A

TRIBUTE
TO THE
100
GREATEST
FILM
SCENES
The Silents (1)

A collection of the 100 most famous,

unforgettable or memorable images, scenes,
sequences or performances in films of the 20th
century.

100 Greatest Film Scenes

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description
# 1. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
A controversial, reprehensible, explicitly racist, but groundbreaking, landmark American epic film masterpiece - these all
describe producer/director D. W. Griffith's cinematic work. In
particular, it is remarkable for its cinematic feel and spectacle of
splendidly-staged Civil War battle scenes with historical
costuming and hundreds of extras.
On the battlefield, eldest son Benjamin Cameron (Henry B.
Wathall), known as "the Little Colonel" leads a final desperate
assault against the Union command of Capt. Phil Stoneman
(Elmer Clifton) and charges down a road leading his troops, in a
dramatic moving-camera shot, taken from a high angle.
Cameron is wounded in action when he leads a final assault
carrying the Confederate flag against the Union entrenchment
line.

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After being hospitalized, the scene of the Little Colonel's return

to his ruined home is touching and poignant - one of the greatest
scenes in early film history. Weary, Ben arrives at the front
fence of his home, pausing to notice its disrepair. As he stands
there, "Little Sister" Flora (Mae Marsh) and other family
members expectantly await his arrival inside. Ben slowly enters
the fence gate and approaches the front porch. Flora bounces
joyfully out of the front door - but then hesitates when she sees
his anguished expression. They both feign happiness at first, and
he notices the raw cotton that she is wearing. Both succumb to
grateful tears and the two sadly embrace on the front porch. She
guides him into the front door. From a side view, the tender
hand of his mother reaches out through the door and gradually
draws him inside.
[The concluding Ku Klux Klan ride - with extensive crosscutting between the scenes to create excitement and suspense although glorifying the role of the white supremacist group, is a
justly-celebrated piece of film-making that builds the film to a
dramatic climax.]

# 2. Way Down East (1920)

The most stunning and realistic sequence ever filmed was
completely real and extremely dangerous in its finale. This is the
scene of Anna Moore's (Lillian Gish) daring, last-second rescue
from a moving ice floe. The young woman is ejected from the
rural Bartlett home during a raging blizzard when her secret past
(an unmarried pregnancy) is revealed. Delirious from the cold
and blinded by the snow, she falls down and faints on a slab of
ice floe in the midst of an icy river.
Lying on the ice block, her hand trails into the freezing water.
As the ice thaws the next morning and breaks apart, her lifeless
form is caught unconscious on moving ice-floes and is swept
downstream toward a precipitous waterfall. The farmer's son
David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess) sees her floating toward
the falls. Without a moment to lose, in an exciting, tense, "last
minute rescue scene," he dashes out onto the wobbly icecakes
and nimbly jumps from one moving, bobbing ice block to
another to try to reach her before the ice jam gives way - rushing

to the falls toward her death.

As Anna regains consciousness, but starts to sink into the frigid
water at the edge of the falls, David finally reaches her, scoops
her up and saves her, running perilously upstream (and keeping
his balance) on unstable blocks of ice to reach the shore.
# 3. Safety Last (1923)
This film earned Harold Lloyd, the bookish, horn-rimmed
glasses-wearing comedian, his nickname "the King of Daredevil
Comedy." The film is best remembered for its thrilling, hairraising climax - a reckless, 'safety last,' humorous stunt on the
side of a twelve-story skyscraper above busy city streets. The
scary sequence was deliberately shot with most of the camera
compositions including views of the perilous drop behind him.
In the remarkable, daredevil sequences, the Boy inches his way
up and climbs to the top of the twelve-story building, one hand
and foot hold after the other, encountering absurdly new
difficulties at every new floor - pesky, flapping pigeons who
feast on nuts that have fallen on him from above, a tennis net
that becomes enveloped around him, painters who thrust a
protruding two by four paint platform at him, a swinging
window, a clock, a rope, a vicious dog, a flagpole, a mouse
which climbs up his pants leg, a photographic subject who is
posing with a gun pointed at him at the exact moment the flash
explodes, a revolving weather vane, and a second rope entangled
around his ankle which swings him pendulum-like from the top
of the building. The most-remembered obstacle is the clock. For
thrilling moments, he hangs from the minute-hand of the large
clock, dangling dangerously above the street as the clock-face
pulls off the wall - while still wearing his glasses and a straw
hat.
He finally reaches the top of the building, lands in the girl's arms
on the roof, and they go off arm in arm. Our hero has proved his
worth, become a success, earned the $1,000 prize money, and
won the girl. Unbeknownst to the Boy, he tromps through fresh
tar on the roof of the building, leaving - in four steps - his shoes
and socks behind.
# 4. Greed (1924)
The tragic ending in the great salt flats of Death Valley in Erich
von Stroheim's masterpiece is absolutely remarkable. Marcus
(Jean Hersholt) joins a posse and pursues his old friend/dentist
McTeague (Gibson Gowland), greedy for the $100 reward
offered following the suspicious murder and burglary of Trina
McTeague (Zasu Pitts) - and for the wife's gold coins.
"McTeague was headed for the very heart of Death Valley...that

horrible wilderness of which even beasts were afraid."

In the closing sequence, McTeague flees with Trina's money
into the stifling heat and wasteland of Death Valley - a literal
hell and a symbolic representation of the expansive, desolate
terrain of McTeague's inner world.
In a protracted fight to the death in the middle of the parched
desert covered with caked ground and cracked alkaline, the two
men face each other and grapple together for the gold as they
wrestle for control of the gun. They struggle on the white
ground, until McTeague overpowers Marcus and strikes with the
revolver - he clubs his one-time friend to death with the gun.
Marcus lies still and bloody on the ground - yet in the midst of
the life and death struggle, McTeague's left wrist has become
attached to Marcus' right wrist - by handcuffs.
He turns and looks at the canvas bag (with gold coins) on the
saddle of the dead mule, looks at the empty canteen, and sinks to
his knees. He sits there, anchored in the deadly, pitiless heat of
Death Valley, chained to the corpse of his once close friend that
he just slew. He has the gold, but no water. There is only vast
emptiness around him as he awaits his own death.

# 5. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The most famous sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's classic is the
climactic massacre of local townspeople on the Odessa steps - in
a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of the failed 1905
revolution in Russia against the czar. The scene is beautifully
orchestrated with a montage of close-ups of faces and objects
and long-shots, all rapidly cut together and contrasted as the
images build to a devastating conclusion.
Czarist troops, with drawn rifles to quell a revolutionary
movement circa 1905, march down a flight of stone marble steps
leading to the harbor where the people of Odessa are cheering
the men on the czarist-armed battleship cruiser Potemkin at the
port on the Black Sea. Successive waves of white-uniformed
soldiers appear - ordered by city officials loyal to the czar to
attack the riled-up citizenry. Shots ring out as they fire on the
civilians, bringing about dizzying chaos as terrified people rush
to flee down the steep stairs.

One woman - whose son has been shot - cradles his bloodied
body in her arms and approaches the army to defy them - she
stands in their elongated shadows before she too is gunned down
point-blank.
A young mother is hit in the mid-section, and the force of her
falling body causes her baby carriage to tumble out of control
down the steps.
In a startling close-up, the lens of a woman's glasses splinters
and blood gushes from her eye socket.

# 6. The Big Parade (1925)

The scene of the parting of the American troops from a French
village in King Vidor's war film is one of the most famous and
memorable in cinematic history.
American doughboy Jim (John Gilbert) calls out for French
peasant girl Melisande (Renee Adoree) but cannot locate her.
She too hears the bugle call and sees the dust of the trucks, the
horse-drawn caissons, and the running men assembling for the
pull-out. Her distress and desperation rises with the suddenness
of their leaving. Suddenly, she decides that she is desperately in
love with Jim. She pushes her way through the massed ranks of
soldiers - looking and calling out for him in the ensuing chaos
and rising dust. Her frenzied search becomes more frantic and
emotional as she searches for a glimpse of him to bid him a
lasting farewell. Two other passing soldiers grab at her - one
touches her breast, the other tries to steal a kiss.
Jim climbs into the back of a transport truck, one in a long line
of battle trucks. When he finally catches sight of her, he jumps
off the truck and races back - they wildly embrace and pepper
each other with kisses - framed in close-up. Earnestly, he vows
to return to her in the touching scene: "I'm coming back! Remember - - - I'm coming back!" An officer pulls on Jim, and
then rips them apart. The agonized, feisty French village girl hits
back at anyone who would tear them from each other. As Jim is
dragged into the tail end of a truck, Melisande holds on firmly to
his left leg - refusing to let go. She runs along for a moment as
the truck pulls away - she desperately hangs onto a chain
dangling off the vehicle, trying to halt the inevitable and defy
both time and fate. When she won't let go, she is dragged

alongside the procession until she can't hold on any longer.

He tosses her mementos to remember him by: his wristwatch,
his dogtags, and one shoe, and then sprays her with two-handed
kisses. She stands and watches the truck disappear - holding his
shoe to her bosom. The passing vehicles and clouds of dust
envelope her - and then subside. In the middle of the road, she
sinks to her knees with her head bowed.
[The realistic battle scenes in the film are also legendary,
especially the harrowingly realistic battle scene of the soldiers'
chilling march into enemy machine gun sniper fire at Belleau
Wood.]
# 7. The Gold Rush (1925)
A legendary scene is the one in which two famished fortuneseekers during the Alaskan Klondike gold rush celebrate
Thanksgiving Day dinner. In their isolated cabin, the starving
Lone Prospector (Charlie Chaplin) cooks his own boot in a large
pot. He takes on airs as a French gourmet at a feast.
When he serves the shoe, he splits the sole, cutting it like a filet,
and sets the smaller portion before his large companion Big Jim
McKay (Mack Swain). Big Jim greedily switches the plates to
get the upper portion of the shoe. The Prospector delicately
chews on the lower sole part, treating it like a delicacy as he
picks his way through the leather - he treats the laces like
spaghetti, coiling them about his fork. He daintily sucks the
nails, like they were the bones of a game bird.
[The famous dancing dinner-roll scene in the same film rates
highly.]

