10- Cape Fear (1991)
Dir- Martin Scorsese
Never mind what the purists say; Scorsese' shocking remake of J. Lee Thompson's classic is every bit a gorgeously overdone yet compulsively enthralling thriller of fear and psychosis, the fireworks delivered like incendiary explosives by the director's unbeatable visual chutzpah and his signature collaborator Robert De Niro let loose like a caged animal. De Niro plays Max Cady, a sociopathic killer who got locked up some years ago after his attorney Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) shuffled his feet. Cady is now nursing that grudge and out he sets, a tattooed beast of a man who decides to wreak Bowden's life by digging his bloody teeth into his darkest, grimiest corners. There is plenty of trademark violence here, all of which is just plain unnerving and hellish to watch. But the real, unbearable tension is derived from the way the director and his protagonist end up drilling holes in Bowden's fragile American Dream. From delivering coarse-mouthed monologues that could make you cringe to a slow-burn scene of nymphet seduction that could make you sweat in ways unexpectedly, this is terror of an almost Freudian level.
9- Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Dir- Alfred Hitchcock
There are more relentlessly enjoyable and endlessly quotable spy thrillers from Alfred Hitchcock, especially the one with Cary Grant and the crop duster plane. But this rattling yarn, set with astounding prescience against the first explosions of the World War 2, can be easily called as a freewheeling and frivolously tongue-in-cheek template for that film itself. Our do-gooder titular hero is smart-talking reporter Johnny Jones (a tenderly charming Joel McRea) who is assigned to interview a Dutch politician in a simmering Europe when all of a sudden, things start taking drastic twists and turns that not even the most seasoned Hitchcock lovers can fathom. The director hurls us in whip-cracking fashion from one breathless, sneakily hilarious, set-piece to another, from a rain-dazzled assassination in Amsterdam to stealth inside a rusty windmill to a nerve-wracking scene inside the Westminster Cathedral down to the sensational action-packed climax. And that is all I am going to reveal for 'Foreign Correspondent' is a lot more than just a superbly crafted thriller. For some, it was a superb propaganda piece as well.
8- Chinatown (1974)
Dir- Roman Polanski
Called by many as the most flawless script ever penned, writer Robert Towne's masterful blend of classic noir tropes and California's land politics circa 1930s is more than just a stunning ode to the genre; it also remained as the definite word on the same till an ambitious tale of Hollywood beat it squarely (check number 2). And yet, it would be a bit of a stretch to call 'Chinatown' as a thriller in the pure sense for both Roman Polanski and Towne were more concerned with the cynical subversion of all the genre elements rather than their function itself. The film's private eye J.J Gittes (a smarmy and slinky Jack Nicholson) is no Bogart; he is not only wet behind the ears, he can also be a bit of a nasty brute. And Faye Dunaway's frosty Evelyn Mulwray is actually a tortured soul who cannot even dream of being a femme fatale. Such brilliant irony, however, makes each turn more hard-hitting than ever. Being a film whose villain is both a capitalist and a pervert, 'Chinatown' derives its tension from the heart of darkness itself.
7- Memento (2000)
Dir- Christopher Nolan
No matter how much you enjoyed deconstructing his magic tricks in 'The Prestige' or surviving those inter-woven levels of action movie fantasies in 'Inception', you would love deciphering the more coherent yet more confounding, mystery of Christopher Nolan's finest hour. No, it is not about the twin narrative strands that move backwards and forwards respectively scene by scene, building up to an unforgettable climax when they both unite. Rather, 'Memento' biggest bag of stark, sneaky surprises is its protagonist himself. Leonard Shelby (a never-better Guy Pearce, in terrific form) suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that renders him incapable of storing new memories. The one piece of information that drives him is that his wife has been killed by someone called John. G. Shelby is hell-bent on his but things don't quite seem to fit together even as he himself insists on the fool-proof perfection of his methods. And that is all you need to know about this lean, ingenious whodunnit in whch Nolan keeps on hammering devastating reveals with every forward or backward plunge in the plot. Witness it to believe it.
