Play Misty For Me (1971)

A casual fling can seem harmless, until the other person decides it was anything but. Clint Eastwood made a confident directing debut with "Play Misty for Me," a lurid but undeniably effective thriller about a brief romance that turns into a deadly obsession. Eastwood plays Dave Garver, a smooth, poetry-quoting late-night jazz DJ in Carmel, California, whose most devoted listener keeps calling to request Erroll Garner's "Misty." When he meets her, Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), in a local bar, they spend the night together, but Dave is still in love with his ex-girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills). Evelyn, it turns out, won't take no for an answer, and her fixation grows more unhinged and violent. Some of its 1970s trappings feel dated, including an indulgent stretch at the Monterey Jazz Festival and a gooey love scene between Eastwood and Mills set to Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." But its central premise of infatuation spiraling out of control remains uncomfortably believable, and it was influential enough to inspire one of the biggest hits of the 1980s - here's a hint: it starred Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and a very unfortunate pet rabbit. It's a well-staged, sometimes genuinely frightening thriller, worth seeing for Walter's brilliantly unhinged performance alone. Eastwood's frequent collaborator Don Siegel, director of "Dirty Harry," has a fun cameo as a chess-playing bartender.