A follow-up to the author’s acclaimed, award-winning book, “Mystery, Suspense, Film Noir and Detective Movies on DVD: A Guide to the Best in Cinema Thrills”, this new ebook describes more than 160 additional movies in the mystery, noir, suspense categories that are now available to purchase for the home DVD library. This book is divided into two sections. In the first, complete cast and production credits, plus full release details are provided in addition to extensive reviews. The second section supplies vital information (including DVD details), while concentrating on comprehensive assessments. Just a few of the 160 movies covered in this book include Above Suspicion, Along Came a Spider, The Asphalt Jungle, The Bicycle Thief, The Case of the Howling Dog, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, Chinatown, City Hall, Cutter’s Way, Dangerous Crossing, The Da Vinci Code, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Dead Reckoning, Dick Tracy, The Firm, Gilda, Hangmen Also Die, Hound of the Baskervilles, The House of Secrets, Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Kiss Before Dying, The Long Goodbye, The Manchurian Candidate, The Metro Chase, Murder on a Honeymoon, The Phantom Express, Pickup on South Street, The Presidio, Scream in the Night, The Shawshank Redemption, The Temp, Thieves Highway, The Thirteenth Guest, Times Square, 23 Paces to Baker Street, The Wilby Conspiracy, Witness, Witness for the Prosecution, The Woman in Green, Young Man with a Horn, You Only Live Once. (112 pages). (33,681 words).

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Among Stanley Kubrick’s early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick’s eye. With a dry narration we’re introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it’s being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it.

On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that’s been dug up as an extra. –Paul Tonks

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This 1941 melodrama is memorable both for its strong central performances and their intimations of how the previous decade’s crime dramas would evolve into film noir–no accident, given the solid direction of veteran Raoul Walsh and the hand of screenwriter John Huston, who teamed with the author of its novelistic source, WR Burnett (Little Caesar). In the central character of Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, a fictional peer to John Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart finds a defining role that anticipates the underlying fatalism and moral ambiguity visible in the career-making roles soon to follow, including Sam Spade in Huston’s directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Earle suggests a prescient variation on the enraged sociopaths that were fixtures of the gangster melodramas that shaped Bogart’s early screen image. Pardoned from a long prison stretch, the weary robber is clearly more eager to savour his new freedom than immediately swing back into action. But his early release has been engineered by a mobster who wants Earle to pull off a high-stakes burglary, setting in motion a plot that is a prototype for doomed heist capers–a small, yet potent sub-genre that would later include Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

What gives High Sierra its power, however, isn’t the crime itself but Earle’s collision with the younger, brasher confederates picked to help him, and the hard-edged but vulnerable taxi dancer they’re competing for, played forcefully by Ida Lupino, who actually received top billing. Her attraction to the reluctant Earle is complicated by a convoluted sub-plot designed to showcase then starlet Joan Leslie, but the movie finally moves into its most gripping moments when the wounded Earle, pursued by police, flees ever higher toward the mountains. His final, suicidal showdown would become a clich&éacute; of sorts in lesser films, but here it provides a wrenching climax sealed by Lupino’s vivid final scene. –Sam Sutherland

High Sierra [VHS] [1941]

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Sterling Hayden: Leading Man, Western , Film Noir, Johnny Guitar, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing

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