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Psycho scene the top movie death: Janet Leigh immortalized in Hitchcock film

Photo: Actress Janet Leigh appears as Marion Crane in the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic thriller Psycho. (AP/File, HO)

LONDON (AP) -- In the gore stakes, Janet Leigh's shower scene in Psycho is the "best movie death" of all time, according to a critics' poll published Thursday. The 44-year-old Hitchcock thriller beat other iconic movies such as The Godfather (22nd) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (23rd) in the non-scientific poll by Total Film magazine. Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964) came second, with the surreal ending when Slim Pickens rides an atomic bomb. Other highly rated movie deaths were the fatal plunge to earth of the ape in the 1933 Fay Wray movie King Kong, in third place, and the demise of Bambi's mother (6th) in the 1942 Disney movie of the same name. Alan Rickman's fall from a 30-storey building in Die Hard (1988) comes fourth, followed by the killing of the title characters in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). "Some of the deaths in the poll, like the Wicked Witch melting in The Wizard Of Oz (13th), are iconic but laughable, but nearly 45 years on, Psycho's shower scene is still distressing," said Total Film deputy editor Simon Crook. "It's the sheer violence of the edit rather than any explicit gore -- 70 different angles, over 90 cuts and those shrieking violins. It's a master class in montage and audience manipulation." Crook added: "Knowing that the blood is Bosco's chocolate syrup and that a pulped casaba melon stood in for the stabbing noises does nothing to reduce the impact."

Photo Gallery Alexandra Kerry in Cannes.

Photos, left: Alexandra Kerry in Cannes Film Festival.

Conservatives: "Do we really want a man who raised a daughter who dresses like this running the country?" Liberals: "Wow, Kerry's daughter went to Cannes - do you think she was at the Almodóvar party?". No comment is needed.

MI5 advised spies not to use sex

Female spies using sex to obtain secrets may be a staple of espionage thrillers, but it has emerged that in reality British intelligence did not approve.

MI5 also instructed its staff on how to stop their female spies falling in love with targets, files newly-released to the National Archives show. The advice was issued at the end of World War II by top MI5 agent-runner Maxwell Knight, the inspiration for James Bond spy chief "M". During the war, he headed the MI5 department recruiting agents to penetrate Nazi spy rings in Britain. Loss of interest: Like his fictional counterpart, he felt sex had no place in the serious business of espionage. "I am no believer in what might be described as Mata Hari methods," he wrote, referring to the World War I spy known for her many lovers.

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