Timeline showing key thriller movies from the past 50 years
These are the Top 10 Thrillers to this is day and the reason why they had an impact on Thrillers now days:
1. The Third Man (1949)
Dominated by Orson Welles' extended cameo as the charming Harry Lime, believed dead in post-war Vienna but returning to befuddle his old friend Holly Martins (Josepth Cotten), Carol Reed's noir thriller is one of the great British suspense films. Debate constantly rages as to how much of Welles' performance was either written or directed by him - including the famous 'cuckoo clock' monologue - but this speculation is a disservice to Graham Greene's excellent, cynical script. Beautifully capturing the atmosphere of a world where nothing seems to count any more, the film is helped immeasurably by Anton Karas' zither score.
Top thrill: The final chase through the sewers, where Reed, Welles and Greene brutally play with our sympathies.
2. Rear Window (1954)
Had Rear Window been made by a director like Truffaut, it would have ended up being a meditation on voyeurism, the role of the cinema and that of the auteur behind it, and the participation of the audience in the relationship. As it was made by Hitchcock, it is all these things, but also a gripping and exciting thriller revolving around wheelchair-bound photographer LB Jeffries (James Stewart) and his suspicions that his neighbour Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife. Hitchcock moves from light social comedy to edge-of-seat suspense with alacrity, and is helped by a positively luminous Grace Kelly as Stewart's girlfriend.
Top thrill: Grace Kelly goes searching for clues in Burr's apartment, as Jeffries and the audience watch, helplessly.
3. The Usual Suspects (1995)
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.' With this showy Baudelaire quotation, Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie announced their intentions from the off. Beginning as a fairly standard thriller - the aftermath of a massacre sees the sole survivor, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) interrogated by police - the film slowly acquires mythic dimensions as a legendary crime lord, Keyser Soze, becomes the pivotal figure in flashbacks of a heist planned by a gang of ne'er-do-wells, including Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) and McManus (Stephen Baldwin). Finally, one of cinema's most iconic twists reveals what, precisely, has been going on.
Top thrill: When we finally find out who Keyser Soze is - or do we?
4. The Silence Of The Lambs (1990)
Although repetition in inferior sequels and prequels has somewhat lessened the shock value of Anthony Hopkins' performance as Hannibal Lecter, there's no doubt that Jonathan Demme's tight and disturbing thriller shows the character at his most fiendish. Although Hopkins is only on screen for something like 20 minutes in total, he dominates the film entirely - his 'quid pro quo' scenes with Jodie Foster's tough but vulnerable Clarice Starling are exceptional. But then even the 'other' plot of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) and the FBI's desperate struggle to stop him is beautifully paced and heart-poundingly executed.
Top thrill: Lecter escapes from his confinement. "Ready when you are, Sergeant Pembry."
5. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
One of the best directorial debuts of all time, Tarantino's supremely confident, supremely stylish hello to Hollywood managed to simultaneously herald a completely distinctive new talent while magpie-ing all the best bits from the thriller gods of yore. A smartly inverted diamond heist plot laced with nods to Mamet, Kubrickian ultra-violence, Scorsese and Losey, to name a few, is combined with a knockout colour-coded ensemble cast including Keitel, Buscemi, Roth and Madsen, all set to a stupidly cool soundtrack and cut at 100mph.
Top thrill: Here the thrills lie in what we don't see, and Tarantino's clever cutting: we don't actually see the heist.
6. Old Boy (2003)
The second in Park Chan-Wook's 'revenge trilogy' has gained the greatest iconic status since its release, due perhaps to the chillingly mysterious plot. Middle-aged salaryman Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik) is mysteriously kidnapped and imprisoned for years, only to be just as unexpectedly released and told he must find his captor in five days, or suffer the consequences. From this, Chan-Wook constructs a plot with all the warped elegance of Jacobean tragedy, building to a horrific and unforgettable finale as his captor's grand plan finally becomes explicit. Apparently it's to be remade, but there seems to be little way of topping the brilliant original.
Top thrill: Oh Dae-Su is confronted with a hallway full of baddies. Never mind, he has a hammer...
7. North by Northwest (1959)
In the midst of Hitchcock's great American film period, beginning with Rear Window and ending with The Birds, North by Northwest stands out as being the most purely entertaining, possibly of all Hitchcock's films. With a suitably ridiculous plot involving advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) mistaken for a government agent by spies led by the unctuously sinister Philip Vandamm (James Mason) and embroiled with femme fatale Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), Hitchcock turns the innuendo, iconic set pieces and witty dialogue up to 11.
Top thrill: Thornhill's near-fatal encounter with a crop duster. As remarkable for what doesn't happen as what does.
8. Se7en (1995)
The film that established David Fincher's apparently inseparable relationship with the darker side of human existence, this bleak, bleak film noir sidesteps the cliches it appears to bury itself in (two mismatched cops, one black, one white; the old-timer on the edge of retirement; a brilliant serial killer with a twisted Biblical methodology) with fierce intelligence, manifested both in an unusual density of literary reference and through exceptional performances from a fine cast, with Morgan Freeman's haunted Somerset and Brad Pitt's feisty Mills more than ably matched. Then of course there's that ending.
Top thrill: Either the pulse-pounding foot chase midway or the final revelation of John Doe's grand plan.
9. The Departed (2006)
The film that finally won Scorsese his long overdue Best Director Oscar, as well as Best Film, The Departed is nominally a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, but with entirely different emphases and twists. Perhaps surprisingly for Scorsese, this tale of a cop posing as a mobster (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a mobster doing the same (Matt Damon) is often as laugh-out-loud funny as it is suspenseful, with great comedic turns by Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin as the police and a wonderfully OTT Jack Nicholson as Costello, the head of the Boston mob.
Top thrill: Damon and DiCaprio finally meet, and the results are unexpected.
10. Fargo (1996)
For many, the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men (2007) is their greatest thriller, but its existential meanderings can't compare for heart and soul to their snowbound murder fable Fargo. Revolving around the failed attempts of inept car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) to have his wife kidnapped and collect her ransom, the Coens neatly balance laughs with high-wire suspense. Best of all is Frances McDormand's marvellously humane performance as the heavily pregnant cop, Marge Gunderson, for whom solving murders is all in a day's work.
Top thrill: Carter Burwell's magnificent score, which is simultaneously epic, elegiac and witty.
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