Thriller

Thriller

The thriller is a genre of fiction in which tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary heroes are pitted against villains determined to destroy them, their country, or the stability of the free world. The hero of a typical thriller faces danger alone or in the company of a small band of companions. The protagonist may be a law enforcement agent, a journalist, or a soldier, but typically he or she is cut off from the resources of "their" organization. More often the hero is an ordinary citizen drawn into danger and intrigue by circumstances beyond their control. Thrillers are typically novels or movies, though television series such as Alias, 24, The Sandbaggers and Spooks also fall into this genre, along with such non-fiction bestsellers as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and even Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh's account of the conquest of Fermat's Last Theorem. While thrillers constitute a distinct genre, they often incorporate elements of other genres such as adventure, detective fiction, and espionage. A thriller includes suspense as an indispensable ingredient.

Novelists closely associated with the genre include: Eric Ambler, Desmond Bagley, John Buchan, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins, Christopher Hyde, Duncan Kyle, Alistair MacLean, Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum.

Notable movie thrillers include: The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, The Day of the Jackal, Duel, The Parallax View, In the Line of Fire, The Fugitive, Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Marathon Man.

Gangster film
Gangster film is a film genre which features gangster characters, such as members of the Mafia and inner city street gangs.

Giallo
Giallo (pronounced jee-AH-loh) is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film. It is closely related to the French fantastique genre, crime fiction, horror fiction and eroticism. The term is also used to mean an example of the genre, in which case it can take the Italian plural gialli. The word giallo is Italian for "yellow" (see Wiktionary: giallo) and stems from the genre's origin in paperback novels with yellow covers.

Literature
The term giallo was originally coined to describe a series of mystery/crime pulp novels first published by the Mondadori publishing house in 1929, which continued to be published until the 1960s. Their yellow covers contained whodunits, much like their American counterparts of the 1920s and 1930s, and this link with English language pulp fiction was reinforced with the Italian authors always taking on English pen names. Many of the earliest gialliwere in fact English-language novels translated into Italian.

Published as cheap paperbacks, the success of the giallo novels soon began attracting the attention of other publishing houses, who began releasing their own versions (not forgetting to keep the by-now traditional yellow cover). The novels were so popular that even the works of established foreign mystery and crime writers, such as Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, were labelled gialliwhen first published in Italy.

Film
The film genre that emerged from these novels in the 1960s began as literal adaptations of the books, but soon began taking advantage of modern cinematic techniques to create a unique genre.

Characteristics
Giallo films are characterized by extended murder sequences featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. The literary whodunit element is retained, but combined with modern slasher horror, while being filtered through Italy's longstanding tradition of opera and staged grand guignol drama.

They typically introduce strong psychological themes of madness, alienation, and paranoia and include liberal amounts of nudity and sex. Sergio Martino's Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (a.k.a. Eye of the Black Cat) was explicitly based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat."

They remain notable in part for their expressive use of music, most notably by Dario Argento's collaborations with Ennio Morricone and his musical director Bruno Nicolai, and later with the band Goblin.

Development
As well as the literary giallo tradition, the films were also initially influenced by the German "Krimi" phenomenon - originally black and white films of the 1960s that were based on Edgar Wallace stories.


The first film that created the giallo as a cinema genre is La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) (1963), from Mario Bava. Its title referred to Alfred Hitchcock's famous The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), again establishing strong links with Anglo-American culture. In Mario Bava's 1964 film, Blood and Black Lace, the emblematic element of the giallo was introduced: the masked murderer with a shiny weapon in his black leather gloved hand.

Soon the giallo became a genre of its own, with its own rules and with a typical Italian flavour: adding additional layers of intense colour and style. The term giallo finally became synonymous with a heavy, theatrical, and stylised visual element.

The genre had its heyday in the 1970s, with dozens of Italian giallo films released. The most notable directors who worked in the genre were Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Aldo Lado, Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi, and Pupi Avati.

Heist film
A heist film is a movie that has an intricate plot woven around a group of people trying to steal something. Comic versions are often called caper movies. They could be described as the analogues of caper stories in film history. Typically there are many plot twists, and film focuses on the characters' attempts to formulate a plan, carry it out, and escape with the goods. There is often a nemesis that must be thwarted, who is either a figure of authority, or a former partner who turned on the group or one of its members.