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 8. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The frightening, eerie moment that the mad
Erik (Lon Chaney, Sr.), the horribly disfigured
phantom of the opera, is unmasked and shows
his "accursed ugliness" is in Universal's
definitive silent horror classic. The phantom is
in love with Christine Daae (Mary Philbin), a
soprano understudy at the Paris Opera.
After he has professed his "love triumphant" for
her, and while he is playing the organ in the

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opera house, she fearfully creeps up behind

him and hesitantly rips off his mask, revealing
his grotesque face - artfully-applied makeup
shows round, darkened eyes, jagged decayed
teeth, flaring nostrils, and a corpse-like visage.
She screams in horror and falls to her knees
and cowers below him as he threateningly
points at her.
# 9. The General (1927)
In a visually simple scene, one of the most
famous and memorable moments in cinematic
history, Johnnie Gray's (Buster Keaton)
girlfriend Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) has just
shunned and rejected him as a coward when
she learns from her brother that "he didn't even
get in line...He's a disgrace to the South." She
rebuffs and spurns him after he has been
rejected as a soldier, not knowing that he will
end up as a civilian engineer in the Civil War
effort.
Johnnie sits down dejectedly on the
connecting, driving bar between the wheels of
his huge locomotive. When the engine starts
up and begins to move forward, his unmoving,
dwarfed frame is carried along on the crossbar,
brought up and down three times in a series of
arcs, before he suddenly realizes what is going
on - a perfect image for the complex emotional
feelings he is experiencing.
As the train passes into the roundhouse (train
shed), he solemnly expresses astonishment,
sadness, and amusement.
# 10. The Jazz Singer (1927)
The most famous of all talkie sequences after
almost three decades of film silence is Al
Jolson's first spoken words. After singing a fullthroated rendition of Dirty Hands, Dirty
Face (Jolson's first musical performance in the
film) about the joys of having a young son, his
song is received enthusiastically by the
audience.
Jack Robin (Al Jolson) raises his hand and
stops them (in his first spoken words on
screen), speaking some of the most famous

lines of dialogue in film history:

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't heard
nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain't
heard nothin'! Do you wanna hear Toot, Toot,
Tootsie!? All right, hold on, hold on. [To the
band leader] Lou, Listen. Play Toot, Toot,
Tootsie! Three choruses, you understand. In
the third chorus I whistle. Now give it to 'em
hard and heavy. Go right ahead!"
Jack entertains the cabaret crowd with a
rousing rendition of Toot, Toot, Tootsie,
including a wide variety of creative whistle
sounds.
# 11. Metropolis (1927)
In Fritz Lang's expressionistic, utopian view of
the 21st century future, visually-cinematic
images foreshadowed the development of
future science-fiction films and other diatribes
of dehumanized Labor versus Capital.
In the visual melodrama, it is the year 2026 - a
Dickensian 'best of times, worst of times.' Total
oppression and manipulation of the masses is
wielded by the unquestionable power of the
leisurely few. Nameless, amorphous, exploited
battalions of uniformed, underground workers
are viewed in stylized shots. Black-garbed and
unidentifiable, they trudge sullenly to their
laborious tasks and alternate their work shifts,
day after day in mechanical routines, amidst
enormous pounding pistons of machinery,
moving/rotating gears, power stations, gauges
and dials, and valves and levers.
The down-trodden, ant-like slave laborers in
the labyrinthine catacombs of the Underground
City support the minority elite ruling class of the
"chosen few" in the upper futuristic world of
skyscrapers, elevated trafficways and
aeroplanes.
[The scene of the life-like vitalizationtransformation of an android female robot by
mad scientist/inventor Rotwang (Rudolf KleinRogge) is stunning. Maria (Brigitte Helm) is
pursued in the catacombs by Rotwang's glaring
flashlight, kidnapped, made captive, and
brought to his alchemist laboratory so that he
can give the false, evil robotic duplicate the

"girl's likeness." Luminous rings circumscribe

and travel vertically over the robotic figure,
spreading Maria's life and circulatory system
into the machine and replacing the robot's
inhuman mask with her human face.]

# 12. Sunrise (1927)

In the darkness of night, the dazed, bewitched
husband, a married farmer (George O'Brien) is
smitten and in sexual thrall to the passionate,
wicked city woman/vamp (Margaret Livingston)
in the erotic seduction scene in F. W. Murnau's
masterpiece.
After hearing a whistle signal and without a
word to his light-haired wife (Janet Gaynor), he
leaves without touching his dinner. He secretly
meets his tempting mistress on the edge of the
misty, swampy marshes in a memorable
sequence. Under a gigantic full hazy moon
which reflects on the water and shines through
the haze, she waits for him, silhouetted against
the moon.
The supernatural spell and erotic charm of the
city woman seduces him - she steals his sanity
and soul. The seductress tempts him,
visualizing for him how to murder his wife by
drowning: "Tell me. You are all mine? Sell your
farm...come with me to the City."
# 13a. The Crowd (1928)
King Vidor's film is a caustic, bitter
denunciation of the illusionary American
dream. The hero of the film eagerly arrives in
the big city, convinced of the promise of
success - on-location work reflects the nittygritty of the metropolis.
One of the most majestic, fluid shots in this
silent film masterpiece - one of the greatest
impressionistic tracking shots in all of cinematic
history - begins at the street level and smoothly
travels up the flat outside surface of a stone
wall of a multi-windowed skyscraper, one of

many in New York City.

Suddenly, the office building rises and
straightens up, and transports the viewer
directly into one of its hundreds of windows - all
looking exactly alike.
# 13b. The Crowd (1928)
In a dissolve, the camera slides through the
window into the building's interior, into a large
room filled with a monotonous criss-crossing of
rows of hundreds of identical office desks and
hundreds of office workers. The criss-crossing
of geometric rectangles on the exterior of the
building are replicated inside. The juxtaposition
suggests that the workers are just as lacking in
individuality as the skyscraper's windows.
The camera sweeps across the infinite sea of
anonymous, business-attired, insurance
company paper-pushers until it zooms in on
our hero - one of many wage-slaves lost in the
sea of desks.
He is seated amidst hundreds of other
obedient and cowed clerks. Another faceless
victim of the city, John Sims' (James Murray)
desk is labeled (in closeup): "John Sims 137."

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 14. All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)
In the unforgettable final moments of this film,
just before the "all quiet on the western front"
armistice and with all of his comrades gone,
soldiers are bailing water out of a dilapidated
trench. The faint sound of a harmonica can be
heard.
Paul (Lew Ayres), a young German soldier, is
sitting alone, daydreaming inside the trench on
a seemingly peaceful, bright day. He is
exhausted by terror and boredom.
Through the gunhole of his trench, he sees a
beautiful lone butterfly that has alighted just
beyond his reach next to a discarded tin can
outside the parapet. He begins to carefully
reach out over the protection of his bunker with

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his hand to grasp it, momentarily forgetting the

danger that is ever-present.
As he stretches his hand out yearning for its
beauty, a distant French sniper prepares to
take careful aim through a scope on a rifle. As
he leans out closer to the fragile butterfly and
extends his hand, suddenly the sharp whining
sound of a shot is heard. Paul's hand jerks
back, twitches for a moment and then goes
limp in death.
All is silent and quiet. The harmonica tune
stops.
# 15. City Lights (1931)
The tearful, sentimental ending in this
memorable film is brilliantly conceived and
acted.
A blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) with
restored sight recognizes and realizes that her
benefactor is the vagabondish, funny-looking
Tramp (Charlie Chaplin). Earlier, the Tramp
'stole' the same money he had once been
given by a millionaire (Harry Myers) -he
snatches the wad of money, gets away from
the police, and rushes to the girl's home. Into
her hands, he places all the money for rent and
for a sight-restoring operation, even giving her
$100 that he had saved in his pocket for
himself. As he bids her farewell, he tells her
that he will be going away for awhile. She
again mistakenly believes, in her blindness,
that he is her millionaire benefactor.
After the Tramp has been released from prison
following nine months of imprisonment, he
ambles down the street and passes a flower
shop where he sees the former blind girl
through the shop window - now miraculously
able to see. She has been watching and
giggling at the comic/tragic figure through the
flower shop window. He is transfixed with
wonder and joy and he grins at her with a
melting smile - but he also realizes how she
wouldn't recognize him. She turns and makes
an ironic comment to her grandmother inside
the shop: "I've made a conquest!" - but she
cannot imagine that he is her Prince Charming.
The film's most simple, moving, eloquent and

poignant finale is filled with melancholy and

pathos. Although the Tramp tries to walk away
and evade her, she stops laughing and pities
him. Determined to help him, she calls him
back and outside the shop, in a sympathetic
act of charity, offers him a fresh white rose to
replace the tattered, wilting one he picked up
from the gutter. She also offers him a coin that
she has just taken from the flower shop
register. When she takes his hand and puts the
coin in the palm of his hand, it suddenly dawns
on her who he is. With her acute, sensitive
sense of touch, she recognizes the familiar feel
of his hands. As she runs her hand up the
ragged fellow's coat from his shoulder to his
face, she realizes that he is her mysterious
benefactor - a shabbily-dressed little vagabond
who raised the money for her operation.
They recognize and see each other for the first
time, reunited, face-to-face, the Tramp feeling
many emotions at once - shame, fear, bravery,
pain, tentativeness, love, bliss and joy. At first,
she appears slightly dismayed - he looks so
completely different from what she expected and then she is moved. The Tramp smiles and
his eyes light up when she
recognizes and accepts him for who he is. The
Flower Girl asks: "You?" The Tramp nods in
assent and smiles shyly, and then points to his
eyes: "You can see now?" The Flower Girl
nods and her smile widens: "Yes, I can see
now." She grasps his hand to her breast.
The Tramp, anguished and ecstatic at the
same time, stands frozen as he holds his finger
to his mouth and places the gift of the flower
between his teeth and clenches the stem with
his teeth - it is a simple, meaningful gesture.
The truth is revealed - she can 'see now'
through his pretense - nothing more can be
said. Their social roles are now reversed in this
face-to-face encounter - his identity has
changed from a benevolent millionaire to a
vagabond, impoverished Tramp.
She has turned from a poor, blind girl into a
prosperous beautiful woman. With one of the
most staggering shots ever filmed - a closeup
of the Tramp's face and smile, she identifies
him.
The ethereal closeup of his radiant, smiling
face fades to black.

# 16. Frankenstein (1931)

In a remarkable creation sequence in the
watchtower during the raging storm in James
Whale's horror classic, Dr. Frankenstein (Colin
Clive) has rigged an apparatus to take the
artificial body on a moveable platform to the
opening at the rooftop of the tower where it can
be electrified by a lightning strike. The
astonished witnesses and onlookers watch and
hear the defiantly mad, zealous Dr. Henry
Frankenstein's theatrically convince his
audience of his work: "Quite a good scene, isn't
it? One man crazy - three very sane
spectators." With startled eyes, they witness
the bizarre experiment in horror.
Dr. Frankenstein and Fritz (Dwight Frye) roll
down a blanket (from head to foot) covering a
white-shrouded, lifeless corpse. Then, they roll
back the white sheet (from foot to head),
revealing a monstrous, fabricated cadaver
underneath. Amidst the crackling of
transformers, dynamos, and electrodes, with
Fritz's help, the table is moved to the rooftop,
where it is repeatedly struck by lightning, to
harness the awesome energy of the storm.
Lightning flashes, and electric arcs jump from
machine to machine, jolting a charge of life into
the inanimate monster strapped to the
operating table.
Finally, the immense platform-table is then
lowered back down into the laboratory. At first,
there is no sign of movement or life - nothing
seems to have happened and the creature fails
to respond. But then, the creature's bare right
hand that is hanging free twitches - a promising
sign that the Monster (Boris Karloff) is coming
to life. Dr. Frankenstein hysterically shouts:
"Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive....It's
alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive,
it's alive, it's alive! Oh - in the name of God.
Now I know what it...["feels like to be God" this phrase was censored and removed]." A
mad and uncontrollable Henry is restrained as
his cries are drowned out by lightning bolts,
howling winds and thunder.
[Another of the film's most powerful, poignant,
and horrifying scenes: The Monster attempts to
make friends with Maria (Marilyn Harris), a
young girl who plays by the bank of a lake she is not repelled by his hideous appearance

