Thrillers flirt with the absurd. Everyone knows this, except the people in thrillers, who are far too busy misplacing briefcases, dangling from cornices, falling in love with the wrong people, and being chased through cobblestoned foreign capitals to notice how ridiculous everything has gotten.
The “screwball thriller” is a genre of fiction that’s been celebrated on these pages before. But in my corner of the world, which is cinema, I’ve never heard it applied to movies. That, my friends, ends today.
Ernst Lubitsch may have first plated the tart, larcenous young couple in Trouble in Paradise (1932), but it was Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) that gave us the screwball thriller’s enduring recipe: Take two mismatched strangers on the run, fold in mistaken identities and a campy MacGuffin, crank the heat and sprinkle generously with crackling screwball banter.
If that sounds like a good time, you’re in luck. Grab your fake passport, slip on your sexiest getaway shoes, and join me on a globe-trotting caper to bag five dazzling but lesser-known jewels of the genre.
5. Out of Time (2003, dir. Carl Franklin)
“What kind of prick dies at cocktail hour on a Friday?” There’s a playful menace wiggling under every line of dialogue in Out of Time, Carl Franklin’s demented Florida noir – a reunion with Denzel Washington after their success with Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington plays a small-town police chief entangled with a troubled married woman. The first act charms, then dawdles, then slams the thrusters as Denzel finds himself implicated in a double-murder, and racing to outrun his own police force’s investigation to find out who set him up. One of the first films he made after Training Day, Out of Time is a cheeky riff on the 1948 screwball thriller The Big Clock, and features, without exaggeration, the tensest fax scene ever committed to celluloid.
Where to stream for free: Tubi.
4. That Man From Rio (1964, dir. Philippe de Broca)
Hot on the heels of stylish American screwball thrillers North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963), French director Philippe de Broca tried his hand with the gloriously ridiculous That Man from Rio – a film that would, improbably, inspire the creation of Indiana Jones and help define the modern blockbuster. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a French airman on leave whose girlfriend, the effervescent Françoise Dorléac, is kidnapped in Paris and whisked to Brazil by art-smuggling baddies. What follows is a frenzied chase through Rio, the Amazon, and the surreal modernist moonscape of Brasília. Belmondo, doing many of his own stunts, careens through each sequence with balletic slapstick flair – the action looks both buffoonish and genuinely dangerous. Reportedly, Steven Spielberg saw the film nine times and credited it as a key inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every time I see That Man from Rio, it makes me smile like an idiot, and though I sang its praises recently in my film Substack Underexposed, I couldn’t resist sharing it with you here.
3. Save the Green Planet! (2003, dir. Jang Joon-hwan)
Inspired by Stephen King’s Misery, but underwhelmed by Annie Wilkes as a villain (too normal), South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan hatched this feral genre mutant about a man who kidnaps his former boss after becoming convinced that he’s an alien sent to destroy Earth. Part zany sci-fi slapstick, part torture thriller, part gonzo chamber drama, Save the Green Planet! was shunned by Korean audiences upon release, but has since garnered an international cult following as a classic of New Korean Cinema, sometimes compared to Dr. Strangelove and Brazil. Ari Aster planned to remake the film, then passed it to Yorgos Lanthhimos, who teamed up with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons and retitled it Bugonia. The reboot arrives later this year.
Where to stream: Kanopy.
2. Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein)
Speaking of Jesse Plemons, the 2018 studio comedy Game Night slyly reintroduced audiences to the dark delights of the screwball thriller. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play hyper-competitive suburbanites whose weekly game night turns deadly when a fake kidnapping gets hijacked by actual criminals. What begins with charades spirals into shootouts, with a surprisingly elegant one-shot action sequence involving a Fabergé egg that ranks among the best in recent memory. Macabre, manic, and far smarter than it looks, Game Night is the rare studio comedy that gets funnier the more times you play.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel
1. The Hot Rock (1972, dir. Peter Yates)
Fresh off Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford slipped into the role of another affable outlaw, John Dortmunder, in The Hot Rock, a breezy caper comedy scripted by William Goldman. Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel (the first in a 14-volume series), the film follows Dortmunder and his partner-in-crime, played by George Segal, as they attempt to steal the same diamond again and again and again, only to be thwarted in increasingly ridiculous ways. By taking the tired “one last job” trope and dropping it on its head repeatedly, The Hot Rock mystified audiences and critics at first, but has since found cult appreciation. In his review, Roger Ebert said the film, though far from perfect, “has two or three scenes good enough for any caper movie ever made. If you’re a pushover for caper movies, like I am, that will be enough.”
Currently available on DVD.
