From streaming docuseries to podcasts, books to social media deep dives, true crime is everywhere. The movies have long understood the lurid appeal of such tales. The first film to explore the topic might be 1901’s Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, in which Edison Studios staged a reenactment of President McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, being strapped into the electric chair. Eleven years later, silent-picture maestro D.W. Griffith drew inspiration from New York City’s gangland for his The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Cinema and true crime have been fast friends ever since.
The most enduring films of the genre typically minimize exploitation or shun it altogehter, focusing on what the crimes and criminals reveal about how we live and what we value and why we fear what we do. Excluding serial killers—a subgenre fertile enough to warrant its own list—below are my picks for the 10 best movies based on real-life crimes.
10. Star 80 (1983, dir. Bob Fosse)
Bob Fosse revisits the fake-documentary format he employed in Lenny (1974), his Lenny Bruce biopic, for this icy tale of the murder of 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten. Mariel Hemingway is heartbreaking as Dorothy, the beautiful young woman working at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, Canada, when she is wooed by two-bit con man Paul Snider. Eric Roberts delivers an unsettling performance as he takes over her life, pushes her into nude modeling, and seethes with jealousy as she proves successful at it. Star 80, which proved to be Fosse’s final film (he died in 1987), divided critics and audiences at the time. It is undeniably lurid, but excels as an unblinking character study of one man’s pathological possessiveness.
9. They Won’t Forget (1937, dir. Mervyn LeRoy)
This somber Warner Bros. drama is loosely based on the 1913 case of Leo Frank, wrongly convicted by a Georgia jury for the strangling of a teenage girl. Two years later, a mob kidnapped and killed the prisoner, who was Jewish, in a lynching widely seen as motivated by antisemitism. In Mervyn LeRoy’s movie version, Leo Frank is now Robert Perry Hale (Edward Norris), a teacher distrusted by the southern townspeople for being a Yankee from up north. The picture also marks the debut of Lana Turner as the young victim. Some of the performances haven’t aged as gracefully as others—and Claude Rains’ Southern accent as the local prosecutor is unconvincing—but They Won’t Forget remains a powerful indictment of mob rule.
8. American Animals (2018, dir. Bart Layton)
Bart Layton, whose The Imposter is one of the most distinctive documentaries of the 2010s, merges fictional narrative and documentary in this fascinating retelling of a 2004 rare-books heist from a college library in Lexington, Kentucky. American Animals interweaves the real-life thieves with their movie doppelgängers. Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson and Blake Jenner portray the inept college students who set out to swipe an original, priceless copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America from Transylvania University. Even the librarian they overpowered in the ill-considered robbery, Betty Jean Gooch, makes an appearance. There is something haunting about the film’s inventive juxtaposition between reflections from the criminals and a narrative that unspools as a gripping thriller.
7. Bernie (2011, dir. Richard Linklater)
Bernie Tiede was the toast of Carthage, Texas. An assistant funeral director with a gift for consoling grieving widows, he was gentle, solicitous and unflaggingly polite. He spruced up many a service with his spot-on tenor, to say nothing of his penchant for lavishing gifts on everyone he came across. But Bernie was also a murderer, convicted for the 1997 killing of an 81-year-old woman and stuffing her body in a meat freezer. In the eyes of townsfolk, however, the crime didn’t make him any less lovable. As Bernie, Jack Black affects a Texas accent and dainty mannerisms that stop just short of caricature. Richard Linklater has made Bernie a low-key docudrama and sly black comedy, especially in his generous use of recollections by actual Carthage residents who knew both Bernie and Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), the ill-tempered widow he romanced before dispatching her with a .22 rifle. Also notable: Matthew McConaughey’s sly turn as the local district attorney flummoxed by the killer’s popularity.
6. Heavenly Creatures (1994, dir. Peter Jackson)
As splashy debuts go, Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey have two of the most memorable in Heavenly Creatures, a gloriously maniacal account of a notorious murder case from 1950s New Zealand. Director Peter Jackson kicks things off with a vintage travelog of the city of Christchurch. It’s an impish start for a story that ultimately spirals into delusion and murder. Winslet is Juliet, a newly arrived high school student who strikes up a fast friendship with the perpetually scowling Pauline Yvonne (Lynskey). Initially they bond over a shared appreciation for Mario Lanza and scars; Pauline is drawn to Juliet’s rebellious streak and ostensible worldliness. As the girls grow inseparable, so, too, does their surrender to a fertile fantasy world of mythical kingdoms and giant green figurines. “It’s the … intensity of the friendship that concerns me,” Juliet’s father (Clive Merrison) confides to Pauline’s parents, aghast that the girls might be more than chums. Jackson laces this—love story? psychological thriller?—with Grand Guignol theatrics. By turns sensual, erotic and chilling, Heavenly Creatures is difficult to classify and hard to shake off.
5. In Cold Blood (1967, dir. Richard Brooks)
The film adaptation of Truman Capote’s nonfiction bestseller was destined to be a landmark. After all, the 1966 publication of Capote’s In Cold Blood was a milestone of what came to be known as New Journalism—a harrowing account of how ex-cons Perry Smith and Dick Hickock burglarized and murdered a Kansas family in 1959. Robert Blake is Smith and Scott Wilson is Hickock, the pair who incorrectly believed the Clutter family had vast sums of money in their farmhouse. Before it was over, Smith and Hickock had killed Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenage children. Like its source material, In Cold Blood tells its grim story through flashbacks revealing the events that led to the murders. The tone is melancholic but detached, almost documentary-style, although Blake’s sad, soulful performance undercuts the coolness of the presentation. Toward the picture’s close, writer-director Richard Brooks dabbles in a bit of agitprop regarding Smith and Hickock’s executions by hanging, contending no sense can be made from senseless killing that follows senseless killing.