and invites him to play. She takes his hand and

leads him to the side of the lake. With child-like
innocence, he smells a daisy flower she has
given him and a smile lights his face. After they
kneel next to the water, Maria hands him some
flowers to join her in a delightful game of
throwing them into the pond. One by one, they
toss flowers onto the surface of the lake,
watching the petals float. When the Monster's
few flower blossoms are gone, he puzzles for a
moment at his empty hands, and then
innocently and ignorantly picks up a screaming
Maria. He enthusiastically throws her in the
water - expecting that she, too, will float like the
flower petals. She flounders and splashes in
the water and quickly sinks and drowns. As he
staggers away from the lake, the Monster
seems to express some confusion and
remorse, shaking and wringing his hands and
possibly perceiving the horrible thing he has
done.]
# 17. Public Enemy (1931)
One of the most vividly remembered,
misogynistic, and vicious scenes in film history
is the breakfast scene in this definitive and
early gangster film. It is one of the single-most
cruel acts ever depicted in a film. A life of crime
has made the character cruel and hardened.
In cocky gangster Tom Power's (James
Cagney) apartment, he walks sleepily to the
breakfast table in his striped pajamas. He is in
a foul mood, bored, grouchy and irritable after
a demanding phone conversation. Tom has
grown tired of his relationship with moll
girlfriend Kitty (Mae Clarke). At the table, she
greets him without a smile. When he asks her
for a beer for breakfast, she talks back.
Tom: "Ain't you got a drink in the house?"
Kitty: "Well, not before breakfast dear."
Tom: "I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if
you had a drink."
Kitty: "I know Tom, but I-I wish that..."
Tom: "There you go with that wishin' stuff
again. I wish you was a wishing well, so that I
could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya."
Kitty (provokingly): "Maybe you've found
someone you like better."
He looks down, makes a nasty grimace, and
then impulsively picks up a grapefruit half from

his plate and contemptuously pushes it into her

face to end their relationship. She looks down,
physically and painfully hurt and emotionally
embarrassed by his crudeness.
# 18. Footlight Parade (1933)
Choreographer Busby Berkeley
choreographed/directed some of the most
elaborate films and production numbers ever,
including this one - his most extravagant
fantasy film.
In most of these unique films, emphasis was
on large extravagant (sometimes outlandish)
musical numbers and sets. He used his chorus
girls not as individuals but as parts of large,
attractive geometric patterns moving with
precise choreography. The images could be
animated tiles in vast, ever-shifting mosaics,
fanciful geometric patterns or cascading
designs. Often, he would use his legendary
cinematic "top view" shot to capture the
kaleidoscopic views. He dressed the girls up in
preposterous costumes, sometimes as coins or
musical instruments, or the chorus girls would
wear next to nothing but wisps of gauze.
There were three large production numbers:
the eight minute Honeymoon
Hotel features a Jersey City, NJ hotel
with staff members who wink at the
arrival of a honeymooning couple. The
hallways contain only young amorous
couples wearing skimpy nightgowns
and pajamas. Eager bridegrooms
share a communal bathroom before
bedding down. House detectives
wonder why everyone is registered
there by the name of Smith.
the second ten-minute
extravaganza By a Waterfall is an
amazing geometric number featuring a
gigantic waterfall covered with scantilyclad bathers who dive and slide down
the rocks, an aquacade of over 100
swimmers shot both from above and
underneath its glass sided aquarium,
and a revolving, human water fountain.
the final ten-minute
sequence, Shanghai Lil, involves
theatrical producer/sailor boy Chester

Kent (James Cagney) searching for his

girl Shanghai Lil in a stylized Oriental
bar and nightclub populated with
Chinese prostitutes. He finds the blackwigged girl (Ruby Keeler), in a scene
inter-mixed with a brawl involving
sailors, marines, civilians, and chorus
girls. In the patriotic finale, he joins the
marching troops, and groups of topphotographed performers create the
Stars and Stripes, an image of FDR,
and an American eagle.

# 19. 42nd Street (1933)

In this seminal backstage musical, when green,
chorus-girl understudy Peggy Sawyer (Ruby
Keeler) is brought out of her dressing room,
director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) delivers
immortal lines to his terrified, open-mouthed
performer in the wings just before she goes
onstage to take the place of opening night star
Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) - his last-minute
instructions:
"Now Sawyer, you listen to me and you listen
hard. Two hundred people, 200 jobs,
$200,000, five weeks of grind and blood and
sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all
these people who have worked with you.
You've got to go on, and you have to give and
give and give. They've got to like you, they've
got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down.
You can't, because your future's in it, my future
and everything all of us have is staked on you.
All right now, I'm through. But you keep your
feet on the ground and your head on those
shoulders of yours and go out - and Sawyer,
you're going out a youngster, but you've got to
come back a star."
Peggy is pushed on-stage for her debut
leading appearance.

# 20. King Kong (1933)

The final moments of this film contain some of
the most familiar and memorable of all images
and sequences in film history.
Atop the Empire State Building, Kong clutches
Ann (Fay Wray), the girl whose blonde beauty
touched his heart. He places her on a ledge
and then roars in defiance at the planes which
are strafing him with machine gun fire. A
squadron of fighter biplanes swirl around him in
an attack to shoot him down, as he swats at
them like irritating mosquitoes, but he cannot
reach them. The perspective of the diving,
sweeping planes takes the viewpoint of the
pilots. He flinches as machine gun bullets rip
into his body. Kong sends one careless pilot to
a fiery death by snatching him out of the sky.
After a vicious attack into his throat and body,
he is weakened and knows that he is dying. He
touches his chest, and then looks at the blood
on his fingers from a chest wound. He wipes
his forehead with the back of his hand. He
gently picks Ann up one last time to look at her
with affection. Then, he returns her to the ledge
and strokes her gently with his fingertips. After
another volley of bullets into his throat, his
head droops and his body sways and staggers
- he is barely able to hold on.
When he loosens his hold from the building he
silently plunges to his death to the street far
below. Tragically, Kong is no longer an object
of terror and fear, but of pity.
# 21. Queen Christina (1933)
Following a classic abdication scene, Swedish
Queen Christina (Greta Garbo) renounces her
throne and duty in favor of love and romance,
after her subjects rebel at the thought of her
marrying a Spaniard who would become king.
She agonizes over her decision: "Evidently, my
people who are said to love me, do not wish
me to be happy."
In the bleak finale, after Spanish envoy Don
Antonio (John Gilbert) tragically dies in her
arms on the deck of her sailing ship, she is
exiled from Sweden forever but she
optimistically muses: "The wind is with us." As

the sails bloom out, she moves to the bow of

the ship and stands mutely as a figurehead. A
lengthy, lingering zoom-in and close-up shot of
her beautiful face conveys a blankly enigmatic,
immortal, Mona Lisa look as she unblinkingly
faces her destiny.
[Another unforgettable sequence: Before a
flickering fire, she eats grapes meltingly in the
flickering firelight with Don Antonio during their
passionate, clandestine love affair.]
# 22. It Happened One Night (1934)
In the most-remembered and funniest
sequence, headstrong heiress Ellie Andrews
(Claudette Colbert) and out-of-a-job
newspaperman Peter Warne (Clark Gable)
compare hitchhiking techniques to try to attract
a ride.
First, Peter confidently brags about his expert
knowledge with a detailed lecture on the three
proper and correct ways that common people
hail cars while thumb hitchhiking: "It's all in that
ol' thumb, see?...that ol' thumb never fails. It's
all a matter of how you do it though." As he
demonstrates his teachings in real action as
cars come by, she lies down on the top rail of a
fence in an uncomfortable position, watching
him but not convinced of his ability. He tries the
first method ("a short, jerky movement like this
- that shows independence") on a sole car, but
it fails and the car drives right on by.
When he tests method number two ("a little
wider movement - a smile goes with this one"),
they watch over a dozen cars on the country
road leave them in their dust without even
slowing down as Peter tries every variation of
thumb-wagging in his repertoire. Method
number three also fails ("When you're broke
and hungry and everything looks black. It's a
long sweeping movement"). Peter thumbs his
nose at the last car - his infallible methods with
all three thumb-wagging techniques are totally
unsuccessful and he is quickly deflated and
defeated.
So Ellie offers to give it a try, demonstrating her
superior hitchhiking technique, but he mocks
her proposal to do better. Without using her
thumb at all, she provocatively raises her skirt

above the knee, exposing a shapely,

stockinged leg. Her technique is immediately
effective and the next car screeches to a halt.
She asks for a little credit for her alternative
thumb-less method: "Aren't you going to give
me a little credit?...Well, I proved once and for
all that the limb is mightier than the thumb."
[The other most famous sequence of the film is
the "Wall of Jericho" bedroom scene in the
autocamp.]
# 23. Alice Adams (1935)
The highlight of director George Stevens' is the
classic, tragically funny, disastrous dinner-party
scene. The aspiring title role character Alice
Adams (Katharine Hepburn) hopelessly wishes
to rise up above the low-social prominence of
her vulgar, poor family. To impress a rich new
suitor Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray) at a
stylish dinner party at her own home - in the
wilting heat - she fiercely wishes to make a
good impression by having conned Arthur into
believing that her folks are well-to-do. She has
fictionalized her life to him and forced everyone
in her family to pretend that they are something
other than themselves.
The slovenly, gum-chewing and drunk parttime black servant Malena (Hattie McDaniel)
has been coached to make it a first-class
event, but she valiantly makes a mess of
things. With her maid's cap falling off her head,
she serves caviar sandwiches - in slow-motion
- as an appetizer. After forcing open the stuck
dining room doors, Malena inelegantly
announces: "Dinner is served."
Alice's father Virgil (Fred Stone), whose shirt
front keeps popping open, responds: "Well,
that's good. Let's go see if we can eat it."
Although it is a sweltering, humid night, they
have hot soup as a first course. The soup
plates are removed before the diners are
finished. Ill-at-ease and sweating profusely,
Arthur plays with his sweetbreads course, but
politely compliments the hosts. Alice chatters
and smiles away, trying to make a good
impression. The brussel sprouts, which have
smelled up the house, are thrust at everyone.
Having forgotten the maid's name, Virgil calls

"Here you" when he requests water to drink.

With tears in her eyes, Alice asks Arthur: "A
penny for your thought. No, I'll pay more," and
offers him a "poor, little dead rose" as further
payment. Obviously, she knows that he has
seen the reality of her bumbling, cloddish
family, but he replies: "I'm afraid I haven't any."
Tremulus and vulnerable from worry, she
pleads as she wipes her tears: "Will you ever
forgive us...for making you eat such a heavy
dinner?...You can run on home as soon as you
like."

