The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman’s take on Raymond Chandler, with Elliot Gould as a Philip Marlowe displaced to '70’s L.A. Great dialogue, and a wonderful performance by Sterling Hayden as a past-it writer with a drinking problem.
I’ve always wanted to try The Long Goodbye…god knows why I’ve gone this long without seeing it. How do you think it compares to the 1946 Howard Hawks/Humphrey Bogart The Big Sleep, Chandlerwise?
My best classic mystery flick would be Billy Wilder’s 1957 Witness for the Prosecution, with its juicy hambone of a cast…Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester among them. Fascinating, baffling, and all the leads chewing on the scenery at once. Time to rent THAT baby again.
Second would be Rene Clair’s 1945 And Then There Were None. ANd I don’t even LIKE Agatha Christie All that much.
Look up twelve posts from yours.
Which is exactly why it will bore a true mystery buff to death, as it did me. I can’t express enough how much I hated this movie.
I 2nd, 3rd and 4th Memento, Dead Again (Awesome!) & Witness for the Prosecution.
Adding to the list, in the “classics” genre, Sorry, Wrong Number, Double Indemnity, Rear Window, Anatomy of a Murder and with a bit of comedy thrown in, Charade.
And though it’s really not a mystery in the classic sense, but in the “Columbo” sense (ie, we know whodunnit – the thrill is watching the detective solve the crime – or does he? ;)), Dial M For Murder is one of my all-time favorite movies. I highly recommend it!
Excuse me while I go pop my copy in the vcr…
Black Widow (1987), with Debra Winger as an FBI agent obsessed with a black widow murderer, played by Theresa Russell.
Wow, I came in to say Deathtrap and Name of the Rose. Glad to see so many mysteries that I’ve forgotten about mentioned as well!
Another that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Dead of Winter. Made in 1987, it starred Mary Steenburgen and Roddy McDowell. Not the same caliber as some of the other movies mentioned, but certainly much better than Silver!!
I’d completely forgotten about that movie, now I’m going to have to go rent it again.
Nobody has mentioned L.A. Confidential or Mulholland Drive. Neither are straightforward detective-solves-crime mysteries. In fact, Mulholland Drive is a more like a hallucination of a mystery. Lots of fun, though, both of them.
Well, I’m a big David Lynch fan, so you might consider me biased, but …
I second ‘Mullholland Drive’ and add ‘Lost Highway’. In both cases, the viewer is actually the sleuth, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Neither should be viewed with kids or great aunts - sex, nudity, potty mouth, and violence, though not gratuitous.
The ‘Twin Peaks’ series is sort of suitable for family viewing. It is a traditional mystery where viewer and character are sleuths. Lots of red herrings to dodge. The series is available on VHS and DVD, but the packaged set doesn’t always include the pilot episode (which one needs to start with) or the finale movie “Fire Walk With Me” which explains how the whole thing went down. By the way, “Fire…” is not for kids or prudes either, but the pilot and the teevee episodes are ok.
While it’s listed as a thriller because there’s some violence, I thought **When Strangers Appear ** was a fairly good mystery. It’s a definite whodunnit.
A stranger mystery (though not as strange as a Lynch movie) is ** Lulu on the Bridge **.
In a similar vein to Memento - in that one pieces together what really happened- I’d suggest ** Urbania**.
I’d second Zero Effect as worth watching once. Although my favorite part of it was a song off the soundtrack (“Emma J” by Brendan Benson)
I’d nominate the version of The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart and To Live and Die in LA.
I also understand that PBS ran several serials based upon P.D. James’ novels. I haven’t seen these, but if they’re half as good as her books, they’re worth checking out.
I’m not sure if these are the sort of movies that you would consider to be mysteries, but I would recommend:
Blood Simple (1985, U.S., dir. Joel Coen)
Body Heat (1981, U.S., dir. Lawrence Kasdan)
Chinatown (1974, U.S., dir. Roman Polanski)
House of Games (1987, U.S., dir. David Mamet)
M (1931, Germany, dir. Fritz Lang)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, U.S., dir. John Huston)
The Third Man (1949, U.K., dir. Carol Reed)
Touch of Evil (1958, U.S., dir. Orson Welles)
The Usual Suspects (1995, U.S., dir. Bryan Singer)
Vertigo (1958, U.S., dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Ooh, and I thought of a few more recent ones I really liked…
Shattered with Tom Berenger, Presumed Innocent with Harrison Ford and Suspect with Liam Neeson, Dennis Quaid and Cher.
Big thumbs up to all of the above.
I would add Murder By Decree… Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper.
Well, it’s clearly more an Altman film than an attempt to epitomize Chandler. The updated timeline, a rather different ending from the book and the very idea of Elliot Gould as a hardboiled detective seemed to piss off many critics immensely when the film first came out. The Chandleresque features that did remain, however, were IMO the essential ones: the crisp dialogue, colorful characters (Mark Rydell’s simultaneously comical and horrifying gangster is a standout) and most importantly, the envisioning of Marlowe as a man of ethics in a world where all around him have none.
The Big Sleep is probably closer to the spirit of Chandler’s writing, but TLG is certainly a worthy movie in its own right.
Years ago I caught the last 10 minutes The Jagged Edge at a freind’s house on cable, so, obviously, I knew the ending. When watching it with my brother and sister later on, they were both yelling “Who is it? Who is it?” at the end, and I was mystified bacause obviously the killer was…
It must have been well done because my brother is not easily duped. It’s one of the big regrets I have re movies because you can’t unknow the ending. Enjoy.
No one has mentioned The Conversation - great movie.
Three Days of the Condor - Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway
Blow Out with John Travolta, directed by Brian DePalma
Mullholland Falls–Nick Nolte, John Malkovich, and Treat Williams. It deals with corrupt cops, but it’s not anti-police. It deals with problems in the nuclear weapons program, but it’s not anti-nuke or anti-military. And the more pre-conceptions you bring to the theater, the less likely you are to figure out who is the real killer.