A Kiss Before Dying

An early Ira Levin thriller, predating Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and Deathtrap, superbly adapted as an icily acute nightmare (and as a riposte to the academicism of A Place in the Sun) by the great Oswald, giving a criminally myopic Hollywood its first glimpse of a unique visual talent, idiosyncratically developed from that of his father, German silent director Richard Oswald. Wagner is perfect as the college kid psycho coolly removing the pregnant Woodward from his life, and both he and Hunter were picked up from here by Nick Ray to play his James Brothers the following year.