My Top 5 All-Time Favorite Suspense Movies

The weather's starting to turn on us, so it's time to think about indoor activities like watching great films. I have many favorites, so it's going to take me multiple lists to break them all down for you.

This list will be focused mainly on what I'm going to call "suspense" (though action, mystery, and noir are all represented). These are the movies I return to time and again when I want a great story told by gifted directors, actors, and writers.

1. The Maltese Falcon
Humphrey Bogart is one of my top two all-time favorite actors (the other is in the second movie on this list), and it's mostly because of this movie. He's the quintessential noir detective, Sam Spade, troubled by dames who bring violent thugs and nosy cops to his seedy little shop. He's quick-witted but not overly kind as he helps Mary Astor track down either her sister or her lover or possibly a plain black statue.... Sydney Greenstreet is here as the jolly but sinister Gutman, and Peter Lorre plays a petulant crook who favors gardenia-scented calling cards. Everything is spare with just the right amount of detail. Falcon is one of the best noir films ever made.

Humphrey Bogart

2. Notorious
I recently rewatched this Alfred Hitchcock-directed gem, and was again awed by the perfection of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as they portray love tenderly disguised as disdain. Ingrid Bergman is a good-time girl named Alicia Huberman whose father just went to prison as a traitor. She, however, is a patriot, which is why CIA agent Devlin recruits her with a delicate assignment: he wants to use her to infiltrate a group of her father's Nazi cronies - which may require Alicia to seduce her old beau, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains, who you may remember from Casablanca as the charmingly corrupt French police chief).

Everyone is at the top of their game here. So much is left unsaid between the two lovers, shown only with looks and long kisses. There are the usual fantastically tense sequences Hitchcock is known for, and Grant and Bergman smolder in their scenes together.

Rains, Grant, and Bergman

3. L.A. Confidential
I can put this movie into the DVD player and watch it on repeat. The plot is complex and there are three incredible leading men, each with his own storyline that slowly feeds into the main narrative. Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a cop whose quick temper and brick-like build have relegated him to roles that require more brawn than brains, but he knows he can do more. Ed Exley (Guy Pierce) is an ambitious new cop who wants to maintain his integrity and climb to the top of the deeply corrupt LAPD. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a Hollywood hanger-on who likes the perks of cop life more than the mission.

James Cromwell (left),
Pierce, Crowe, and Spacey

The story begins when a high-level mobster gets arrested, leaving a vacuum in the crime world that leads to massacre, corruption, high-end prostitution (Kim Basinger, in a role that won her an Oscar), and the darkest guts of Tinseltown. There are very few movies that offer this much story and compelling characters.

4. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
This slyly self-aware film marked Robert Downey Jr.'s pre-Iron Man comeback role and it pays homage to the trashy pulps that inspired The Maltese Falcon and L.A. Confidential. Harry Lockheart (Downey) is a small-time crook who lucks into a movie role (they happen to need a crooked type, and he nails the audition with some Method acting) and is sent to Hollywood. As research for the part, he is paired with detective Gay Perry (Val Kilmer, who gets some of the best lines and delivers them to perfection). But a girl from Lockheart's past (Michelle Monaghan) shows up with a big problem, so he pretends to be a detective to impress her. Then real corpses start appearing in odd places, and the hapless Lockheart needs all the help he can get to stay alive and out of prison.

I'm telling you, watch it.

5. In Bruges

This foul-mouthed gem is one that may have easily slipped under your radar, but fans of Harold Pinter's play "The Dumb Waiter" will recognize some of the setup. Two hit men with very different personalities hole up in the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, waiting for their next assignment. Ken (Brendan Gleeson), the senior of the pair, is charmed by the attractions of scenery and art. His impatient partner, Ray (Colin Farrell), is not. At all. And he goes out looking for trouble, which ought to be hard to find in such a sleepy place....

