Director: Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich worked in almost every genre and brought the same abrasive sensibility to all of them. Kiss Me Deadly ends with a nuclear briefcase opened in a beach house, an image so strange for 1955 that it has been reprinted and referenced ever since.

The Dirty Dozen and Attack are war films about officers as the enemy, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane turned two ageing stars into a horror premise and revived both careers.

He financed his own studio for a period and lost it. The films are consistently harsher than their studio contemporaries and consistently more interesting.