Etymology
The noun caper, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary means a frolicsome leap, a capricious escapade or an illegal or questionable act.

The archetypal plot
Usually a heist film will contain a three act plot. The first act usually consists of the preparations for the heist: gathering conspirators, learning about the layout of the location to be robbed, learning about the alarm system, revealing innovative technologies to be used, and most importantly: setting up the plot twists in the final act.

The second act is the heist itself. With rare exception, the heist will be successful, though some number of unexpected events will occur.

The third act is the unravelling of the plot. The characters involved in the heist will be turned against one another, or one of the characters will have made arrangements with some outside party, who will interfere. Normally most or all of the characters involved in the heist will end up dead, captured by the law, or without any of the loot.

Variations on the plot
As an established archetype it became common, starting in the fifties, to excise one or two of the acts in the story, relying on the viewers' familiarity with the archetype to fill in the missing elements. Touchez pas au grisbi and Reservoir Dogs, for example, both take place entirely after the heist has occurred.

Some heist films take place non-linearly: The Killing, Reservoir Dogs.

Related film archetypes
The "heist film" is the most well-known of a number of closely related archetypal storylines. All involving collaborative efforts that require elaborate preparation and dramatic fallout, there is also: the prison-break film, the assassination film, and the hostage film (usually shown from the opposite perspective: that of the hostages and the rescuers). A number of spy films also have heist-like plots.

Additionally, it is common for films to have sections that are modelled after the heist film archetype. National Treasure, etc.

History
From the origins...
A "caper movie" generally shows the ingenious planning and realization of a heist. Even though it has come to be regarded as as classic American genre, in Europe it is Jules Dassins Du rififi chez les hommes of 1955 that served as the founding father of this particular type of film.

The classical Film noir period of the 40s and 50s brought the genre to fame: during these decades, several such gangster's films have been shot that to this day remain second to none. John Huston's Asphalt Jungle of 1950 or Stanley Kubrick's The Killing of 1956 are examples. The sombre atmosphere of the unavoidable failure which occurs during the film and which should become a sort of brand name for Film noir intertwines in these films with the viewers delight in watching the unfolding of a near-perfect crime.

Since that time Big caper movies have been shot in many variations, often introducing innovative ways of craftsmanship, such as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Even to contemporary Hollywood, the genre still remains promising, as the 2001 and 2003 remakes of Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job show.

Spy film
The spy film film genre deals with the subject of fictional espionage, either in a realistic way or as a basis for fantasy. Many novels in the spy fiction genre have been adapted as films, although in many cases (such as James Bond) the overall tone is changed.

Alfred Hitchcock did much to popularise the spy film in the 1930s with his influential thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). These often involved innocent civilians being caught up in international conspiracies. Some, however, dealt with professional spies as in Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936), based on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories.

In the 1940s and early 1950s there were several films made about the exploits of Allied agents in occupied Europe, which could probably be considered as a sub-genre. 13 Rue Madeleine and O.S.S. were fictional stories about American agents in German-occupied France, and there were a number of films based on the stories of real-life British S.O.E. agents, including Odette and Carve Her Name With Pride. A more recent fictional example is Charlotte Gray, based on the novel by Sebastian Faulks.

The peak of popularity of the spy film is often considered to be the 1960s when Cold War fears meshed with a desire by audiences to see exciting and suspenseful films. The espionage film developed in two directions at this time. On the one hand, the realistic spy novels of Len Deighton and John Le Carre were adapted into relatively serious Cold War thrillers which dealt with some of the realities of the espionage world. Some of these films included The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Deadly Affair (1966), and the Harry Palmer series, based on the novels of Len Deighton.

At the same time, the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming were adapted into an increasingly fantastical series of tongue-in-cheek adventure films by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, with Sean Connery as the star. The phenomenal success of the Bond series lead to a deluge of imitators, especially from America. Among the best known examples were the two 'Derek Flint' films starring James Coburn, and the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin. Television also got into the act with series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E and I Spy in the U.S., and Danger Man and The Avengers in Britain. Spies have remained popular on TV to the present day with series such as Callan, Alias and Spooks.

Spy films also enjoyed something of a revival in the late 1990s, although these were often action films with espionage elements, or comedies like Austin Powers.