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 24. A Night at the Opera (1935)
This Marx Brothers' musical comedy has one
of the most celebrated scenes in all screen
comedy - the classic, slapstick crowded
stateroom scene. Seedy entrepreneur and
swindler Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) sails
to New York on the S. S. Americus with the
New York Opera Company to represent his
interests toward wealthy dowager Mrs.
Claypool (Margaret Dumont). On board,
Driftwood finds himself in Suite # 58, a
telephone-booth-size stateroom on the cruise
ship.
When the steward attempts to cram a steamer
trunk into the cozy room, Driftwood asks:
"Wouldn't it be simpler if you just put the
stateroom in the trunk?" He is aghast to see
three stowaways, Fiorello (Chico), Riccardo
(Allan Jones), and a sleeping Tomasso (Harpo)
curled up in the bottom drawer of the trunk they pop out into his tiny compartment. To
keep them quiet, he steps into the hallway and
places an order with the steward for meals supplemented by additional orders for food
items from behind the stateroom door.
A persistent procession of people from the
ship's staff parade into the tiny shoebox cabin
no bigger than a closet: two chambermaids to
make up the room, an engineer to turn off the
heat, a manicurist to trim Driftwood's nails, the
engineer's large assistant, an inquiring young
woman wandering around for her Aunt Minnie

Screenshots

and asking to use the phone, a determined,

gum-chewing, cleaning washwoman to mop
up, and the stewards with the meal order.
Each of the occupants that are entangled
together must find space in a nook or cranny of
the miniscule stateroom. The grande dame,
Mrs. Claypool shows up in her finest costume
and opens the door, letting loose the abovementioned in an avalanching torrent of bodies
into the corridor.
[The other classic scene in the film is "The
Party of the First Part" contract scene and the
line about a "Sanity Clause".]
# 25. Top Hat (1935)
The dancing partnership of Ginger Rogers and
Fred Astaire, stretching over seven years for
RKO Studios, has produced a priceless
number of memorable dance duets. Most film
afficionados consider it (their fourth film) to be
their finest film together.
In a centerpiece solo, Astaire dances the
sensational Top Hat, White Tie, and
Tails number as part of the second act of his
London show - it is the quintessential tuxedoclad dance, backed by a top-hatted, tuxedoed,
male chorus line.
Together, the duo performs the romantic
adagio Cheek to Cheek. He breaks into song in
mid-sentence: "Heaven, I'm in Heaven. And my
heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I
seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're
out together dancing, Cheek to Cheek..." First,
they dance in the company of others on a
crowded dance floor and then dance/drift
across a bridge to a deserted, circular ballroom
area. All alone in a dreamlike setting, they
perform a romantic dance together.
Dale's ankle-length gown, (the most famous of
all Rogers' dance dresses), light, ice-blue satin
covered with ostrich feathers, sheds as they
whirl around. Beautifully, they stretch out an
arm to each other (his left, her right), leading to
her twirling spin into him. Briefly, they repeat
their earlier tap-dancing routine from the
bandstand, performing side by side. Several
times she bends deeply backwards in his arms

during their choreographed dance, surrending

to his seductive, luring attraction. Mixed with
standard ballroom dance positions, they also
leap and turn boldly, separate, spin, and then
return "cheek to cheek."
After a climactic ending with a full orchestral
burst, the dance ends as they come to rest
against a wall. They affectionately gaze at
each other, while Jerry slowly twiddles his
thumbs.
# 26. Modern Times (1936)
In Charlie Chaplin's last 'silent' film, he battles
technology.
The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) has a disastrous,
nightmarish lunch at a food-eating machine
(another most-memorable sequence) - a
mechanical, automated, aerodynamicallystyled, silent feeding machine which features a
revolving table, an automaton soup plate, an
automatic food pusher, a revolving low and
high gear corncob feeder, and a hydrocompressed sterilized mouth wipe.
Back at his factory worker job in the late
afternoon after rejoining his co-workers on the
assembly line, his job is to tighten bolts on an
endless series of machine parts - he is a small
cog in the factory. The key to successful nuttightening is to perform his movements and
tasks with clocklike tempo and precision. From
his work station on the assembly-line, he holds
wrenches in both hands to tighten nuts on a
long stream of steel plates carried on the
conveyor belt production line. The boss has
ordered production increases: "Section 5 - give
'em the limit," so the conveyor belt is sped up a hilarious, frenzied scene as he makes an
heroic effort to keep up.
Under the strain of the job, he finally goes
beserk, slowly driven insane by the assembly
line. He literally lies prone on the belt and is
dragged, swallowed and eaten up by the
whizzing wheels, gears, and cogs of the
monstrous machine. His body snakes its way
through the gears until the production line's
direction is reversed and he finally emerges
free - coughed out of the machine. He has

gone completely crazy and insane.

[The film's final image of the Tramp walking
into the sunrise is indelible.]

# 27. Camille (1936)

There are few romantic tragedies that capture
the funereal death scene as well as this
exquisite film.
The 19th century Parisian courtesan,
Marguerite 'Camille' Gautier (Greta Garbo), a
notorious, kept-woman with an avaricious life
of self-indulgence and frivolity succumbs to
consumption in the presence of the handsome,
young Armand Duval (Robert Taylor). The
prolonged scene commences with the
confinement of the dying Marguerite on her
bed. Her weakened, wan face is framed by her
pillow - she rallies to get out of bed when she
learns her lover has come. The vulnerable
woman gets out of bed and painfully makes her
way to a chair. There, her nurse brings her
camellias to pin to her lap, and brushes her
hair. Rapturous, impatient, and hoping to look
perfect, Camille begs: "I'll be beautiful again
when I'll be well again, won't I?"
In an exquisite, classic deathbed scene, she
makes a great effort to stand and greet
Armand as he enters. Her eyes and face are
joyous and bright for their reunion. But in
moments, she is exhausted and debilitated - he
sweeps his fragile love into his arms as she
falls. He babbles to her about his reaffirmation
of love and promises to stay with her forever now that he understands her love-asrenunciation. He plans for their happy future
together, beginning with a trip to the country
where she can get well. She gains sustenance
and power from his ardor and support.
Marguerite falters however - she goes limp and
cries that she isn't strong enough.
After he calls for the doctor, places her in a
chaise and kneels at her side, she experiences

sadness for a love that she has lost forever in

the temporal world. But she's not self-deluded her death will release them from an untenable
relationship into a more spiritual, mystical
relationship: "Perhaps it's better if I live in your
heart, where the world can't see me. If I'm
dead, there'll be no staying of our love." She
signals death when her eyes burst open once.
She crumbles and falls lifeless, but remains
tranquil with a gentle smile on her face.
Armand looks at her and notices she has
already passed away. He is horrified that this is
the end. He buries his face on her breast,
weeping. The film ends with a final fade-out,
close-up shot of Marguerite's lovely, radiant
face - imperishable in death.
[Only the deathbed scenes in Dark Victory
(1939) and Wuthering Heights (1939) come
close to equaling this scene - see below.]
# 27a. Dark Victory (1939)
At the conclusion of this film, after bidding her
departing husband Dr. Steele (George Brent)
goodbye, and also comforting her sorrowful
best friend Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald), a dying
Judith (Bette Davis) enters her house - and at
the foot of the stairs, she tells her maid Martha
(Virginia Brissac): "I'm going up to lie down
now." Feeling her way along, she starts
climbing the stairs - one last time - she stops
midway to embrace and say goodbye to her
two dogs Daffy and Don. She haltingly climbs
further toward her bedroom, kneels and offers
a final prayer by her bedside.
Martha has followed her and pulled the blind
on the window, shutting out the rays of
sunlight. Judith asks: "Is that you, Martha?"
She eases herself onto her bed and lies down,
telling her housekeeper to be dismissed,
without hysterics: "I don't want to be disturbed."
Martha covers her with a comforter and then
respectfully leaves the room and closes the
door. Judith triumphantly and victoriously faces
the end alone and dies in a dignified manner.
A camera frames a close-up of Judith's
sightless, staring face and then slowly blurs
out-of-focus, signifying the end of her vision and death. A heavenly chorus of voices
accompanies her entrance into the void.

# 27b. Wuthering Heights (1939)

Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) runs up and
sneaks into Cathy's (Merle Oberon) bedroom,
where together they share one of the most
memorable, luminous deathbed scenes ever
filmed. They pledge their enduring, undying
love and become reconciled after so many
years of mutual unhappiness and bitterness.
They passionately hug and kiss each other,
finally revealing their truest emotions to each
other:
Cathy: "Oh, Heathcliff. Oh how strong you look.
How many years do you mean to live after I'm
gone? Don't, don't let me go. If I could only
hold you until we were both dead. Will you
forget me when I'm in the earth?"
Heathcliff: "I could as soon forget you with my
own life, Cathy, if you die."
Cathy: "Boy, Heathcliff. Come. Let me feel how
strong you are."
Heathcliff: "Strong enough to bring us both
back to life, Cathy, if you want to live."
Cathy: "No, Heathcliff, I want to die."
Heathcliff: "Oh Cathy, why did you kill
yourself?"
Cathy: vHold me. Just hold me."
Heathcliff: "Oh, and love comfort you. My tears
don't love you, Cathy. They blight and curse
and damn you!"
Cathy: "Heathcliff, don't break my heart."
Heathcliff: "Oh Cathy, I never broke your heart.
You broke it! Cathy! Cathy! You loved me!
What right to throw love away for the poor
fancy thing you felt for him, for a handful of
worthiness. Misery and death and all the evils
that God and man could have ever done would
never have parted us. You'd be better alone.
You wandered off like a wanton, greedy child
to break your heart and mine."
Cathy: "Heathcliff, forgive me. We've so little
time."
Heathcliff vows to stay with Cathy as her
strength ebbs. He hears her claim that he was
always the only man she ever loved. She asks
that Heathcliff pick her up: "Take me to the
window. Let me look at the moors with you
once more, my darling. Once more."
Heathcliff carries her in his arms to the window,
where they look out on the moors and the Crag
where they played together as children. Before

slumping into his arms after breathing her last

breath, they make a pact to be together for
eternity. She promises to wait for him there in
death until they are reunited again one day:
"Heathcliff, can you see the Crag over there
where our castle is? I'll wait for you 'til you
come."
# 28a. Gone With the Wind (1939)
One of the most famous and popular films of all
time is director Victor Fleming's Civil War epic.
Against the sweeping, panoramic drama of the
war is the passionate, tumultuous story of
Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and the dashing,
charming Charlestonian Rhett Butler (Clark
Gable).
She is forewarned about him when he is first
noticed as the "nasty dark one" with a "most
terrible reputation" standing alone at the foot of
the staircase during the Wilkes barbecue at the
Twelve Oaks plantation. Dressed in an elegant
black suit, Butler exchanges a cool,
challenging stare with Scarlett. She notices him
undressing her with his eyes: "He looks as if as if he knows what I look like without my
shimmy."
# 28b. Gone With the Wind (1939)
Another powerful scene during the war evokes
irrevocable feelings: Scarlett races to the
enormous open-air 'hospital' of Atlanta's
railroad depot to find Dr. Meade to assist in
Melanie's (Olivia de Havilland) delivery. A
close-up of Scarlett's face shows her horrified
reaction to what she sees. She picks her way
through thousands of wounded and dead
Confederate soldiers strewn around the
railroad depot, in one of the classic, most
incredible and memorable scenes ever filmed.
In the spectacular moving crane shot, the
camera slowly pulls back to show more and
more of the defeated and crippled army in the
hot sun. It finally comes to rest on a close-up of
a torn and tattered Confederate flag which
waves defiantly and bravely over the remnants
of the army, a vivid representation of the death
throes of the Old South.
[And lastly, the scene of Rhett Butler's
exasperated parting from Scarlett at their front

