Best Crime Movies of 1959

Semi-retired Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler takes the case of Army Lt. Manion, who murdered a local innkeeper after his wife claimed that he raped her. Over the course of an extensive trial, Biegler parries with District Attorney Lodwick and out-of-town prosecutor Claude Dancer to set his client free, but his case rests on the victim's mysterious business partner, who's hiding a dark secret.

Frederick Loren has invited five strangers to a party of a lifetime. He is offering each of them $10,000 if they can stay the night in a house. But the house is no ordinary house. This house has a reputation for murder. Frederick offers them each a gun for protection. They all arrived in a hearse and will either leave in it $10,000 richer or leave in it dead!

An old-time crook plans a heist. When one of his two partners is found out to be a black man tensions flare.

Two Scotland Yard detectives investigate the murder of a young woman of mixed race who had been passing for white. As they interview a spate of suspects -- including the girl's white boyfriend and his disapproving parents -- the investigators wade through a stubbornly entrenched sludge of racism and bigotry.

In this unusually accurate biography, small-time hood Al Capone comes to Chicago at the dawn of Prohibition to be the bodyguard of racketeer Johnny Torrio. Capone's rise in Chicago gangdom is followed through murder, extortion, and political fraud. He becomes head of Chicago's biggest "business," but moves inexorably toward his downfall and ignominious end.

A Los Angeles detective and his Japanese partner woo an artist while solving a stripper's murder.

An Englishman in France unwittingly is placed into the identity, and steps into the vacated life, of a look-alike French nobleman.

A disgraced merchant marine officer elects to stay aboard his sinking cargo ship in order to prove the vessel was deliberately scuttled and, as a result, vindicate his good name.

In London, a diplomat accidentally becomes involved in the death of a British agent who's after a spy ring that covets British military secrets.

A dedicated FBI agent recalls the agency's battles against the Klan, organized crime and Communist spies.

Panic and fear overtake a small British farming community after a homicidal child-killer escapes from a local mental hospital.

Career criminals and a local youth carefully plan and rehearse the robbery of a Missouri bank.

Story of how a group of incorruptible federal lawmen helped put 1920s' Chicago gangster Al Capone in prison.

Lawyer Ralph Anderson arrives in Tula, an amazingly remote town in the desert, as reluctant emissary of mob chief Victor Massonetti, who wants the airstrip clear for his unofficial exit from the country. Ralph's arrival has a profound effect on his estranged father, the sheriff; his brother Tip, an alcoholic deputy; and his ex-sweetheart Linda, now married to Tip. Tension builds as a small army of gangsters takes over the town. Then the situation abruptly changes...

Ten strangers are invited to a mansion on a remote island, where they are killed one by one by a mysterious assailant. Based on the Agatha Christie novel, also known by the title And Then There Were None.

The rise and fall of gang lord Joe Sante. A crime boss appears before a Senate subcommittee. A flashbacks tell his story.

Helped by socialite Janice Kendon and barkeeper Scott O'Brien, Arizona deputy sheriff Les Martin works to solve three brutal murders in and around the Grand Canyon. His efforts leads to the killer fleeing with Janice as a hostage and a chase by car and helicopter lead to a climax on a miner's bucket on cables a mile above the canyon floor.

Jail house tensions mount as a killer's execution approaches.

Dutch painter Jan-Van Rooyer hurries to keep a rendezvous with Jacqueline Cousteau, an elegant, sophisticated Frenchwoman, slightly his elder, whose relationship with him had turned from art student into one of love trysts. He arrives and is confronted by Detective Police Inspector Morgan who accuses him of having murdered Jacqueline. Morgan listens sceptically to the dazed denials of Van Rooyer as he tells the story of his relationship with the murdered woman. Morgan, after hearing the story, realizes that the mystery has deepened, and it becomes more complicated when the Assistant Commissioner, Sir Brian Lewis, explains that Jacqueline was not married but was being kept by Sir Howard Fenton, a high-ranking diplomat whose names must be kept out of the case.

Tropical island underwater scuba diving swimming murder thriller, in which divers and thieves search for a sunken treasure.

A power-mad union boss resorts to murder to eliminate witnesses scheduled to testify against him. The eclectic cast includes Mickey Rooney, Mamie Van Doren, Mel Torme, Jay North, Vampira, Charles Chaplin Jr., Jackie Coogan and Norman Grabowski.

A serial killer is murdering women in the Whitechapel district of London. An American policeman is brought in to help Scotland Yard solve the case.

An escaped prisoner is trying to clear his name.

The story of the infamous Purple Gang - a ring of bootleggers, hijackers and killers in 1920's Detroit.

