Best Mystery 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.

The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomized to cover up the truth.

When a nobleman is threatened by a family curse on his newly inherited estate, detective Sherlock Holmes is hired to investigate.

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!

A California commercial pilot sees a telecast in London of an interview with Sir Mark Lodden at his home. The Canadian is convinced that the baronet is a fraud, and he is actually a look-alike actor named Frank Welney.

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.

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

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

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.

Mystery writer Cornelia Van Gorder has rented a country house called "The Oaks", which not long ago was the scene of some murders committed by a strange and violent criminal known as "The Bat". Meanwhile, the house's owner, bank president John Fleming, has recently embezzled one million dollars in securities and has hidden the proceeds in the house, but is killed before he can retrieve it.

Jonathan Drake, while attending his brother's funeral, is shocked to find the head of the deceased is missing. When his brother's skull shows up later in a locked cabinet, Drake realizes an ancient curse placed upon his grandfather by a tribe of South American Jivaro Indians is still in effect and that he himself is the probable next victim.

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.

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.

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.

A World War II evacuee (Van Johnson) returns years later to England and finds his father in prison framed for murder.

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.

In the first episode of The Twilight Zone, a man finds himself totally alone in a small town. His panic escalates into terror as he desperately looks for an explanation.

A ship's captain gets mixed up with murder during the hunt for lost Nazi treasure.

A artist living in a quiet Connecticut town is the main suspect in the disappearance of his shrew wife. Things turn ugly when the townsfolk attempt to take the law into their own hands.

A young airline pilot wrongly accused of murdering his unfaithful wife searches for the real killer.

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.

Barbara Jean Trenton is a faded film star who lives in the past by constantly re-watching her old movies instead of moving on with her life, so her associates try to lure her out of her self-imposed isolation.

A New York newspaper reporter is sent to the Swedish island of Gotland to interview a nuclear scientist. He gets involved with foreign agents who have kidnapped the scientist’s daughter.

A film crew doing a live broadcast from a haunted castle is convinced that a strangling was committed by a real ghost.

An antique mirror reflects the image of a long-ago murder committed before its gaze.

The Twilight Zone is an American media franchise based on the anthology television series created by Rod Serling. The episodes are in various genres, including fantasy, science fiction, suspense, horror, and psychological thriller, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist, and usually with a moral. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to common science fiction and fantasy tropes. The original series, shot entirely in black and white, ran on CBS for five seasons from 1959 to 1964.

A man believes that a telescope containing magical powers will make him rich, only to receive a dire prediction instead.

"Mr. Denton on Doomsday" is episode three of The Twilight Zone. A jaded gunslinger finds a magic potion that restores his shooting skill but brings an end to his fast-drawing career.

A voodoo doll offers up vengeance for a determined businessman.

A doctor and his wife are involved in a head-on accident. The doctor's hand is caught in the steering column of his burning car. After freeing himself of the vehicle and doing the necessary surgery, he decides to put the dead man's hand from the other vehicle onto himself to replace his missing limb. Bad things start to happen while the doctor wonders what the cause of recent his problems are.

While vacationing in snowy Maine, photographer Donald Powers takes a number of powerful images, none more so than a lonely farmhouse framed by a bleak landscape. When a beautiful woman emerges from the house, Powers tries to get her to pose; instead she flees into the woods. Powers overtakes her and tries to force her to return but, in the struggle, accidentally strangles her. When Powers develops the picture of the farmhouse, he notices something strange - whenever he looks at the picture the woman moves closer and closer to the camera.

An aging movie star (Ida Lupino) rewatches her old films in an attempt to recapture her youth.

A doctor is murdered by a phony medium hoping to bilk the grieving widow.

Mike Ferris finds himself alone in the small Oakwood town and without recollection about his name, where he is or who he is. Mike wanders through the town trying to find a living soul. The tension increases and Mike has a breakdown.

A fatigued man fights to stay awake as he explains to a psychiatrist that if he falls asleep it will trigger a nightmare, which will cause his heart to fail.

It's 1942, and a man finds himself on a ship in the Atlantic, not knowing who he is, nor how he got there. He does know the ship will soon be attacked by a German U-boat.

Three astronauts return to Earth after seemingly having made an encounter that dooms them and their craft to erasure from existence itself.

Three astronauts (Rod Taylor, Charles Aidman, Jim Hutton) return from the desert where their spacecraft crashed, but cannot remember what happened during their flight.

A man travels back in time to his childhood, arriving just a few miles away from his native town.