern bus stop, as Cary Grant’s ad man suffers a potentially fatal outbreak of Wrong Man-itis. If there’s a thriller out there more exhilarating, sexier or packed with iconic moments than this one, we’ve yet to see it. Written by A bbey Bender, Joshua Rothkopf, Phil de Semlyen, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza & Tomris Laffly On the list? Murder, political intrigue, espionage, conspiracy, manipulation, gaslighting and, of course, crime. It is, unlike many of its ill-fated characters, alive and well.īut what are the very best of them? As we’ve done with science fiction, horror films, romances, comedies, westerns and war films, we’ve dusted cinema for prints and taken a magnifying glass to its finest thrillers to boil them down to a tonne of all-timers. Even superhero flicks, like Captain America: Civil War and The Batman, have been borrowing liberally from the crime thriller. Fincher’s Seven and Zodiac have carried on the legacy, while films like Pig, Nightmare Alley and The Card Counter show that the thriller is the genre for all eras. With masterful control of those elements, Hitchcock could manipulate his audiences like puppets on a string, delivering shocks that reverberate through cinema history. ![]() Thrillers show us horrors and weave in human dramas, but they use those raw materials to forge something particular: a sense of unease and suspense. From the early classics, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger or Fritz Lang’s M, to the films of David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, they’re rich in nerve-shredding, adrenaline-pumping rides into the darker recesses of the psyche. And if you don’t believe us, there’s a suspicious figure in that darkened doorway who’d like a word. Everyone has their favourite genre but we can surely all agree that thrillers are the best.
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