door. Scarlett asks: "Rhett, if you go, where

shall I go? What shall I do?" Without
sentimentality, (in a daring, almost-disallowed
taboo line), he cooly responds for the last time:
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"]
# 29. Gunga Din (1939)
The greatest rousing adventure tale and film of
all-time is George Stevens' classic, based upon
Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name - a
tribute to a courageous water carrier (Sam
Jaffe) who accompanies British Army veterans
in India as they battle against a fanatical,
murderous Indian cult in the late nineteenth
century. In the film's stirring and poignant
ending, Gunga Din - who longs to be a
regimental bugler, but has been mortally
wounded by a bayonet, gathers all his courage
and strength and crawls painfully to the top of a
domed tower. There, with his last ounce of
stamina, he blows a warning from a bugle to
warn approaching British troops that they are
about to be ambushed at the entrance to a
rocky pass.
As he finishes giving his warning, a bullet hits
him, and he slumps - the final sounds from his
bugle are ones of his fading death before he
expires and falls from the tower. In the
epilogue, the loyal, lowly water-boy is praised
and admired by a colonel for his deserved
heroism as one of the "honored dead," and he
is posthumously appointed as a regimental
corporal. The last stanza of Kipling's poem is
read as tribute: "...Though I belted you and
flayed you, By the living Gawd that's made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
The film ends with a superimposed image of a
proudly smiling and saluting Gunga Din, fully
costumed in a British soldier's uniform.
# 30. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
The classic filibuster scene at the conclusion of
Frank Capra's film has to rank as one of the
most-finely acted sequences ever recorded.
After almost twenty-four hours of filibustering,
with an agonizingly, pathetically hoarse voice
but also with an indomitable spirit, a weary,
pleading Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) has

a few more exhortations for the Senators who

have returned to the Senate chamber. In an
extraordinary metaphor emphasizing the
Capitol Dome high above him, Smith
imaginatively suggests re-positioning the lady
of the Dome back to an ethical center where
she belongs: "And it's not too late. Because
this country is bigger than the Taylors or you or
me or anything else. Great principles don't get
lost once they come to light. They're right here.
You just have to see them again."
When baskets, wire barrels, and bundles of
stacks of 50,000 "Taylor-made" phony
telegrams from Senator Paine's (Claude Rains)
state are brought in and deposited in the front
of the Senate chamber, Paine holds up a
fistful, telling Smith that they all demand that he
yield the floor and give up his filibuster.
In one of the most powerful scenes ever filmed,
Jefferson staggers forward in disbelief to look
at the telegrams, pawing through them and
desperately looking for some evidence of
support. In a symbolic crucifixion stance, he
grabs two large fistfuls and holds them out. In a
hoarse voice, he turns toward Senator Paine
and delivers an impassioned speech, accusing
Paine face-to-face of betraying his ideals. Then
with heart-stirring courage, Smith finishes his
heroic speech with the immortal eloquent
words: "You think I'm licked. You all think I'm
licked. Well, I'm not licked, and I'm gonna stay
right here and fight for this lost cause even if
this room gets filled with lies like these, and the
Taylors and all their armies come marching into
this place. Somebody'll listen to me. Some..."
Smith faints and collapses on the floor,
dumping a basket of telegrams over onto
himself. His supportive friend Saunders (Jean
Arthur) screams from the gallery. With a
strained look on his face, Senator Paine rushes
from the Senate floor toward the
vestibule/cloakroom as Smith is treated. Two or
three shots ring out, and Paine is seen
struggling with other Senators. They prevent
him from killing himself, as he screams in a
public confession that he is unable to live with
his guilt-ridden conscience any longer: "I'm not
fit to be a Senator. I'm not fit to live. Expel me!
Expel me! Not him."
Conscience-stricken and in a fit of remorse,

Senator Paine re-enters the Senate floor and

admits that everything Smith said was true,
exonerating him and the American political
system.
# 31. Stagecoach (1939)
In director John Ford's first modern Western,
John Wayne began his fertile acting
partnership with the director (in his first major
western role) with the inspired, legendary
scene of his first appearance - in a role that
made him famous and launched him as the
most durable Western hero.
As Ringo Kid, an outlaw who is seeking
revenge for the murder of his father and
brother by the Plummers, he is first seen
'holding up' the stagecoach (with an
assortment of characters) on its way to
Lordsburg. Along the way after rounding a turn,
a rifle shot is heard, and a tracking shot zooms
in (losing focus for a moment) for a large clear
closeup of Ringo Kid standing tall from the
perspective of the moving stagecoach. The
camera rapidly tracks in on his face. Ringo is
twirling and re-cocking his Winchester rifle in
one hand, shouting out: "Hold it!", while holding
his saddle in the other hand. He is standing in
the middle of the desert by the trail, stranded
without a horse. Ringo is wearing a paneled,
placket-front shirt with a neckerchief, and jeans
with its pants legs rolled up outside of the
boots.
[The stirring chase across the salt flats at the
film's conclusion, with dare-devil stunts
performed atop charging horses, is equally
momentous.]
# 32. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
In the much-beloved film is the indelible image
of Dorothy (Judy Garland), her dog Toto, the
Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) who needs a brain,
the Tin Woodsman (Jack Haley) who desires a
heart, and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) who
desperately wants courage. They break into
spirited song as they link arms and dance
through the woods singing: "We're Off to See
the Wizard" - this single film sequence has
been irrevokably imprinted on everyone's

consciousness.
With the Wicked Witch of the East's ruby
slippers on her feet, Dorothy is off to seek
advice on the best way home from the allpowerful Oz, the ruler of the Emerald City.
Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of the West
(Margaret Hamilton) gazes into her crystal ball
high up in her broken down castle to follow
their progress. With the captain of her evil crew
of wicked monkeys at her side, she cackles
gleefully. She concocts sorcery and other
menacing elements to take possession of the
ruby slippers. Her plan is to cause sleepinducing flowers in a poppy field to poison
them: "Now my beauties. Something with
poison in it I think. With poison. But attractive
to the eye and soothing to the smell. Poppies.
Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Sleep.
Now they'll sleep."
[Other scenes qualify as tie-breakers:
Dorothy's singing of her beloved, haunting and
plaintive, but immortal song "Over the
Rainbow." Dreaming, yearning and wistfully
longing for a trouble-free, fascinating, far-away
world beyond her home-land, she strolls from a
bale of hay (which she leans on), to an old
wheel (which she pulls on), to a discarded
buggy (which she and Toto sit on) as she
sings. Or the Wicked Witch's memorable death
scene, as she is reduced to a puddle of
vaporous clothing in front of everyone, crying
out: "You cursed brat. Look what you've done.
I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a
world! Who would have thought a good little girl
like you could destroy my beautiful
wickedness." Unforgettable.]

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 33. The Great Dictator (1940)
Charlie Chaplin's first talking picture contains one
of filmdom's most splendid pantomime sequences.
At the time of Hitler's rise to power, Chaplin played
both a Jewish barber and the dictator of Tomania,
Adenoid Hynkel.
As Herr Hynkel, uniformed in his Hitler-like outfit
in his imperial office, he performs an "emperor of

Screenshots

the world" ballet/dance with a giant, balloon-like

globe of the world which he hopes to dominate. He
approaches the globe, holds his hands out delicately
to surround it, and imagines himself possessing and
caring for it. Hynkel removes the globe from its
stand and raises it aloft - he spins and balances it
with one hand, while letting go with a sick, maniacal
laugh. He sends it sailing into the air over his head it floats from one hand to the other and back.
As it drifts down, he gives it a light rear kick with
his heel and it soars toward the high ceiling in the
room. When it descends, he bounces it upwards with
his head - his hands are interlaced in front of his
waistline. When it floats down again, he lets it
bounce and then adoringly catches it in his
outstretched arm. He sizes it up for a moment, and
then repeats the kicking action and the head-bounce.
After a few more gentle tosses as he moves toward
his desk, he catches the globe. While reclining on
his back on the top of his desk, he swiftly kicks it
into the air. When it descends a second time, he
twists slightly and projects it upwards with two
gentle bounces off his fanny. He catches it once
more, spins it, and stares lovingly at it.
After more tosses, he leaps onto the top of his desk,
sends it aloft, jumps to the floor in front of the desk,
and grabs it on the way down. As he holds out the
conquered world, it suddenly explodes in front of
his face - he holds up the tattered rubber rag - all
that is left of his world. Distressed, he whirls away,
puts his head on his desk, and with his back to the
camera, he bursts into tears.
# 34. Citizen Kane (1941)
This is the most-honored film in all of film history,
with many sequences or images worthy of a
mention.
One of its greatest sequences is at the end of the
film, when the secret of the word "Rosebud," the
last word uttered by Charles Foster Kane (Orson
Welles) before he died, is finally revealed.
The camera pulls away from the basement floor to
show the incredible accumulation of Kane's
acquisitions over a lifetime. Then, the camera
slowly glides over years and years of his pitiless
pieces of material goods and collected art objects,
looking like a broken jigsaw puzzle, a deserted
skyscraper city, or a metropolis when photographed

from high above. There in the piles of possessions

are:
iron bedframes
an open, wooden toybox (with a few dolls
and a picture of Kane around the time of
his first marriage)
a pile of old newspapers wrapped in twine
a photograph of Kane as a boy with his
mother
a snow sled (which is picked up by a
workman)

Kane's life appears as a disjointed collection of

failed energy to productively use resources.
In the basement beneath Xanadu, workers clear
away the vast array of junk and articles. A workman
is sorting and crating his possessions near an
incinerator, a blazing furnace where items are
thrown that are considered junk. The worker with
the sled in his hands is told by Raymond, the butler,
to "throw that junk" into the flames of the
incinerator to be consumed, along with an
accumulation of other possessions. The sled, the one
that young Charles played with when he was with
his father and mother early in the film, is an
enduring and beautiful symbol of Kane's life.
The name "Rosebud" (and its decorative flower) is
briefly seen on the sled in a close-up before flames
lick the wood, the heat warps and blisters the paint
of the wooden surface, and it is consumed by the
flames. The "Rosebud" sled is a momento from
Kane's childhood with his mother, a childhood that
was interrupted by the opportunities wealth and
fortune bestowed upon him. He rammed Thatcher
(George Coulouris) with the sled when he was
forcibly taken away to New York to be raised in
more affluent surroundings. The sled symbolized the
innocence, beauty, and love that he lost, the love
that eluded him - a dying man's memory of a
childhood possession that held special meaning.

