100 Essential Crime & Mystery Films

In the latter part of 2003 I supervised the assembly of a list of 100 "essential" crime & mystery films over at the Classics Film Board on the IMDb. These are the films in the order they were finally ranked, from "best-liked" on down. (With some tweaking; for example, "M" was generally liked more by the "jury" than "The Maltese Falcon", but nobody rated it as their very favorite so I demoted it.)

My somewhat bizarre voting system was designed to produce a mix of accepted classics and off-the-wall personal favorites; plenty of both may be found below. However, some films of inarguable importance to the genre are missing. Because of this, and because many fine films in the genre have been released in the last decade, I hope to assemble a list of 100 MORE essential crime & mystery films some time in the near future. (Preferably after I’ve finished viewing all the titles here!)

(Also, a few short films are included here, represented by the DVD’s on which one can view them. The "Wallace & Gromit" video at #30 contains "The Wrong Trousers"; the "Looney Tunes" video at #31 contains "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery"; and to the best of my knowledge, "Who Killed Who?" is not yet officially available on DVD. I should also mention that the version of "The Killers" at #91 is the 1946 one.)