British film photo galley for Crime/Thriller

British films Crime/Thriller

The Lodger (1927)

The best known and most popular of Hitchcock’s silent films is The Lodger, a skilfully woven concoction of suspense thriller and romance which presages many of the director’s subsequent great works. The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, Psycho, and many others all have their roots clearly visible in this groundbreaking masterpiece of early British cinema... [More...]

Blackmail (1929)

Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock’s second great crime thriller (after The Lodger), has the distinction of being the first all-sound film to be released in Great Britain. The film was originally shot as a silent film but during its initial post-production the studio (British International Pictures) requested Hitchcock to convert it into a partial sound film... [More...]

Murder! (1930)

Murder! has the distinction of being Alfred Hitchcock’s one and only true whodunit, in the mould of the classic English murder mystery popularised by such writers as Agatha Christie. Hitchcock’s preference for suspense over surprise is evident in this film which, whilst competently directed and entertaining... [More...]

Number Seventeen (1932)

Alfred Hitchcock was justifiably unenthused when his employers, British International Pictures, requested him to make an adaptation of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s mediocre stage play Number Seventeen. Hitchcock rightly considered the play to be full of clichés and only took on the project with great reluctance. Rather than make a serious thriller... [More...]

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

The Man Who Knew Too Much was the film which earned Alfred Hitchcock international recognition and effectively assured his prolific film making career after a faltering start in the early 1930s. His subsequent British films and his later Hollywood offerings established him as the absolute master of the suspense thriller genre... [More...]

The 39 Steps (1935)

The absolute best of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films is this exciting, highly entertaining adaptation of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. It was the culmination of everything that Hitchcock had achieved in his preceding twenty or so films and a template for much of what was to follow. Along with the subsequent The Lady Vanishes (1938) ... [More...]

Young and Innocent (1937)

Young and Innocent shows a lighter, more human side to Hitchcock than many of his films, and it can just as easily be classified as a romantic comedy as a suspense thriller. Interestingly, this was the only one of the thrillers that Hitchcock made in the 1930s which did not have a political back story, and it has often been described as a remake of his earlier The... [More...]

Green for Danger (1946)

Possibly the best film to come out of the immensely successful partnership of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder is this mischievously tongue-in-cheek thriller whodunit featuring some of the best British actors of its time. It’s a classic of its kind, benefiting from an ingenious plot, well developed characters, and a mood that is keenly evocative of England during WWII... [More...]

Brighton Rock (1947)

The most celebrated film to come out of the Boulting brothers partnership is this superlative 1940s thriller based on a popular novel by the acclaimed English writer Graham Greene. Brighton Rock is the only true example of film noir in British cinema, a work which brings the distinctive look and feel of American thriller movies of the time to the cramped boarding houses and dingy back streets... [More...]

Odd Man Out (1947)

The first of Carol Reed’s unfaltering masterpieces is this extraordinarily intense and poignant film noir drama which both presaged the director’s other great works – notably The Third Man (1949) – and provided the inspiration for many subsequent British noir thrillers. The lukewarm reception the film received on its release probably had more to do with its sympathetic... [More...]

Stage Fright (1950)

Coming after the commercial failure of the huge experimental gamble Under Capricorn (1949), Stage Fright looks like a dramatic throwback to a much earlier phase of Alfred Hitchcock’s career. Here we are, back in England, with a rather quaint murder mystery – no big name American actors, no set-piece action sequences... [More...]

Beat the Devil (1953)

Beat the Devil is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek yet totally bizarre concoction of screwball comedy and film noir adventure thriller, which manages to be irresistibly funny in spite of a plot that is childishly absurd and at times unfathomable. Director John Huston intended it to be a spoof of his earlier noir films, particularly The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre... [More...]

The Good Die Young (1954)

One of the few true film noir crime dramas to be made in Britain, The Good Die Young benefits from a mixed Anglo-American cast which gives it a realism and harder edge than many contemporary British thrillers. Directed by Lewis Gilbert, one of Britain’s most prolific filmmakers, best known for the three Bond movies he made in the 1970s... [More...]

Footsteps in the Fog (1955)

During his long and productive career as a filmmaker, Arthur Lubin never earned the critical acclaim that he deserved, although his films, mostly low budget B-movies, were often very popular and directed with great flair. His diverse oeuvre includes film noir dramas such as Gangs of Chicago (1940), thrillers such as Who Killed Aunt Maggie? (1940) and several entertaining Abbott and Costello... [More...]

The Ladykillers (1955)

The Ladykillers (the film which did for Boccherini’s String Quintet in E what Brief Encounter had done for Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2) is the last great comedy to come out of Ealing Studios before it closed for business in 1955. The film, which was a huge success in both Britain and America, has acquired the status of a classic and is widely regarded as one of the best... [More...]

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

After their successful pairing in Hammer’s 1958 production of Dracula, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are reunited in this enjoyable Gothic-style adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the only Sherlock Holmes film which Hammer made, although others were planned. Cushing is as good in the role of the deerstalker-wearing sleuth as he was as the vampire hunter... [More...]

Never Let Go (1960)

Having established himself as a superlative comedy performer in a series of hit British comedies – including The Naked Truth (1957) and I’m All Right Jack (1959) - Peter Sellers was keen to take on a tough dramatic role to avoid being typecast in future films. He had the opportunity to do just that when he landed the part of a psychopathic gangster boss in this hard-edged thriller... [More...]

The Hands of Orlac (1960)

After a successful concert, the pianist Stephen Orlac is involved in a plane crash whilst returning to his fiancée Louise. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance must take a detour because no one can pass near the prison where the strangler Vasseur is due to be guillotined that same night. Six months after an operation on his hands... [More...]

Murder at the Gallop (1963)

In the second of her four outings as Miss Marple (five if you include her cameo appearance in The Alphabet Murders), Margaret Rutherford once again proves that no one is better suited to play Agatha Christie’s spinster detective (although she would later be eclipsed by Joan Hickson in the BBC TV series of Miss Marple stories)... [More...]

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

The most impressive of the production collaborations of Bryan Forbes and Richard Attenborough, Seance on a Wet Afternoon is a darkly affectionate portrait of insanity and marital devotion that is as poignant as it is unsettling. The dreary, confined setting of the old Victorian house within which most of the story takes place is a potent expression of the bleakly oppressive... [More...]

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