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The curious truth about memorable film moments is how few of them actually
chime with the distinguished lists of all-time greats. How many readers can
pluck a heart-stopping scene from Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story,
the No 1 film in Halliwell’s list of the 1,000 best movies ever made? Quite.
But everyone can misquote Clint Eastwood’s pay-off line in Dirty
Harry: “So do you feel lucky, punk?” Indeed, the language of movies can
be boiled down to iconic images and killer lines. This is why cinema throws
such powerful punches.
The iconic moments don’t always grace the best films. But there is a
surprising amount of conformity about what these moments are. Some are so
familiar that they rightly, and often wrongly, define the entire host film:
the shower music in Psycho; the beach landing in Saving Private
Ryan; the Alien foetus that rips through John Hurt’s stomach
wall; the wind-kissed lovers throwing shapes on the deck of the Titanic;
the wrecked Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes; the opening
shots of Jaws; the moonlight bike ride in E.T.; the parting of
Rick and Ilsa on the runway in Casablanca; Jimmy the Mod (Phil
Daniels) racing his moped off the white cliffs of Dover in Quadrophenia.
The list rolls ever on.
But why are these scenes so special? There are no quick answers and no
simple formula to making the magic – which is why The Times is
keen to canvass your opinions. Most of my own memorable moments hinge on
unexpected shocks, terrifying revelations, or slices of exhilarating
bravura. Music helps. I’m sure the examples that follow will too.
But I confess that my own favourite moments are probably more revealing about
my gut response to film, rather than what I actually thought about the
movie.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER
Chief film critic
The dawn helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
Coppola’s movie was almost as insane as war itself, never more so than during
this showpiece scene where the nutty Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall)
flattens a Vietcong village so that he can go surfing. “I love the smell of
napalm in the morning” is a line of sheer brilliance. The power of the scene
lies in its crazy contradictions, and the fact that Willard (Martin Sheen)
can barely believe what’s happening. A cavalry platoon of choppers that goes
into battle blasting out Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries
deserves every medal it can get.
JC
Dil pulls down her tights in The Crying Game
Neil Jordan, 1992
The scene where Dil (Jaye Davidson, a former fabric designer with no previous
acting experience), revealed that she had rather more male genitalia than
Stephen Rea’s former terrorist gambled on became an instant classic. Most
people failed to guess until that moment that that Dil was actually a man.
The shock revelation after a touching and tentative romance with Rea had a
profound impact on audiences whose sympathies were already unbuttoned by
Jordan’s kindly portrait of a former IRA hardman. The director won an Oscar
for Best Screenplay.
JC
The arrival of Uncle Monty at the cottage in Withnail & I
Bruce Robinson, 1986
Few films have provided as much twilight pleasure as Robinson’s scabrous
account of two out-of-work actors with no money but an endless appetite for
drugs, lighter fuel and alcohol. Richard E. Grant’s fantastic degenerate,
Withnail, secretly sells the idea of rough sex with his unwitting flatmate
(Paul McGann) to his fat gay uncle (Richard Griffiths) in return for the
keys to his country cottage. Uncle Monty’s sudden late-night arrival to cash
in the favour is an exquisite moment of heterosexual terror.
JC
The beergarden scene from Cabaret
Bob Fosse, 1972
The setting is a sun-dappled idyll, a bucolic beer garden where generations
gather to raise a glass. As Sally Bowles and her two beaus look on, an
angelic blond youth stands and starts to sing in a tenor as pure and clean
as a bell. Fosse lets the beauty of the song Tomorrow Belongs to Me
seduce us for a moment before revealing the Nazi insignia on the sleeve of
the singer´s shirt. It’s a sucker punch of a moment that grows in power as
the rest of the drinkers join in to what is revealed to be a fascist anthem.
WENDY IDE
“Funny how? Funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you?” from Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese, 1990
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) joins in the laughter that follows a story told by
Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). “You’re a funny guy”, Hill tells him. DeVito
rounds on him. “Funny how?” The jovial atmosphere suddenly crackles with
tension. Henry, eyes wide with panic, tries to work out what he said to
offend DeVito and how he can avoid being shot in the next minute. He goes
from one of the guys to outsider in one sickening moment. The vulnerability
of his position in the mob is ruthlessly hammered home. He laughs again when
he realises it’s a joke, but he might as well be crying with relief.
WI
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” – The Shining
Stanley Kubrick, 1980
Kubrick´s masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is packed with
magnificent scenes and arresting images – the steadicam shot following the
tricycle around the Overlook Hotel’s maze of corridors; Jack’s conversation
with the imaginary barman; “redrum”. But my favourite is the scene where
Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is forced to accept that her husband Jack (Jack
Nicholson) has, quite literally, lost the plot. She flicks through pages he
has been typing feverishly, expecting to see the beginnings of a novel.
Instead she reads a single sentence, repeated over and over: “All work and
no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
WI
“You wanna have a catch?” from Field of Dreams
Phil Alden Robinson, 1989
The ultimate male tearjerker culminates in an Iowa cornfield where the farmer
turned baseball-obsessed looney Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) takes a summer
stroll with the ghost of his dead father’s younger self (Dwier Brown). The
light is crepuscular pink, the music from James Horner softly swelling, and
the lines from Alden Robinson suitably sparse. The two men gaze sadly into
each other eyes, drinking deep, like lovers. There’s an ache here, about
forgiveness, loss and love, that’s both agonising and serene. When the son
finally asks of the father, “You wanna have a catch?” all wounds are healed,
the universe is revealed to be benign, and if you’re not in floods you have
no soul.
KEVIN MAHER
The lobby carnage in The Matrix
Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999
Modern action cinema was reinvented the very moment that would-be cyber-Christ
saviour Neo (Keanu Reeves) and his PVC-clad sidekick Trinity (Carrie-Anne
Moss) decided to rescue their imprisoned Kung-fu philosopher guru Morpheus
(Laurence Fishburne). Our daring duo enters the heavily guarded enemy
skyscraper through the marble lobby. Alarms sound, guns are cocked, and thus
begins 190 of the most impossibly frenetic and stylised seconds in film.
Cartwheels, high kicks, semi-automatic carnage, super-slow-motion and a
propulsive dance track from the Propellerheads combine to transform
interballistic mayhem into high art. Shame about the sequels.
KM
The eyes have it in Les Diaboliques
Georges Clouzot, 1955
This was an unforgettable Psycho sort of horror film worthy of
Hitchcock himself. In fact, Hitch tried his best to acquire the screen
rights, only to be pipped by his French rival. The plot concerns the
headmaster of a French boarding school and the wife and mistress who
conspire to murder him. And it appears they have succeeded when we witness
him well and truly drowned. Then, horror on horror, we see him arise from
his watery grave and slowly and deliberately pluck out his bulging sightless
eyes from their horribly hollow sockets. It still haunts me.
KEN RUSSELL
“I coulda been a contender” in On the Waterfront
Elia Kazan, 1954
I haven’t seen On the Waterfront again since it was first
released and went on to pick up eight Oscars and four nominations, including
one for Leonard Bernstein’s score. I play the stunning orchestral suite
quite often, at which time the film comes vividly alive again and again.
But, so far as I remember, there is not a single note played in the most
memorable scene in the movie. It’s a conversation in the back of a cab
between Terry (Marlon Brando), an ex-prize fighter and his mobster brother
Charley (Rod Steiger), who is responsible for Terry’s decline to dockland
informer. Anyone who can elevate the following into high tragedy deserves an
Oscar: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.
I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” And, of
course, Brando got the Oscar for Best Actor.
KR
