Crime doesn't pay - except in Hollywood, where some of our most successful and influential movies have revolved around characters on the wrong side of the law. TCM's marathon covers the history of crime films over the decades. In the 1930s, with Little Caesar (1930) and other gangster films, Warner Bros. created a new movie genre with dynamic anti-heros and a new cinematic language that included gritty urban settings, tough-talking slang and realistic violence. The title character of Little Caesar, a Capone-inspired crime czar called Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello, provided Edward G. Robinson with a star making role.

Based on the true-life murder case of Leopold and Loeb, Rop (1948, TCM premiere) is stylistically one of the most unusual movies ever made, filmed by director Alfred Hitchcock in what amounts to one long, uninterrupted take, without the customary editing. Farley Granger and John Dall are the young "thrill killers" and James Stewart is the college professor who uncovers their awful secret.

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), another one-of-a-kind thriller, combines harsh realism with poetic expressionism in its story of a murderous preacher (Robert Mitchum) in pursuit of two innocent children in rural America. The definitive crime film of the 1960s is Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the legendary bank-robbing couple of the 1930s. Controversial in its boundary-pushing violence and sympathetic treatment of the law breaking lovers, the film was initially reviled, then embraced by critics.

One of the most riveting films of the 1970s was Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), in which four criminals hijack a New York City subway train and demand a cool million in cash to prevent them from shooting one hostage per minute. Charles Crichton's hilarious black comedy A Fish Called Wanda (1988) takes a cockeyed look at crime as sexy con artist Jamie Lee Curtis plots to steal a fortune in diamonds in cahoots with Monty Python funnymen John Cleese and Michael Palin and Oscar® winner Kevin Kline as a goofy henchman.

by Roger Fristoe