"The suspense is terrible," says Gwendolen in
Oscar Wilde
's
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895), before adding, "I hope it will last." This witticism contains an intriguing paradox. Why is it that we both fear and enjoy being frightened?
Alfred Hitchcock
always thought it started in a mother's arms, when she says 'Boo!' to her child, who is first startled and then delighted. In the cinema, this sensation might have originated in the first public screenings of films by the
Lumiere brothers
in 1895. "A train appears on the screen," wrote Maxim Gorky in a memorable newspaper review. "It speeds straight at you - watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit..." Some audiences did indeed flee the theatres in terror, but they must have returned, because the cinema had soon established itself as the most popular mass medium of the early twentieth century.
Audiences went to the cinema not simply to see but also to feel something which they would not ordinarily experience in real life. At one extreme, they were enthralled by the ingenuity of the dog in
Rescued by Rover
(1905) as it discovers the whereabouts of a kidnapped child. At another, they shuddered as the title character of F.W. Murnau's
Nosferatu
(Germany, 1922) makes his sinister progress to the heroine's bedchamber. Something of that film's eerie atmosphere seeped into the first thriller masterpiece of the British cinema,
The Lodger
(1926); and the first major British talkie,
Blackmail
(1929) was also a thriller, using sound particularly imaginatively in the scene when the recurrence of the word 'knife' in the mouth of a gossipy neighbour presses on the heroine's guilty conscience like an exposed nerve.
The director of both films was the young
Alfred Hitchcock
, who declared his intention "to give the public good healthy mental shake-ups". So he supplied a string of films during the 1930s - including
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934),
The 39 Steps
(1935),
Sabotage
(1936) and
The Lady Vanishes
(1938) - which set the standard by which future English thrillers were to be judged. They also set
some important ground rules. In the thriller, whodunit is not that important, and unlike the gangster or the crime film, the leading protagonist can be an innocent bystander who gets caught up in the adventure, like Richard Hannay (
Robert Donat
) in
The 39 Steps
. In this way, an audience is gripped because the hero is an Everyman figure grappling with unexpected danger not too far removed from possibility. Needless to say, not all thrillers of the decade were of that quality, least of all - with a few exceptions - the so-called 'quota quickies', supporting features designed to fulfil as cheaply as possible quota requirements for British films. Nevertheless, films like
Carol Reed
's
Night Train to Munich
(1938) and
Thorold Dickinson
's
The Arsenal Stadium Mystery
(1939) had something of
Hitchcock
's verve.
During the war, the thriller was pressed into service to guard people against complacency.
Dickinson
's
Next of Kin
(1942) warned that 'careless talk costs lives', while
Alberto Cavalcanti
's
Went the Day Well?
(1942) was a disturbing fantasy about a possible German invasion of England. The latter was based on a story by
Graham Greene
, who scripted three of the best British thrillers of the late 1940s, the
Boulting Brothers
'
Brighton Rock
(1947), based on his own novel, and two films directed by
Carol Reed
,
The Fallen Idol
(1948) and
The Third Man
(1949), the former a study of innocence and experience, the latter an extraordinary evocation of the amorality of post-war Europe. Prior to these
films, Reed had also directed the outstanding
Odd Man Out
(1947), which, alongside two films of the same year,
Cavalcanti
's
They Made Me a Fugitive
and
Robert Hamer
's
It Always Rains on Sunday
, cast a noirish gloom across post-war tales of betrayal and disillusionment.
The most significant thrillers of the next decade or so often combined suspense
with a social conscience. Particularly adept at this were the producer-director
team of
Michael Relph
and
Basil Dearden
, examining the policeman's lot in
The
Blue Lamp
(1950), racial prejudice in
Sapphire
(1959) and homosexuality in the groundbreaking
Victim
(1961). Similarly, the
Boulting Brothers
'
Seven Days to
Noon
(1950) combined an exciting race-against-time structure with a thoughtful sub-text about the dangers of atomic research. Forced into exile during the
McCarthyist
era in America,
Joseph Losey
brought a stylistic flamboyance to
Time
Without Pity
(1957) and
Blind Date
(1959) but also brought his socialist sympathies to bear in attacking capital punishment in the former film and
exposing class hypocrisy and police malpractice in the latter. Another
blacklisted American,
Cy Endfield
also enlivened the English scene with the exciting
Hell Drivers
(1957) and with a B-feature,
Impulse
(1955), made for
Robert
S. Baker
and
Monty Berman
's
Tempean
films, which produced some competent
low-budget thrillers during this period. The most controversial thriller of the
time, however, was undoubtedly
Michael Powell
's
Peeping Tom
(1960), which,
brilliantly but disturbingly, analysed the tortured psychology of its hero and
implicated the audience in his anguished voyeurism.
It would be fair to say that the antics of
James Bond
rather overshadowed
most British attempts to revitalise the thriller in the 1960s. Indeed,
refreshment came from abroad, with two remarkable films from European auteurs
working in London.
Roman Polanski
's
Repulsion
(1965) clinically observed the
mental breakdown of a lonely young woman (Catherine Deneuve) whose alienation
will lead her to murder.
Michelangelo Antonioni
's
Blow-Up
(1966) told an
ambiguous tale of a fashionable London photographer who films an incident in a
park that looks like a harmless love scene but, on closer photographic
inspection, could be a murder. The artistic ambition of that film was to be
matched at the end of the decade by
Donald Cammell
's and
Nicolas Roeg
's
Performance
(1970), in which a reclusive pop star begins to play deadly mind
games with a gangster on the run who has stumbled into his lair.
Roeg
was later
to top this with the cinematically adventurous
Don't Look Now
(1973), which added
sensuality and the supernatural to breathtaking suspense.
In subsequent years, some of the most interesting thrillers stiffened their
suspense with political undertones. If
Richard Lester
's
Juggernaut
(1974) seemed
in part to use its situation of an ocean liner in peril as an audacious metaphor
for the last days of Edward Heath's Conservative Government, later films like
John Mackenzie
's
The Long Good Friday
(1979),
David Drury
's
The Defence of the
Realm
(1985) and
Peter Greenaway
's
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
(1989) spun tense tales of entrepreneurial greed, political conspiracy and
materialist rapacity to communicate what they saw as the ruthless values of
Thatcherism.
Recent examples have tended to lack that political and social edge and have been slick but relatively conventional in their dramatic strategies, such as
Danny Boyle
's
Shallow Grave
(1994) and two popular gangster-thrillers,
Guy Ritchie
's
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
(1998) and
Jonathan Glazer
's
Sexy Beast
(2000). Nowadays it is more common to find a good British thriller on television than in the cinema, but it remains a fascinatingly flexible form that, at its best, can undermine complacency through a dramatic rendering of psychological, social, familial and political tensions; and can encourage sheltered but sensation-hungry audiences, in
Hitchcock
's phrase, "to put their toe in the cold water of fear to see what it's like."
Neil Sinyard
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