# 35. The Lady Eve (1941)

Preston Sturges' sophisticated romantic comedy is a
battle of the sexes highlighting the painful,
antagonistic terrors of sexual passion and seduction.
The sexual comedy is the story of a sophisticated,
card-sharp, Eve-like temptress who takes advantage
of an innocent, vulnerable, snake-loving man - a
literal Garden of Eden fable.
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), a snake-expert is the
obvious next target of calculating cardsharks and
con artists Jean (Eugenia) Harrington (Barbara
Stanwyck) - appropriately nibbling on an apple and her father "Handsome" "Colonel" Harry
(Charles Coburn) Harrington.
The memorable scene of his seduction in Colonel
Harrington's cabin is one of the most satirically sexy
scenes ever filmed. As they enter the cabin, the
naively-innocent adventurer remarks on the
overpowering presence of her perfume - he's "been
up the Amazon for a year" where "they don't use
perfume." Wearing a black, exposed-midriff outfit,
Jean invites him, her Prince Charming, to pick out a
pair of evening "slippers' for her to wear. She points
to a compartmented shoe bag with fifty pairs of
shoes, seducing him with suggestive lines as she
leans back on the trunk flirtatiously: "The shoes are
over here. Because you were so polite you can pick
them out, and put them on, if you like..."
After he has shyly chosen an appropriate pair of
evening slippers, she sits down and crosses her
nyloned leg in front of him - revealing her evening
gown slit to her knees. She elegantly dominates him,
suggesting that he put the slippers on her feet. He
clumsily gets on one knee in front of her, with his
face almost touching her kneecap. Charles' vision
blurs as he reels dizzyingly in front of her and takes
ahold of her foot. While holding onto her leg and
fiddling with her shoe strap, he distracts himself
from her allure by explaining how he is a snakeenthusiast and a beer heir nicknamed Hopsie.
As he finishes putting on her 'slippers,' he finally
admits how he is smitten with her and bursting with
desire from the powerful aphrodisiac of her
perfume. He attempts to make a pass at her: "You
see, where I've been, I mean up the Amazon, you
kind of forget how, I mean, I haven't seen a girl in a
long time, I mean, there's something about that
perfume..." He leans forward to kiss her, but she

holds him back: "Why Hopsie, you ought to be kept

in a cage!"
# 36. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
At the conclusion of John Huston's seminal film
noir, tough detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart)
utters the definitive byline for all Hollywood films.
As the mysterious and duplicitous Brigid
O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) is led away to the
hallway's elevator by a detective, Spade asks: "Well,
shall we be getting down to the hall?" Police
Sergeant Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) delivers one of
the film's final lines when he lifts up the heavy black
statuette as they are leaving the room: "It's heavy.
What is it?" Spade responds while touching the bird:
"The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of."
The detective makes a puzzled response: "Huh?"
Spade takes the statuette from Polhaus' hands and
walks to the stairs. In a memorable parting close-up,
Brigid is tearfully being taken away, waiting in the
elevator for the gates to close. The steel cage is
pulled in front of her like the bars on a cell, framing
her frightened, motionless, lonely face in the bars of
the gate. The outer door shuts and the elevator drops
from view - she disappears down the elevator shaft
to her fate. Spade takes the stairs with Polhaus. The
case is closed.
[Another unforgettable sequence is the one in which
Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) feverishly unwraps
the newspaper-shrouded bird, gazes upon it, and
then anxiously scrapes and chips at its surface with
his penknife - wildly realizing that the bird is a
fake.]
# 37a. Casablanca (1942)
The finale of one of the most beloved films ever
made (by Michael Curtiz) is justly celebrated.
The romantic drama ends in the dense airport mist
and fog, after American cafe proprietor Rick Blaine
(Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to the only
woman he has ever loved, the luminous Ilsa Lund
(Ingrid Bergman) with her Resistance leader
husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). For Rick, no
sacrifice is too great - he touches her cheek with one
finger after delivering one of the film's most famous
speeches:

"Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take

much to see that the problems of three little people
don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday you'll understand that. Not, now. Here's
looking at you, kid."
He also kills the sinister German Nazi/Gestapo
commander Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt)
who is trying to apprehend them. The crafty Chief
(Prefect) of police Captain Louis Renault (Claude
Rains) is sympathetic toward Rick and ultimately
lets him off the hook by commanding his men:
"Round up the usual suspects."
# 37b. Casablanca (1942)
Then, in the fog, they watch the plane leave the
ground for neutral Lisbon. Renault offers Rick a
way out of Casablanca - the cafe owner is willing to
accept the transit letter, but not in exchange for
cancelling their wager. Rick walks off with Captain
Renault across the wet runway, as they discuss what
they might do together with the 10,000 francs
[$300], the payment due on their earlier bet over
whether or not Laszlo would ever get out of
Casablanca.
The closing in the fog brings another great classic
line [dubbed in later] as Rick tells Renault that they
have forged a new alliance as they head off for an
uncertain future together: "Louis, I think this is the
beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Their new partnership is underscored with the
sounds of La Marseillaise, earlier sung in a classic
scene in the cafe (and led by Laszlo) as a statement
of solidarity against the Germans.
# 38. Now, Voyager (1942)
The famous cigarette trick occurs in a tale of love
between Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis), a middleaged, withdrawn spinster from a wealthy Boston
family who is transformed from an ugly duckling
into a beautiful, self-assured woman, and a
handsome, unhappily-married, suave European
named Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid). During a
South American cruise, Charlotte discovers life and
love when she meets him and they fall in love and
have an affair.
In their famous scenes, cigarette smoking becomes a
sensual act. In the final scene of the film, he asks

Charlotte once more: "Shall we just have a cigarette

on it?" She responds breathlessly: "Yes, sir,"
holding out an opened cigarette box. He takes two
cigarettes and puts them in his mouth, lights them
both, and then hands one over to Charlotte.
The film ends with Charlotte's most memorable line
on the balcony. Although she knows Jerry will never
leave his wife, they have found something far more
enduring and happy:
"And just think, it won't be for this time only. That
is if you'll help keep what we have. If we both try
hard to, to protect that little strip of territory that's
ours...Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We
have the stars."
As the music swells, the camera moves between
them and ascends above the trees to a starry night
sky.
# 39. Saboteur (1942)
The agonizing, breath-taking, harrowing death
sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller is a
terrifying, suspenseful bit of film-making.
After a cross-country chase, suspected saboteur
Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) has confronted the
real fifth columnist Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd) on
the top of the Statue of Liberty - on its torch held
high above the water of New York harbor.
Windblown against a cloudy sky, Fry loses his
balance and falls over the side of the railing - he
bounces once and is left clinging to the space
between the immense base of the thumb and the
forefinger that compose the concrete hand of the
statue.
Kane climbs down to rescue the spy - he halfcrouches and has one hand wrapped around part of
the base of the torch. With his free hand, he can only
reach and clutch Fry's coat jacket sleeve near the
wrist. As Fry perilously hangs there clinging for his
life and perspiration beads appear on his forehead,
the sleeve begins to tear apart at the seam where the
arm joins the shoulder. The saboteur literally
dangles by a thread.
As the split widens, Fry's terror-stricken face notices
that his entire coat jacket will soon separate. He
cries out: "Quick, the sleeve, the sleeve!" And then
his arm slips suddenly out of the sleeve - in a

disorienting, downward view from Kane's

perspective, Fry falls away through space and drops
to his death many feet below. His face contorts, his
body rotates awkwardly, and his screams become
fainter as he approaches the ground.
# 40. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
The spirited, spunky and domineering acting
performance of James Cagney as song and dance
man George M. Cohan in this biopic is unbelievably
rousing.
Especially in the title number, George, as horse
jockey Johnny Jones - the Yankee Doodle Boy
himself, stands on a pedestal next to a race horse,
and is soon surrounded by long-gowned, glittering
dancers/singers. He sings the film's classic, all-time
favorite title song: "Yankee Doodle Dandy":
"...I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle,
do or die; A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam,
Born on the Fourth of July. I've got a Yankee
Doodle sweetheart, She's my Yankee Doodle joy.
Yankee Doodle came to London, Just to ride the
ponies, I am that Yankee Doodle boy."
As the chorus is sung, the limber song and dance
hoofer George struts back and forth across the stage
with a stiff-legged gait, bent forward with a straight
upper torso. His high, straight-toed kicks, jerky
convolutions (like a unwieldy marionette), a bit of
bouncing, twirling, tap-dancing, and other assorted,
arrogant movements make the dynamic, vigorous
dance number come alive. The side walls of the
immense stage become part of his dance floor as he
walks up them to make his turns.
# 41. The More the Merrier (1943)
In George Stevens' part screwball comedy, part
romantic comedy, wartime Washington housing
shortages force the prim, working bachelor girl
Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) to rent out some of
her apartment space. An elderly, match-making
gentleman Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), a
"retired, well-to-do millionaire" in Washington for
business, rents out half of her apartment, and then
sub-lets his half to clean-cut young aviation expert
Army Sergeant Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), in
Washington on special duty.
One balmy evening, Joe accompanies room-mate

Connie home - she is provocatively dressed in an

off-the-shoulder black lace evening dress, with a
string of white pearls around her soft neck, and her
hair is decorated with a white flower. On the way
she turns a streetcorner and nearly walks into one of
many kissing couples on the sidewalk. As they talk
about his family, he keeps taking off and putting on
her wrap, putting his hand on her bare shoulder, and
taking her arm in his. When she asks about his
girlfriends, they almost kiss in a shot framed
between two small tree trunks, but then she resists
and pulls away and asks: "Are you afraid to get
married or something?" As he embraces her, they
collapse on the front steps of their shared apartment.
In their famous courtship scene on the front steps,
she speaks about her plans for her own marriage and
her future with her fiance, an older man, forty-two
year old ("a safe and sane age") government official
- her stuffed-shirt boss, Charles J. Pendergast
(Richard Gaines): "I consider myself a very lucky
little lady...being engaged to Mr. Pendergast." All
the while, he is amorously embracing her, caressing
her, and fondly touching her hands, arms, and
shoulders - she vainly attempts to ignore his
advances. She holds out her engagement ring for his
approval and he responds by kissing her wrist.
Connie becomes visibly distracted and her voice
cracks when he admires and then nuzzles her bare
neck. "Well you see, that's the way with those older
men like Mr. Pendergast. A girl gets to appreciate
their more mature..." He passionately kisses her on
the lips - when he releases, she finishes the
sentence: "...viewpoint."
She pauses, looks away for a second, and then takes
the two sides of his face with her hands and boldly
kisses him back - harder. But then, she realizes that
they are getting too involved - she stands and
politely states: "I've gotta go. Good night, Mr.
Carter." He responds: "Good night, Miss Milligan."
She ascends the stairs into the building and shuts the
door. He begins walking away and then sheepishly
remembers that he is leaving his own apartment: "I
almost forgot where I lived." Connie holds the door
open for him.
As they bed down in adjacent rooms - shot from
outside in a frame split by the wall between them,
they discuss how uncomfortable and restless they
are, and Joe finally admits: "I love you, Connie" and
she responds likewise: "I love you more than
anything in the world."

# 42. To Have and Have Not (1944)

The startling movie debut of 19 year-old Lauren
Bacall was in Howard Hawks' loose adaptation of
the Hemingway novel. She held her own as Marie
Browning, a self-reliant, tough, insolent, nononsense romantic partner to boat Captain/privateer
Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart).
Morgan first meets the young, sultry, and stranded
American in the doorway of his room in the
hotel/nightclub's upstairs hallway. She has appeared
from her rented room across the hall from his. In her
first husky, sexy lines to him as she leans in the
door, she makes a simple, deadpan request for a
match, but it sounds like an erotic challenge:
"Anybody got a match?" He tosses her a box of
matches and she aggressively lights the flame,
looking at him with her wide expressive eyes. She
flings the used match backward out the door, tosses
the box of matches back at him, and turns and leaves
without any emotion: "Thanks."
Later, at the beginning of one of the screen's most
famous seductions, Slim sits on his lap. Before
kissing the seated man for the first time, she acts the
aggressor role as they engage in flirtatious sexual
repartee. Her verdict of his kissing talent requires a
second kiss. Then, after kissing him again, he
appears baffled. She suggests to her passive partner
as she stands: "It's even better when you help."
When this remark doesn't immediately work and
produce a satisfactory reaction, she propositions him
midway from leaving his room with other famous
lines, delivered with a calculated coolness: "You
know, you don't have to act with me, Steve. You
don't have to say anything and you don't have to do
anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. (She
opens his door and pauses.) You know how to
whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips
together - and blow." He continues to remain seated
in his chair, smoking a cigarette. After she has left,
he makes the sound of a cat-call whistle - and then
chuckles to himself.