4. The Honeymoon Killers (1970, dir. Leonard Kastle and Donald Volkman)
This delicious excursion in sleaze quickly became a cult classic, buoyed by champions as diverse as shock connoisseur John Waters and French New Wave icon François Truffaut, the latter of whom called it his favorite American film. The Honeymoon Killers recounts the crimes of Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) and Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), the so-called “Lonely Hearts Killers” who in the 1940s murdered women they met through personal ads. For Martha, a morbidly obese nurse with a hair-trigger temper—“I’m not so sure Hitler wasn’t right about you people!” she barks at a disagreeable supervisor—it is love at first sight when she hooks up with Ray, a Spanish gigolo from New York. Together they bilk older women who fall for Ray’s exotic charms, but the violently jealous Martha finds it increasingly difficult to pose as Ray’s sister. The leads are mesmerizing, but Stoler is a particular standout, straddling campy and batshit scary. Part of the film’s sordid appeal undoubtedly stems from the limitations of its $200,000 budget. While one wonders what the movie would have looked like had initial director Martin Scorsese not been fired early on, the picture’s grainy film stock, amateurish cinematography and uneven performances certainly work to its advantage.
3. Compulsion (1958, dir. Richard Fleischer)
The names have been changed, but little else in Compulsion masks that its subject is the 1924 murder of a 14-year-old boy at the hands of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Chicago sons of privilege who believed their considerable intellects entitled them to commit “the perfect crime” without detection. They were wrong, as it turned out, especially when Leopold accidentally left a pair of spectacles at the scene of the crime. Clarence Darrow, one of the greatest criminal defense attorneys of his day, saved the two from death sentences. Compulsion is a taut, tense dramatization of the case, with Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell stunning as the cold-blooded young men and Orson Welles bringing gravitas to the Darrow role. Director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter Richard Murphy do not shy away from Leopold and Loeb’s homosexuality, but they don’t sensationalize it, either. While I admire Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which is also based on the Leopold and Loeb case, I find Compulsion the superior work.
2. Bonnie and Clyde (1967, dir. Arthur Penn)
Bonnie and Clyde has been dissected more thoroughly than a dead frog in biology class. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, both superb) play the Depression-era lovers on a deadly crime spree through Texas and Oklahoma until law enforcement finally stopped them in a hail of gunfire in 1934. While the movie fudges some aspects of the bank-robbing duo, particularly in downplaying their viciousness, Bonnie and Clyde was never meant to be a historical document. It is, however, a historic and artistic milestone. Its antihero protagonists, seriocomic tone and unforgettably violent ending sent aftershocks through mainstream Hollywood. It took a while for critics to get it. Some high-profile publications savaged the picture until Pauline Kael came to its defense in The New Yorker. Even Warner Bros. boss Jack Warner didn’t like it. According to Chris Yogerst’s The Warner Brothers, at an early screening, Warner cautioned director Arthur Penn, “If I have to go pee, the picture stinks.” He then took multiple trips to the john. When the houselights came up, Warner was disdainful. “What the fuck is this? That’s the longest two hours and 10 minutes I ever spent.” In the end, the movie garnered 10 Oscar nominations and won for cinematography and editing.
1. Dog Day Afternoon (1975, dir. Sidney Lumet)
Sidney Lumet’s masterful, quasi-naturalistic comedy-drama of an ill-fated bank heist is perfect. Really, it is a perfect film. Based on the real-life 1972 robbery of a Brooklyn bank, Frank Pierson‘s Oscar-winning screenplay is sharp and incisive. Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) and dim-but-loyal friend Sal (John Cazale) knock over the First Brooklyn Savings Bank (a fictionalized Chase Manhattan branch). But things go badly from the onset, and in short order, the building is surrounded by police and the FBI. The botched robbery turns into a hostage situation, as our surprisingly endearing crooks realize the bank employees are their only chance out of their predicament. Gawkers gather outside to cheer on Sonny, who plays to the crowd by tossing out handfuls of highly marked bills. But the spectators’ sympathies stop when news media reports that Sonny has robbed the bank to pay for gender-reassignment surgery for his transgender lover (a terrific Chris Sarandon). Lumet’s matter-of-fact treatment of a queer subplot is surprisingly bold for a movie produced while the gay rights movement was still in its infancy. The performances are phenomenal. In his memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino recalled that the “whole film was flying without a net”; it just might be his best work. But there’s always at least one dissenting critic. From prison, John Wojtowicz, the real-life Sonny, called the picture “a piece of garbage” that was only “30 percent true,” even as he praised Lumet and Pacino.
Honorable mention: American Hustle (2013, dir. David O. Russell), At Close Range (1986, dir. James Foley), The Bling Ring (2013, dir. Sofia Coppola), Bronson (2008, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn), Catch Me if You Can (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg), The Hoax (2006, dir. Lasse Hallström), I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, dir. Mary Harron), Reversal of Fortune (1990, dir. Barbet Schroeder), Rope (1948, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), The Phenix City Story (1955, dir. Phil Karlson)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 