6- Strangers On A Train (1951)
Dir- Alfred Hitchcock
Is Robert Walker's debonair devil Bruno Antony one of the earliest silky psychopaths of the silver screen? It is probable for it is Bruno, a spoilt, slippery brat who ignites the dynamite of one of Hitchcock's most indelible, iconic thrillers. After casually teasing tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) about his affair and impending divorce on a train ride, Bruno pitches a terrifying idea on : he himself kills Haines' licentious, devious wife and the latter will do his part of doing away with Bruno's domineering father. When Haines makes the mistake of laughing it off, Bruno actually goes ahead with his evil plans and then demands them to be completed. Detective writer Raymond Chandler was roped in to pen the script but the director, being every bit the adroit rascal, trashed most of it and for good reason. 'Strangers On A Train' is pure sensationalist pulp served with A-grade finesse, its thrills and chills orchestrated like a dance of death and guilt and balanced by the typically sharp detail(Bruno's preference for manicures, a bantering younger sister) and suspenseful, chiaroscuro craft by cinematographer Robert Burks.
5- All The President's Men (1976)
Dir- Alan J. Pakula
Everyone knows what is going to happen at the end of 'All The President's Men'. This was not fiction but fact: Richard Nixon and his administration were found guilty of political espionage, sabotage and subterfuge in the big fallout resulting from an affair called the 'The Watergate Scandal'. And yet, the film is not about all what happened. It is about two unlikely yet wholly believable crusaders of truth who are not action heroes. Rather, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) are egged by the exacting yet encouraging Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) to dig up clues, call up unreliable witnesses and verify the red-hot material of facts that start emerging as the two investigate a hot-trail of lies, corruption and manipulation in the Washington DC political circuits. Meanwhile, Alan J. Pakula, armed with writer William Goldman, breathes breakneck tension to the seemingly simple task, from Gordon Willis' tense, sombre visuals to art director George Jenkins' painstaking recreation of the bustle and noise of a newspaper office. This is the big and brilliant political barnstormer that Hollywood has forgotten to make.
4- Jaws (1975)
Dir- Steven Spielberg
A little before he made us scared about going to the sea for a swim again, Steven Spielberg had already made TV audiences cringe with terror in 'Duel', a terrifying little tale in which an ordinary motorist is harassed on a lonely, hostile highway by a psychopathic trucker (or should I say the truck itself?). If that film was all about the fear of death coming in its purest, ominous form, 'Jaws', adapted masterfully from Peter Benchley's book, does the opposite with jaw-dropping artistry and astonishing economy, with the director choosing to keep his fearsome leviathan well out of sight even as we can see its victims struggle and gasp for release as John Williams' legendary score throbs with menace. That is however before it actually rears its ravenous face out of the waters and we actually see the eponymous bloody teeth in front of us all. 'Jaws' might have kickstarted a whole genre of me-too monster thrillers of variable quality but it is a flawlessly functioning and seamlessly intelligent thriller; its' monster is one of our oldest predators and it deserves some respect, after all.
3- The Third Man (1949)
Dir- Sir Carol Reed
It sounds perfectly simple to begin with. Down-on-his-luck and broke pulp fiction writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is invited by his friend Harry Lime to post-war Vienna which promises to be a land of opportunity. A land of opportunity it is indeed, except Martins would discover all this opportunity to be heartless and illegitimate, a city crowded with racketeers, swindlers and smugglers and ruled by four armies at the same time. Moreover, he has also found out that mere hours before he landed, Lime was killed in an accident. Or was it only an accident? Martins finds that the answers are rather baffling to say the least.
There were many films after 'The Third Man' that would explore the moral and psychological fallout after the end of World War 2 but let's not forget that Sir Carol Reed's masterful film, scripted flawlessly by Graham Greene, has to be the best of them all. For all its dependence on classic whodunnit tropes (the film has us guessing relentlessly at the central puzzle of Lime's sudden death till the unforgettable reveal towards the frenetic, breathless climax), this might also be one of the earliest portraits of darkness which comes as a cold breath of cynicism as compared to the sultry American noir potboilers of the same time.
Staging the simmering backdrop of false identities, disguised motives and hidden plots that can take lives and play nasty games, Reed and Greene churn out a truly rattling roller coaster ride of guilt, horrifying truth and morality across a city where everything, even innocence and freedom, is for sale. Robert Krasker's tilted, timelessly brilliant cinematography captures the breakneck, unrelenting pace of those proceedings fraught with danger and darkness, from the cobblestones that glitter in the night-lights to the gushing, gritty sewers where there are the resounding echoes of death knocking on the doors. Poetic, poignant yet filled with unsettling pessimism, 'The Third Man' might be the darkest yet most astute portrait of every conceivable failing of mankind.
2- Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Dir- David Lynch
And you thought that 'Inception' was about our dreams and fantasies spinning out of control. Compare the action-packed yet sometimes emotionally restrained dream levels of Christopher Nolan's undeniably impressive brainteaser with David Lynch's eye-widening, jaw-dropping act of illusions and delusions, of both beauty and disgust, and you will know the difference. 'Mulholland Dr' begins like a mesmeric, sensual dance of throbbing, fiercely passionate love and lust, as starry-eyed Betty (a spectacular Naomi Watts) offers to help the befuddled Rita (a gorgeous Laura Harring) in finding out quite why some people wish to get her kill. Sure, they never quite find out why but they do fall in love, the kind of richly erotic love that no other storyteller can quite tell these days.
Meanwhile, in the backdrop that turns out to be a scorching, sun-baked Los Angeles, strange but seductively mysterious things are happening. There is a hideous monster behind a diner, a hitman tries to steal a book and ends up wrecking things, grim and sinister mobsters are demanding to cast an actress in an upcoming film and its director, a young idealist, finds his own world collapsing when he refuses to compromise. Oh and there is also a kingpin called Mr. Roque and someone called the Cowboy but I leave that to you.
Like the often confounding yet ingenious sub-plots and digressions of Thomas Pynchon's brilliant novels, Lynch's film is replete with these seemingly odd yet beautifully etched and acted characters filling up the space of enigma behind the love-lorn couple. They all serve a purpose in this drama, as does the hard-hitting subtext that the film presents: about Hollywood, its sinful allure and its sleazy underbelly, its star-studded dreams and its seedy realities.
When mid-way Lynch, like a devilish conjurer, pulls apart the grand curtains and lets loose the hideous, shattering truth of it all, 'Mulholland Dr' becomes something more than just a brilliant slow-burn thriller. It becomes a stunning, heart-rending and exquisitely sad reflection of all our shattered dreams, all our failed idealism and all the chaos and devastation that is left after it. And in the end, Lynch delivers a climax of such terrifying agony that echoes with the howling wail of loneliness and doom. Whoa!
1- Psycho (1960)
Dir- Alfred Hitchcock
And so, after a ride full of thrills and spills leaping from psychological batshit to sensationalist mysteries, from conspiracy theories to fugitive thrillers, I finally round off the list with the simplest, subtlest and greatest thriller of them all. By the time 'Psycho' was released, Alfred Hitchcock had proven his mettle as the pioneer of the thriller genre and every single new cinematic potboiler was taking all its cues from any of the films that he had already made. To be honest, the bare bones of 'Psycho', at a first glance, felt quite tame stuff for a director who was already churning out spy capers, stylish whodunnits, psychological dramas and romantic thrillers with expert skill. Is it not a bit surprising that the greatest thriller of all time was only about a murder in a motel?
The thing is that 'Psycho', made with Hitchcock's customary visual and narrative sass operating at peak levels, was, in fact, a lot more than just a murder in a motel. Instead of the beautiful layers of stealthy detailing and unexpected nuance (which I would leave virgins to experience on their own), let's not forget also the big, brainy subtext that the film's shocking proceedings unloaded with perverse glee. It was the first time that we saw a frosty ice-blonde, itself the quintessential Hitchcock damsel in distress, capable of taking a risky, suicidal step; it was also the first time when suddenly, her despicably petty crime of stealing some money looked wholly forgivable in front of the greater, inexplicable evil that claims her own life.
It is also an amazingly, flawlessly well-crafted thriller that has never been rivalled in its perfection. Let me explain. A lot of people complain that once they got the twist of 'Psycho', they could predict it easily early on in the film. That might be true if you are being too alert but then, that is the magic of Hitchcock's film. It does not want you to be alert, it does not want you to pay attention to the pitch-perfect, slyly disguised hints or even the occasionally obvious bits. It wants you to be deceived, to be misled as Hitchcock clearly knew that we want to be deceived and we want to be shocked.
And shock it does. Every time you watch 'Psycho', you have something thrillingly new to take away from the experience. At one time, it will be Bernard Hermann's unforgivingly haunting, hollering score. At another, you will be marvelling at the stuffed birds in the office of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) or Martin Balsam's less-than-efficient private detective Arbogast. But the film also never stops shocking and scaring you. Can anything be greater than that?
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