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 43. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The home-coming scene is marvelously-filmed - it
captures the four long years of separation between
middle-aged serviceman Al Stephenson (Fredric
March) and his wife Milly (Myrna Loy).
The touching, wordless homecoming scene
commences when he rings his apartment's doorbell,
and quickly cups his hand over the mouths of his
two grown children to silence them. Son Rob
(Michael Hall) and daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright)
stand in amazement - overjoyed to see him. From
the distant kitchen, his wife's voice asks about the
unexpected visitor: "Who's that at the door, Peggy?
Peggy? Rob? Who is...?"
Al's apron-clad wife suddenly stops placing dishes
on the table and intuitively guesses her husband has
finally come home. In a long-held shot with Al's
back to the camera, she spatially appears at the end
of the hallway corridor with arms half-outstretched.
Both stand frozen to the ground - and then silently,
slowly, move into each other's arms across the vast
void. His children watch from afar as their parents
share a long embrace.

Screenshots

# 44. Duel in the Sun (1946)

The heavy-handed, lusty western epic from David
O. Selznick's production ends with an unforgettable
climax of dirt, death, blood, and lust. Its
orgasmically-tinged finale helped earned the film its
nickname: "Lust in the Dust."
The sultry half-breed Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones),
who has created enmity between two brothers in the
McCanles family, trails the spoiled, lecherous,
vicious, undisciplined, swaggering no-good Lewt
McCanles (Gregory Peck).
The final notorious scene is the climax of all their
confrontations together amidst a rocky outcropping.
When the depraved Lewt appears in the rocks at a
long distance from her, Pearl takes aim and shoots
her lover to end their passionate love-hate affair.
She shows immediate remorse, thinking he's dead.
But he is still alive, although wounded in the leg. He
fires back, calling her a "double-crossin' bobcat."
Pearl is still drawn to him, re-cocking her gun and
moving forward. As she approaches, Lewt shoots
Pearl in the chest, sending her into the rocks and
rubble. Satisfied that he has killed her, he says: "I
guess that does it," but then feels twinges of regret
that he has shot his beloved, calling out "Pearl, hey
Pearl!" The ex-lovers continue their bloody shootout in the hot desert sun and Lewt is shot in the
stomach.
Seriously wounded, she drags herself over the rocks
and up the side of the mountain toward her dying
lover, spouting blood and shouting threats. Dying,
Lewt asks Pearl to join him so that they can expire
together: "Please, I gotta hold ya just once more
before...I love ya. I love ya. Hurry, hurry. Hurry
honey." In their final moments, she cries out for
him: "Lewt, Lewt, hold on. Wait for me," and
lustfully crawls toward him. They bloodily embrace
and mercifully die in the dust in each other's arms.
As they die, the camera pulls back until they are lost
in the landscape under the blazing, hot sun and
under the massive face of Squaw's Head Rock.

# 45. Gilda (1946)

This film features the most famous role and peak
performance of WWII's GI "love goddess" - the
beautiful, alluring, and provocative pin-up Rita
Hayworth - with her sleek and sophisticated
eroticism, lush hair and peaches and cream
complexion.
In an early sequence in the film, crippled Buenos
Aires casino owner Ballin Mundson (George
Macready) introduces his new exuberantly healthy
American wife to second-hand casino manager
Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), the film's femme
fatale, in one of filmdom's best-known film
entrances. He asks: "Gilda, are you decent?" She
responds innocently: "Me?" as she gives a long,
sensual look at Johnny, and pulls up one side of her
strapless dress. "Sure, I'm decent." The hedonistic,
flirtatious, auburn-haired Gilda (Rita Hayworth) has
returned from their honeymoon. In her first screen
appearance as she throws back her head, she
responds sexily and sends her thick mane of hair
flying.
The film's most memorable scene occurs later - it is
Gilda's bawdy, sexy casino performance/glove
striptease while singing the torchy number "Put the
Blame on Mame, Boys." The lyrics of the song,
filled with double entendres, describe a dangerous,
threatening kind of woman who is often blamed unfairly - by men. Following Mundson's supposed
death, Johnny replaces him as her emotionallyabusive husband in a continuing love-hate
relationship - another complicated, hateful marriage.
She fights back in the only way possible - with a
defiant, drunken sexual exhibition that doubles as a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Swathed in a black satin
dress displaying bare upper arms and shoulders, her
dance is deliberately designed to shame, humiliate
and infuriate Johnny in public. As she sings, she
beckons with extended arms toward the lusting men
in the audience and peels off one of her long, elbowlength black gloves - keeping the casino audience
(and viewers) in suspense - wondering whether the
strapless gown will remain suspended on her frame.
Receiving accolades and encore-applause, Gilda
flings her second glove toward the hungering
audience. As she starts to shed her strapless dress,
she entreats the men for assistance: "I'm not very
good at zippers, but maybe if I had some help." She

is dragged away from the stage to prevent further

embarrassment.
# 46a. It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
Frank Capra's classic contains some of the greatest
movie moments ever recorded. The phone
conversation sequence has some of the most
unforgettable moments of the film.
Small town Bedford Falls residents George Bailey
(James Stewart) and Mary Hatch (Donna Reed)
share the same earpiece extension, squeezed
together, listening and talking on the same phone.
George is very conscious of her being close to him,
and resists his close proximity to her. He is
romantically attracted and cannot deny that he loves
her, but such an admission would mean remaining in
Bedford Falls, where he has been forced to stay
against his will and give up his other dreams.
In a long closeup of them ear-to-ear, they listen to
old friend Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson) who
tells George: "Well, George Bailey-ofsky. Hey, a
fine pal you are! What are you trying to do? Steal
my girl?" Mary is unable to go to a different
extension, because her mother is listening on the
upstairs extension. Sam offers George a 'get-richquick' job in his new business, telling him of the
bright future in plastics. But Sam wonders if George
is available, cheerfully mocking him: "It's the
biggest thing since radio and I'm lettin' you in on the
ground floor."
All the while, George squirms and tries to contain
himself, standing so close that he can smell Mary's
hair. Sam tells Mary to encourage George with the
offer: "Will you tell that guy I'm giving him the
chance of a lifetime? You hear - the chance of a
lifetime." She looks upward at him and with her lips
almost on his lips reinforces what Sam has said in a
whisper, but she is almost unable to say the words:
"He says it's the chance of a lifetime."
The phone suddenly drops to the floor, and instead
of grabbing and embracing Mary with a kiss,
George holds her fiercely by the shoulders and
violently starts shaking her, passionately protesting
that he doesn't want to get married: "Now, you listen
to me! I don't want any plastics, and I don't want any
ground floors, and I don't want to get married - ever
- to anyone! You understand that? I want to do what
I want to do. And you're...and you're..." Then he

runs out of words. She responds by crying

helplessly, silently, and then George all of a sudden
reverses himself and pulls Mary to himself in a
fierce embrace: "I...I...Oh, Mary...Mary..."
George overcomes his resistance to her and starts to
kiss her, passionately, all over her face, holding her
intensely. Their undeclared love for each other
overwhelms both of them. Mary's mother turns from
her eavesdropping on the stairway, running away
shocked: "Oh dear, oh dear!"
# 46b. It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
In the miraculous heartwarming finale, a
rejuvenated George Bailey ("the richest man in
town") is surrounded by all of his friends and
associates in his home next to the Christmas tree to
sing Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Auld Lang
Syne. All of his friends have contributed to pay his
rent, and he is toasted by his returning war-hero
brother Harry (Todd Karns): "A toast...to my big
brother, George. The richest man in town."
He and Mary glance at the handwritten inscription
by angel Clarence (Henry Travers) in the front of
the book Tom Sawyer("Dear George: - Remember
no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the
wings! Love Clarence").
Zuzu (Karolyn Grimes) also notes how an
ornamental bell is ringing on the Christmas tree:
"Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings"
(signifying Clarence's promotion to an angel with
wings).
# 47. Notorious (1946)
Director Alfred Hitchcock's blackish
romance/espionage thriller is known for having at
the time of its production "the longest kiss in film
history." The director circumvented the Hollywood
code limiting a kiss to three seconds by interrupting
the couple's kiss every three seconds - they never
once break their embrace.
The famous marathon kissing scene lasts almost
three minutes - it occurs between government agent
Devlin (Cary Grant) and the playgirl daughter of a
convicted Nazi spy Alicia Huberman (Ingrid
Bergman). It begins with a medium closeup shot and
as they kiss and embrace on her apartment's balcony

above a Rio beach.

As the camera pulls in for a closer shot of their
faces, they rapidly alternate passionate, clinging
kisses and whispered endearments, first on the
balcony, and then continuing with nibbling bites and
nuzzling hugs as they walk from the balcony to the
telephone.
During the middle of their lengthy embrace and love
scene, Devlin calls his hotel and checks for his
phone messages, while she tells him that they have
"a very strange love affair." Afterwards, they
proceed arm in arm to the front door. All the while
during the seduction, they discuss dinner, hold on to
each other, and carry on a conversation.
# 48. The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
One of the greatest visual effects in cinematic
history is the famous, visually intriguing Crazy
House/Hall of Mirrors scene at the climax of Orson
Welles' film noir classic.
The setting for the sequence is the deserted
funhouse/amusement park closed for the season,
where itinerant Irish adventurer/sailor Michael
O'Hara (Orson Welles) awakens, trips a mechanism
in the "Crazy House" ("for a while there, I thought it
was me that was crazy") and careens down a long,
serpentine zigzag slide past a thirty-foot high
dragon's mouth halfway down. At the bottom is the
Hall of Mirrors where he finds blonde femme
fatale Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) - she
confesses her guilt to him.
The Hall of Mirrors (the Magic Mirror Maze) is
constructed with myriad mirrors - huge distorted
closeups mingle with multiple fragmented images.
A moment later, her brilliant, but crippled husbandlawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) arrives
walking with his cane - his image is multiplied a
dozen times in a series of vertical panes. As they
confront each other, shooting at multiple likenesses
of each other, the screen erupts into a kaleidoscope
of smashed glass, cracked and chipped pieces of
mirror, and shattering bits of their images. Their aim
is confused by the mirrors which break into splinters
during the wild shooting as one fake image splinters
and another replaces it.
At its climax after the panes have been blasted
away, both Bannister and Elsa are mortally

wounded and face each other across a scene of

shattered glass. The camera films at ground level,
next to Elsa as she agonizes over her death on the
floor, and Michael abandons her to die as she cries
out:
"Give my love to the sunrise...Oh Michael, I'm
afraid. Michael! Come back here. Michael. Please. I
don't want to die. I don't want to die!"
As he leaves, the revolving exit gate makes a death
rattle as it rotates.
# 49. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
In John Huston's classic tale of adventure and greed
for gold, old-timer prospector Howard (Walter
Huston) humorously belittles his two gold-seeking
compatriots, American Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey
Bogart) and Curtin (Tim Holt) in the middle of the
Mexican wilderness (in the foothills of the Sierra
Madre) for wanting to prematurely turn back - and
for threatening to end his life by bashing his head
with a rock:
"My, my, my, what great prospectors, two shoe
clerks readin' in a magazine about prospectin' for
gold in the land of the midnight sun, south of the
border, or west of the Rockies, ha, ha, ha...Go
ahead, go ahead, throw it. If you did, you'd never
leave this wilderness alive. Without me, you two
would die here more miserable than rats."
Howard wonders who is truly "nuts," calls them two
"dumb specimens," and then dances a lively jig in
front of them. He tells them that they are ignorant the first real traces of gold are already under their
feet: "You're so dumb, you don't even see the riches
you're treadin' on with your own feet." Howard
bursts into maniacal laughter, howling at them. He
picks up some of the earth, as the two drop to their
knees scratching at the ground. "Yeah, don't expect
to find nuggets of molten gold. It's rich but not that
rich. And here ain't the place to dig. It comes from
someplace further up. Up there, up there's where
we've got to go. Up there!" Howard turns and points
toward a towering mountain peak behind them.
[Mexican bandit Gold Hat's (Alfonso Bedoya)
'badges' speech is also priceless: "Badges? We ain't
got no badges! We don't need no badges. I don't
have to show you any stinkin' badges!"]