Chuck Wheeler gets out of the Pen and sets up an elaborate heist of Vegas casino money travelling by armored truck. He enlists the help of shady club owner Joe Darren and his ex-cellmate's wife, Vi. Vi's husband Mike is a trigger happy and jealous hothead and will not grant her a divorce. Mike escapes from prison right before the armored truck job goes into motion and promises trouble as he tries to locate his associates and his wandering wife.

Roger Fenton has been released from prison and stared to build a new life. But his past catches up when an elderly visitor is murdered in his office.

After World War II, an ex-spy returns to Germany to search for a cache of jewels he hid in a Czechoslovakian convent.

Serving a jail sentence for a crime he didn't commit, Paul Langley makes several attempts to escape from prison, in order to clear his name. He also has other problems, his wife is about to go into labor with their first baby.

Based on the play by Ted Willis, the film is set in the years just before World War II, when England hadn't completely dug itself out of the worldwide depression. Melvyn Hayes is featured as an aimless teenager, who tries to escape his squalid surroundings by entering a life of crime. He falls in with local hoodlum Herbert Lom, who holds the rest of the slum citizens in the grip of fear including Hayes' own family. No Trees in the Street chronicles Hayes' sordid progress from nickel-and-dime thefts to murder.

A group of beatniks unwittingly harbor a serial rapist. A cop goes after him after his wife is attacked.

A madman is on the loose... killing fashion models that appear on the cover of magazines. The police start a manhunt in an attempt to capture the killer.

Believing he can elude justice, a California law student murders an elderly pawnbroker, then matches wits with the detective on the case.

The Cat Gang is a group of precocious British kids. They have a habit of hanging around a grown-up customs official who wishes that they'd beat it. But the Gang comes in handy when a smuggling gang arrives on the scene.

An American officer scours Britain in search of his dead brother's girlfriend and becomes involved in a jewel heist.

After getting out of prison, a Latino criminal tries to go straight.

Berlin provides the backdrop for this crime drama that centers on a military doctor falsely accused of dealing illegal drugs. Determined to prove his innocence, he escapes from the MPs and ends up holing up in the apartment his wife rented. He doesn't know that she has sublet the flat to a nightclub singer. When he finds out, he begs the singer to assist him. She is attracted to him and agrees. The doctor believes that his wife is behind the black-market dealings, but in the end, they find the real culprit.

Henry Jekyll was always the outsider, a bungling and awkward buffoon, relegated to waiting for his invitation to participate in life that never arrived: until he discovers a medical formula developed by a dead uncle, which claimed to turn 'a man of timid disposition into a bold, fearless dragon'. Taking a draught of the elixir Henry is transformed into suave, sophisticated and highly desirable Teddy Hyde. Armed with his new persona, Teddy is ready to face the world; but is Henry ready for the consequences?

A gold thief and his gang use a skier's lodge and meet a monster covered with cobwebs.

A gang of thieves led by American Eddy (Reed de Rouen) kill a security guard during a botched safe robbery and flee with his daughter (Leigh Madison) as a hostage. They hide out in a dangerously unstable old warehouse for a couple of days awaiting their getaway ship to sail, but Johnny (Kenneth Cope) falls for the girl - provoking a serious falling-out and a violent conclusion to the disastrous heist.

The daughter of a textile company owner falls in love with a young illustrator with a secret criminal past.

This low-budget Asian-set adventure concerns a reformed smuggler (Vince Edwards of TV's Ben Casey) who finds his missing wife (Carol Ohmart) in Hong Kong.

A mob assassin holds innocent hostages at an airport in upstate New York.

A novelist wakes up with a gun in his hand and a corpse in the house he woke up in. He doesn't remember how he got there or even if he committed the killing.

Cajun newlyweds must deal with the jealousy of his brother, who also loved her, and the arrival of a mysterious seductress in their bayou backwater.

A drifter riding the rails gets mistaken for the new sheriff of a small town. He takes the police job and is immediately pressured to crack down on local organized crime.

When the shootings of two juvenile inmates bring public protest, a psychologist is brought in to see if he can do anything to control the problems peacefully.

A sleazeball (Ronald Long) who supplies women to his public-relations clients explains the rules of the game to his latest acquisition (Jeanne Rainer).

Gangster and cop killer Jack Martin is on the run from the law, and hides out in a small town. Low on funds, he engineers a clever bank robbery that yields him a big bundle. Now he has not only the cops and the FBI after him, but also the local crime boss, who's outraged that an outsider can pull off a heist like that in his territory and not cut him in on it.

Man hides out in Puerto Rico from the police and his double-crossing attorney.