Best Thriller Movies of 1973

Detective Philip Marlowe tries to help a friend who is accused of murdering his wife.

James Bond must investigate a mysterious murder case of a British agent in New Orleans. Soon he finds himself up against a gangster boss named Mr. Big.

Charley Varrick robs a bank in a small town with his friends, but instead of obtaining a small amount of money, they discover they stole a very large amount of money belonging to the mob. Charley must now come up with a plan to not only evade the police but the mob as well.

An aging hood is about to go back to prison. Hoping to escape his fate, he supplies information on stolen guns to the feds, while simultaneously supplying arms to his bank robbing chums.

"Dirty" Harry Callahan is a San Francisco Police Inspector on the trail of a group of rogue cops who have taken justice into their own hands. When shady characters are murdered one after another in grisly fashion, only Dirty Harry can stop them.

Laura and John, grieved by a terrible loss, meet in Venice, where John is in charge of the restoration of a church, two mysterious sisters, one of whom gives them a message sent from the afterlife.

In an overpopulated futuristic Earth, a New York police detective finds himself marked for murder by government agents when he gets too close to a bizarre state secret involving the origins of a revolutionary and needed new foodstuff.

Inquisitive journalist Grace Collier is horrified when she witnesses her neighbor, fashion model Danielle Breton, violently murder a man. Panicking, she calls the police. But when the detective arrives at the scene and finds nothing amiss, Grace is forced to take matters into her own hands. Her first move is to recruit private investigator Joseph Larch, who helps her to uncover a secret about Danielle's past that has them both seeing double.

In a futuristic resort, wealthy patrons can visit recreations of different time periods and experience their wildest fantasies with life-like robots. But when Richard Benjamin opts for the wild west, he gets more than he bargained for when a gunslinger robot goes berserk.

After her younger sister gets involved in drugs and is severely injured by contaminated heroin, a nurse sets out on a mission of vengeance and vigilante justice, killing drug dealers, pimps, and mobsters who cross her path.

Citizens of a small town are infected by a biological weapon that causes its victims to become violently insane. As uninfected citizens struggle to survive, the military readies its own response.

A year after Sheila is killed in a hit-and-run, her multimillionaire husband invites a group of friends to spend a week on his yacht playing a scavenger hunt-style mystery game. The game turns out to be all too real and all too deadly.

A short Arizona motorcycle cop gets his wish and is promoted to Homicide following the mysterious murder of a hermit. He is forced to confront his illusions about himself and those around him in order to solve the case, eventually returning to solitude in the desert.

Hobos encounter a sadistic railway conductor that will not let anyone "ride the rails" for free.

New York private eye Shamus McCoy likes girls, drink and gambling, but by the look of his flat business can't be too hot. So an offer of $10,000 to finds some diamonds stolen in a daring raid with a flame-thrower is too good to miss. His investigations soon get pretty complicated and rather too dangerous. At least along the way he does get to meet Alexis.

A tough detective who is part of an elite New York City unit is trying to find out who killed his partner, but uncovers a plot to kidnap mobsters for money.

Kidnappers making a ransom demand dial a wrong number and reach a struggling actor instead. He decides to cut himself in for some of the money.

Rogue intelligence agents, right-wing politicians, greedy capitalists, and free-lance assassins plot and carry out the JFK assassination in this speculative agitprop.

An abused autistic boy is the sole witness to the kidnapping of a teenage heiress.

Cross is an old hand at the CIA who often teams up with Frenchman Jean “Scorpio” Laurier, a gifted freelance operative. After their last mission together, the CIA orders Scorpio to eliminate Cross, leaving him no choice but to obey.

Tommy Gibbs is a tough kid, raised in the ghetto, who aspires to be a kingpin criminal. As a young boy, his leg is broken by a bad cop on the take, during a payoff gone bad. Nursing his vengeance, he rises to power in Harlem, New York. Angry at the racist society around him, both criminal and straight, he sees the acquisition of power as the solution to his rage.

Ellen Wheeler, a rich widow, is recovering from a nervous breakdown. One day, while staring out the window, she witnesses a murder. But does anybody believe her?

When a gunman opens fire on a crowded city bus in San Francisco, Detective Dave Evans is killed, along with the man he'd been following in relation to a murder. Evans' partner, Sgt. Jake Martin, becomes obsessed with solving the case.

Detective John Shaft travels incognito to Ethiopia, then France, to bust a human trafficking ring.

A newspaper publisher listens to the personal tapes of investigative reporter David Norliss, who has disappeared during an investigation. The tapes tell the story of that investigation, involving a recent widow whose late husband has been seen working in his private studio. As Norliss and the widow investigate, they unravel a plot involving Voodoo and the walking dead.