Gleeson and Farrell

Farrell shows that he's more than just an action hero, playing his deeply immature character with a seemingly effortless combination of humor and pathos. Gleeson is the film's solid heart, and Ralph Fiennes almost steals the show as the hit men's hilariously obscene - yet deeply principled - boss. It's a violent film, completely un-PC, with more F-bombs than you can count (one of the special features on the DVD is a supercut of all the obscenities uttered by the characters - a solid minute and a half). So don't say I didn't warn you, but you should really check out f***ing Bruges.

(Side note for fans: it's by the director who did 2012's Seven Psychopaths starring Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, and Christopher Walken.)

Hunting Eichmann

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a thrilling international manhunt, a group of Israeli secret service agents risked everything to bring Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to justice.

Adolf Eichmann fled Germany in the wake of the fall of Berlin and made his way to Argentina. Juan Perón welcomed and sheltered Nazi war criminals in the decades after the war in spite of the guilty verdicts at Nuremberg. As years passed, Eichmann's role in the genocide of European Jews became more clear, though no one seemed interested in finding him. No one except for those who had survived.

Eichmann covered his tracks well and may have died free - diminished and impoverished, but free. There are details in the story that sound straight from a spy thriller but are well-researched and documented. A blind Jewish man and his beautiful daughter were the first to recognize the mass murderer in hiding - Eichmann's grown son's unrestrained anti-Semitism and familial pride sparked their suspicions. An Israeli commercial plane was drafted into service to smuggle the prisoner to Tel Aviv, its crew of Holocaust survivors only told of the man's identity after takeoff.

Israel was brand-new, and so was its intelligence agency, Mossad  Extracting Eichmann from a country so openly hostile to Jews was a major test of Mossad's capabilities. If a whisper of his danger reached Eichmann, the hunters were sure he would go deeper into hiding and evade justice for good. If the Argentine government found out about the spies in their country, all of the agents would have been imprisoned for life.

The story is a fascinating one, told with the kind of detail you normally find in a John le Carré spy novel like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The echoing horror of the Holocaust permeates the story, since each Jew attached to the hunt had his or her own losses to contend with. The self-discipline of the agents who captured Eichmann is remarkable - they were able to restrain their desire for vengeance in exchange for justice.

The object of the hunt was a man so thin, balding, spectacled and poor that he inspired disgust and pity in his captors. Eichmann's defense was that he had only been following orders, and his persona and defense strategy led reporter Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase "the banality of evil" in her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. The trial served as a reminder of the Holocaust and touched off an entire era of studies in history and ethics. (An excellent book on the subject of banal evil is James Waller's Becoming Evil, one I read in a class Dr. Waller taught on the psychology of holocaust and genocide at Whitworth University.)

And for spy thriller junkies, you have to see Alfred Hitchcock's classic Notorious starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Bergman is a civilian enlisted to spy on a group of Nazis in South America, pushed to ever-more compromising tactics by her handler, Grant. (It also has one of the most notorious kisses in movie history, a post-Hays Code smooch that took three minutes to finish.) See it. You'll thank me.

Do you really need more reasons?

Quotable:

"'We will bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem,' [Isser] Harel said, striking the table, 'and perhaps the world will be reminded of its responsibilities. It will be recognized that, as a people, we never forgot. Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes.'" - 174

"That someone who looked like a postal clerk, someone so average in appearance and temperament, could have been responsible for killing millions of Jews was a horror in and of itself. Harel later described the feeling he had that night. 'The sight of that miserable runt, who had lost every vestige of his former superiority and arrogance the moment he was stripped of his uniform and powers of authority, gave them a feeling of insult and profound scorn. Was this the personification of evil? Was this the tool used by a diabolic government? This nonentity, devoid of human dignity and pride, was this the messenger of death for six million Jews?'" - 256

"David Ben-Gurion had achieved his ambition. The trial had a profound impact on Israel. It unified the country in a way it had not been unified since the 1948 war. It educated the Israeli public, particularly the young, on the true nature of the Holocaust. And, after sixteen years of silence, it allowed survivors to openly share their experiences. The trial also reinforced to Israelis that a sovereign state for Jews was essential for their survival." - 322