Whereas the classical period of the movie thriller (ca. 1930–1960) was characterized by the entrenchment of most of the central thriller-related genres (such as spy, horror, detective, film noir), the period beginning around 1960 was marked primarily by reconceptions of those genres. Key thriller categories underwent major overhauls, ranging from subversive debunking (the detective film) to neoclassical revival (neo-noir) to revitalization, both short-term (the spy film) and long-term (the police film, the horror film).
Among the factors contributing to these new directions were the decline of the old Hollywood studio system (exemplified by its self-enforced censorship system, the Production Code) and the vogue of imported foreign films, which achieved unprecedented influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Internationally successful foreign (especially French) thrillers such as Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1952) and Les Diaboliques (Diabolique, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), Du Rififi chez les hommes (Rififi, Jules Dassin, 1955), À bout de souffle (Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), and Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut, 1960) flaunted a more ambivalent morality, cynical tone, overt stylization, digressive structure, and explicit presentation of sex and violence than did their American counterparts. These European models left their mark on the increasingly permissive and experimental Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, including a series of revisionist detective films (The Long Goodbye, 1973; Chinatown, 1974; Night Moves, 1975) that questioned the effectiveness and relevance of the traditional private eye hero so devastatingly that the detective movie has never fully recovered.
An influential foreign phenomenon of a different sort was the British-based James Bond series (inaugurated by Dr. No in 1962), whose colorful escapades revitalized a spy movie genre that had been constrained by the political pressures of the early Cold War. However, the Bond movies' diminished sense of the familiar and the flippant invincibility of Bond himself moved the series closer to the sphere of the adventure tale. More relevant to the central concerns of the thriller was a countermovement of pessimistic "anti-Bond" spy films, such as The Ipcress File (1965), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), and The Deadly Affair (1967), which featured compromised, vulnerable heroes (much like the flawed-cop films of 1950s) and questioned the ethics and effectiveness of the conventional genre hero (much like the revisionist detective films of the 1970s).