A member of British Intelligence assumes a fictitious criminal identity and allows himself to be caught, imprisoned, and freed in order to infiltrate a spy organization and expose a traitor; only, someone finds him out and exposes him to the gang...

Several men hiking in the mountains discover an injured skyjacker who parachuted from a plane with $600,000. They kill him, then start fighting each other over the money.

A social worker who recently lost her husband investigates the strange Wadsworth family. The Wadsworths might not seem too unusual to hear about them at first - consisting of the mother, two grown daughters and the diaper-clad, bottle-sucking baby. The problem is, the baby is twenty-one years old.

In the late 18th century, two newlyweds move into the stately mansion of husband Charles Fengriffen. The bride, Catherine, falls victim to a curse placed by a wronged servant on the Fengriffen family and all its descendants.

Dr. Jake Terrell, who has been training a pair of dolphins for many years, has had a breakthrough. He has taught his dolphins to speak and understand English, although they do have a limited vocabulary. When the dolphins are stolen, he discovers they're to be used in an assassination attempt. Now he is in a race to discover who is the target, and where the dolphins are, before the attempt is carried out.

Federal agent Jones tries to rescue her framed boyfriend from a drug-queen pervert known as Mommy.

While searching for a small fortune of embezzled money, an ex-con, a small-time bandleader, his doting wife and a kooky drifter find themselves being followed. Their chase takes them to trailer camps, bingo halls, laundromats and ultimately, a showdown with a group of unconventional bad guys.

A married couple are traveling on a deserted desert road at night. They stop at a diner and the husband goes to the men's room. He never returns and the wife begins to suspect serious foul play.

When various trustees of the Van Traylen Orphanage begin dying in close order, it's at first written off as a coincidence. But, when a school bus accident very nearly takes out three more of them along with a group of orphans, Col. Bingham (Christopher Lee) and his pathologist friend, Mark (Peter Cushing), begin looking into the deaths. They come to think the answer lies with one of the girls on the bus, who has vivid memories of things she could not possibly have seen.

Tougher than Shaft and smoother than Superfly, this high-voltage sequel to Black Caesar explodes with enough action to incinerate New York City. Packed with machine-gun mayhem and riveting adventure, Hell Up in Harlem is nothing less than a modern-day tribute to the classic 30s gangster film. Fred Williamson is Tommy Gibbs, a fearless, bulletproof tough guy who blasts his way from the gutter to become the ultimate soul brother boss. Tommy steals a ledger with the name of every crooked cop and man in the city. Enlisting the aid of his father and an army of Harlem hoods, Gibbs goes from defense to offense, launching a deadly attack on his enemies that sets off a violent chain reaction from Harlem all the way to the Caribbean, climaxing in one of the hottest turf-war shoot-outs in Hollywood history.

The wives of three wealthy men are kidnapped and held for a $3 million ransom, but one of the men doesn't want to pay his share.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision to outlaw the death penalty, California passes an initiative that designates San Bruno island as a dumping spot for first-degree murder convicts, free to do what they like except leave. The main camp of convicts is controlled by the tyrannical Bobby, who rules with an iron hand, and the women are used as sex slaves. A.J. and a group of more free-minded murderers have escaped and gone into hiding. When A.J. and his men liberate the women from Bobby's custody, tensions mount to an all-out confrontation for control of the island.

One man decides to wage war against a gang of teenage punks besieging an affluent California community. Based on a true incident.

Scientists Culp and Wallach suspect that there is someone other than their research primates inhabiting their polar station.

A sculptor hires young college girls to take care of his elderly mother and his supposedly insane sister, both of whom live in the old family mansion with him.

A young psychiatric nurse goes to work at a lonesome asylum following a murder. There, she experiences varying degrees of torment from the patients.

A woman kills her lover's wife, then sets out to frame her husband for the murder.

Tracy Fleming is a widowed police officer, with a young son, who has risen to the role of plainclothes operative. After six women have been raped and killed, Fleming agrees to go undercover in an effort to make herself a target for the killer. The climax places her in a life-and-death struggle with the killer.

A young girl lives with her mother and grandmother. One day her estranged father returns home with a female companion he introduces as his fiance. Soon the girl finds herself in the midst of strange goings-on, which evolve into a web of crime and murder.

Two truck drivers are hired to transport a top-secret cargo from New York to Houston. Along the way they must evade attempts by a terrorist group to hijack the material.

When the President's plane mysteriously disappears with him on board, it is left to the seemingly weak Vice President to try to avert a nuclear exchange with the Chinese.

A TV reporter investigates compromising photographs of a nominee to the Supreme Court.

A wealthy older man picks up two teenage hitchhikers, and soon his erotic dream becomes a nightmare.

A family's outing turns out badly as they are terrorized by a gang of young thugs.