10 sweaty summer thrillers hidden on digital platforms

All 10 films make explicit reference to heat.

Some of them open with the close-up of a human being sweating up to the eyebrows.

And in all of them there is a crime that ends up moving the characters between the hell of the thermometer and that of desolation.

The

as a genre, has always benefited from heat.

Also snow and cold.

What they usually don't have, or perhaps they are less funny or less memorable, are mid-season

.

Here is a selection of 10, available on platforms, with which to enjoy a scorching summer afternoon or evening.

More information

The best summer read: 20 crime novels analyzed and commented

'In Full Sun' (1960), by René Clément

The first of two great adaptations of Patricia Highsmith's novel (the other,

is, if anything, even more elegant) finds in the almost dour beauty of Alain Delon its perfect Ripley.

The torrid Italian summer of a self-conscious and eternal aspirant to the upper class, who finds in the disguise of becoming someone else the best weapon for the assault on power.

The perfidious dimension of a sociopath whom we cannot stop looking at, and almost admiring.

Highsmith loved it, and the legendary singer Marie Laforêt made her acting debut in it.

'The Mad Dog' (1949), by Akira Kurosawa

A rookie cop loses his gun on the tram to a pickpocket, and without it, the professional's honor also fades.

Wounded in his pride, he hesitates between presenting his resignation or starting an obsessive search for the culprit in the underworld, accentuated by the successive deaths with each of the six bullets from his lost Colt.

"Rabid dogs only see what they are looking for," says a Japanese poem, and Kurosawa films the search through interiors that look like an oven and exteriors marked by the post-world war: misery, prostitution, ration cards, drugs.

With echoes of American film noir,

the first collaboration between Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune.

'In the heat of the night'

(1967) Directed by Norman Jewison

In a town in the southern United States, a businessman who wanted to "give work and wealth" to the locals appears dead in the street with a blow to the head.

The

and his deputies only think of arresting the first black they catch for a gang, who turns out to be nothing less than a police officer and homicide specialist passing through the place.

A white criminal gets to ask Sidney Poitier's character the most infamous and revealing of questions: "Why are you dressed as a white man?"

Police investigation and sociological portrait of racial prejudice in the United States of the sixties.

Oscar for best film, photography by the master Haskell Wexler, and soundtrack with a

touch by Quincy Jones.

Turn to Hell (1997) by Oliver Stone

The classic film noir nerd who changes his existential meaning when he turns his car towards a seedy town next to the desert, and finds the most mysterious of offers: a husband who wants him to kill his wife;

and that same woman who wants me to finish off her husband.

Stone goes crazy with the camera and the montage, he makes the wide angle his hallmark of style and the performers have a blast looking at each other with eyes of wanting to fornicate in each shot.

Meanwhile, Ennio Morricone recovers his soundtrack for

emulates himself, adds a few notes of vitriol, and has just rounded off a work that sometimes seems more like a Road Runner and Coyote cartoon than a live action movie

'Angel Heart' (1987), by Alan Parker

In terms of weather, the most unique

of the selection: it begins in the snow of New York and ends in the sweat and storms of New Orleans.

Lie: ends up in hell, but that's another question.

In the mid-1950s, a private detective is tasked with finding a former singer who returned from the war with amnesia, and it is unknown if he lives or lies underground.

Voodoo, crimes, sex, blues

remorse, forbidden passions.

And the biblical and diabolical aura that surrounds its protagonists right from their names: Robert De Niro is Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke, Harry Angel.

A generational

that had an impact in the eighties, and that today is too forgotten.

'Obsession'

(1943), directed by Luchino Visconti

The most social of the four (magnificent) adaptations of the novel

by James M. Cain.

In fact, more than in a generic key, in

or in film noir, it is usually framed as the antecedent of an artistic movement that was fully critical of the society of its time: Italian neorealism.

But, in essence, it is the same story of a wild adulterous passion that culminates in death.

The miserable existence of adrift beings, who encounter desire as the only loophole with which to escape from a sordid atmosphere.

Mussolini ordered the negatives of all copies to be destroyed, but it is obvious that some of them escaped him.

Rear Window (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

A heat wave, a leg in plaster, nothing to do and a neighborhood in front of your window full of trifles that can become the best entertainment for a good voyeur.

The only thing missing is what looks like a crime, and the sick concept of suspense and knowing how to look, both from Hitchcock and from the photographer played by James Stewart.

In the words of François Truffaut: “We are all

Stewart at his window is in the situation of a spectator attending a movie."

In the background, the teacher's sarcasm: the (bad) consequences of love, and a protagonist who is too lazy to marry Grace Kelly.

Seeing is believing.

Thirst for Evil (1958), by Orson Welles

Film noir even more expressionist than usual.

Extreme characters, extreme behavior and extreme technical paraphernalia.

Important breaks in rhythm, alternating very long sequence shots with other scenes in which each shot lasts barely a second.

Welles's unsettling return to Hollywood, where he hadn't filmed since

ten years ago, is one of the most outstanding examples that a masterpiece can be made basically from the form.

The background, here, is the least of it.

Borderline, sick and grotesque,

has the director himself as the most sweaty and unpresentable of the policemen.

As violent as his own use of black and white in photography.

'Barton Fink' (1991), directed by Joel Coen

The heat is such that the wallpaper is peeling off, complaining too, unable to hold on to the wall.

It falls on the head and the thought of a playwright terrified of the blank sheet of paper, who has been cajoled from Hollywood to write a film.

The mosquitoes make a killing on the face of a John Turturro diffident in a hellish territory that he does not know.

Black comedy with a background of a

in style,

was concocted by the Coens when they themselves suffered a blockage with the script for

First film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the awards for best director and best actor.

'Detour' (1945), by Edgar G. Ulmer

"Where you come from?".

"From the east".

"Where are you going?".

"To West".

In that paucity of responses, a grim gesture, a lost look, a wrinkled forehead, furrows of suffering, the sweat of a bitch of life, there is already a fascinating character: a pianist turned hitchhiker.

With four stars and third-rate performers, Ulmer put together a cult piece.

Film noir of harsh human beings, cynical attitudes and predetermined destiny.

In no other movie do two characters, a man and a woman, talk to each other for so many minutes at a time as if they were spitting in each other's faces in each of their sentences.

Another possible title for