# 50. The Heiress (1949)

The climax of William Wyler's film is one of the
most compelling and powerful ever made. Oscarwinning Olivia de Havilland in the lead role plays
the 1850s era plain-looking, shy, mid-twenties
heiress daughter Catherine Sloper who lives in her
wealthy, tyrannically abusive father's (Ralph
Richardson) elegant, lavishly-furnished mansion at
16 Washington Square. Fortune-hunting, charming,
penniless suitor Morris Townsend (Montgomery
Clift) courts and exploits the desperate, love-starved
needs of the sheltered, awkward Catherine - she is
blind to his mercenary motives. In a torturous scene,
he fails to show up at her doorstep on the night of
their planned elopement (vanishing after learning
from her that her father threatens disinheritance),
while she naively waits for him at the front window.
The painful learning experience teaches her that she
has been manipulated and deceived.
Years later, Catherine has matured into a more
lovely, attractive, strong-willed woman and she has
come into her inheritance. Thinking that he has been
forgiven for his betrayal, the beguiling Townsend
returns with the hope that he can be vindicated and
that she will understand the reasons for his desertion
and accept his second marriage proposal. After
speaking to him and appearing to accept his
proposal. Catherine tells him to return to the house
later that night with his belongings. After he leaves,
she then reveals her real intentions - to cruelly reject
him. When her Aunt Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins)
thinks she is being cruel, Catherine replies: "He
came back with the same lies, the same silly
phrases...He has grown greedier with the years. The
first time, he only wanted my money. Now, he
wants my love too. Well, he came to the wrong
house and he came twice - I shall see that he never
comes a third time...Yes, I can be very cruel. I have
been taught by masters."
On the night of a second promised elopement in a
stunning climactic scene of ultimate revenge, she
closes all the curtains and sits calmly in her parlor
finishing her embroidery while he futilely bangs on
the locked, bolted front door while calling out her
name. Taking a lighted lamp, the steely-eyed
Catherine coldly walks up the long, extremely steep
flight of stairs in the front hallway. As he watches
the light move away and diminish in strength, he
becomes more frenzied as he beats vainly on the
door: "Catherine, Catherine, Catherine!" She turns a
curve at the top of the stairs, gaining perverse, proud

satisfaction from jilting him, and triumphantly

fulfilling a promise to herself. The film's 'The End'
appears on the screen, before the film fades to the
Paramount Pictures logo.
# 51a. The Third Man (1949)
In this visually-stylish thriller with haunting zither
theme music by Anton Karas, American pulp writer
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) has come to bombedout, post-war Vienna to seek out his friend Harry
Lime (Orson Welles) - unfortunately deceased.
One night, Martins becomes aware of a figure in a
doorway on the opposite side of the wet street from
the apartment of Lime's Czechoslovakian girlfriend
Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) when he hears her cat
meow loudly. The animal rubs itself at the feet of
the silent, motionless figure. The figure's big shoes
are illuminated - whose are they? Holly defiantly
calls out to the figure to come out and reveal
himself. Then, Holly momentarily and suddenly
sees Harry, the 'third man' himself.
[The third man, whom he suspected was responsible
for Harry's "accidental" death.]
A light from an upstairs window briefly illuminates
the figure's face, shining straight across the street.
Amazed to see Harry still alive, Holly is startled by
the sight of the teasing, smiling face of his friend
staring back at him. The light is extinguished, and
before Holly can reach his friend, a car approaches
and blocks his path, coming between them. The
figure makes off and vanishes to the sound of
retreating footsteps in the dark as Holly finds the
doorway empty by the time he crosses the street.
# 51b. The Third Man (1949)
[The final closing sequence of the film is just as
memorable: Holly leans on a cart and waits on the
tree-lined cemetery road for Lime's former lover
Anna as she leaves Harry's second funeral on foot.
Off in the distance, she is walking and approaching
toward him, first a dot, then a shadow, and then a
full figure - in an extremely long-held stationary
shot. As he seeks in vain for any response from her,
she stoically ignores him and continues by, passing
him without paying any attention - without a pause,
a look, a word, or a gesture. Holly follows her with
his eyes, but she stares impassively ahead, walking
out of his life. He lights a cigarette as the film fades

to black.]
# 52. White Heat (1949)
There has never been a more fiery, sizzling
apocalyptic ending for a film than the one in this
Warner Bros.' late gangster film.
In the film's final sequence, mother-fixated,
tormented gangster Cody Jarrett (James Cagney)
and his gang rob a huge chemical plant. One by one,
the other members of his gang are killed during the
ambush, but Jarrett rambles with berserk boasts to
the last-remaining gang member Ryley: "They think
they've got Cody Jarrett. They haven't got Cody
Jarrett. You hear? They haven't got him. And I
wanna show ya. They haven't got him."
In the famous, climactic scene ending the film, he
defiantly scrambles higher and higher around a
holding tank with curving stairs circling the steel
bulbous sides. At the top of the sphere, he even
gleefully fires upon Ryley as he turns himself over
to the police. Cody is the only one left, cornered
high atop one of the gas storage tanks at a dead end
- he taunts the cops with a cocky retort: "Come and
get me." As Jarrett is repeatedly wounded while
standing astride the globe - or the world itself - by
Fallon's high-powered, scoped-rifle fire, he laughs
maniacally.
Undercover T-man agent Fallon (Edmond O'Brien)
asks quizzically as he recocks the gun: "What's
holding him up?" Rather than giving in and
submitting to the lawmen, a cackling, psychoticallymad Cody staggers around on the top of the
platform as more bullets tear into him. Now out of
his mind, he deliberately empties his pistol into the
giant gas-tanks of the chemical plant to ignite them.
The men below run from the flaming area, fearing
for their lives.
And then Cody hysterically lifts his face skyward,
holds out both arms, and cries out to his dead
mother that he has fulfilled her oft-repeated advice
to him: "Made it Ma! Top of the world!" He dies in
the tremendous explosion - a mushroom cloud blast
shakes the earth. Following his death, Fallon
provides an additional epitaph as clouds of smoke
billow up and firelight flickers on his face: "He
finally got to the top of the world. And it blew right
up in his face."

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 53. All About Eve (1950)
This film has a realistic, dramatic depiction of
show business and backstage life of Broadway
and the New York theater. Thematically, it
provides an insightful diatribe against crafty,
aspiring, glib, autonomous female thespians
who seek success and ambition at any cost
without regard to scruples or feelings. With
approaching age, vain Broadway mega-star
actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis) seeks
the flattering attention of aspiring, captivating
actress Miss Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter).
When Margo's fiancee-to-be, theatrical director
Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), a show business
veteran and one of Margo's inner circle, turns
his attention toward Eve, her sympathy for Eve
slowly turns into alienation and hostility.
Paranoid and suspicious, Margo smells
"disaster in the air" before a belated birthday
(and welcome home from Hollywood) party for
Bill. She is clearly plagued by jealousy, "age
obsession" and "paranoiac insecurity" and she
turns acerbic toward Eve - "she's a girl with so
many interests."
Margo begins to get roaring drunk and feels
"Macbethish" in mood - she snidely calls Eve
"the Kid" and "Junior," feeling menaced by the
deceptive young actress. At the height of her
bitchery, she warns some of the birthday party
guests about what to expect in the film's most
famous line - after finishing another martini, her
slur is delivered as a lip-sneering, nasty
admonition: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going
to be a bumpy night."
# 54. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Billy Wilder's dark, classic comedy/drama is
perhaps the most acclaimed, "behind the
scenes" film about Hollywood and its legacies.
Legendary silent film star Gloria Swanson
"autobiographically" portrays a deluded actress
whose career declined with the coming of the
talkies - she resolutely refuses to accept her
forgotten status. In a flashback, wealthy, aging,
reclusive Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson),
Paramount's greatest film star during the silent

Screenshots

era (noted for saying "I am big. It's the pictures

that got small"), murders her struggling, downand-out depressed hack screenwriter Joe Gillis
(William Holden).
In the film's memorable conclusion, she is lured
from her mansion in Beverly Hills to go quietly
downstairs to a waiting car through a group of
assembled reporters and cameramen - only by
being made to think she is returning to the
screen and shooting a scene for famous movie
director Cecil B. De Mille. Her bald-headed
butler Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim)
prepares the newsreel cameramen and also
asks if the lights are ready. Then looking up
toward the balcony where Norma will enter the
scene, he shouts: "Quiet everybody!...Lights!"
Max must explain the scene to a confused
Norma: "This is the staircase of the palace."
Norma readies herself: "Oh yes, yes...down
below, they're waiting for the princess. I'm
ready." Sweeping her gown around with one
hand, she begins to descend the staircase for
her final close-up. Max shouts more directions:
"Cameras! Action!" The dead screenwriter
narrates in voice-over, introducing her exit
down the marble staircase in her decaying
Hollywood mansion to the whir of cameras:
"So they were turning, after all - those
cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful,
had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream
she had clung to so desperately had enfolded
her."
The film queen descends the marble staircase
believing she is playing Salome in the most
important scene of her career. At the bottom of
the stairs, she has become so overjoyed that
she has to have a word for the crew:
"I can't go on with the scene. I'm too happy! Mr.
De Mille, do you mind if I say a few words?
Thank you. I just want to tell you all how happy
I am to be back in the studio making a picture
again! You don't know how much I've missed
all of you. And I promise you, I'll never desert
you again because after Salome we'll make
another picture and another picture! You see,
this is my life. It always will be! There's nothing
else - just us - and the cameras - and those
wonderful people out there in the dark. All right,

Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up."

Then, Norma walks past the newsreel cameras
and directly toward the offscreen cameras
filming the scene. As one camera closes in on
her face, her image goes into a blurry softfocus, as Norma slips transcendently backward
in time to her glory days, a time of illusion.
# 55. A Place in the Sun (1951)
George Stevens' romantic drama is a film
adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel An
American Tragedy - it emphasizes the wide
gap between the frivolous rich and the
downtrodden poor and how fate heavyhandedly controls life. A poor, uneducated,
quiet, but ambitious and aspiring young man,
George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), although
considered a bit of an embarrassment to his
wealthy, status-conscious aunt and uncle, he
falls in love with his cousin, the Eastman's
daughter Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor).
She is attracted by his boyish, shy, and
handsome appearance, and he is attracted by
the parties, dances, cars, clothes, upper-class
lifestyle, and he begins to fall madly in love
with the beautiful and wealthy young woman.
In one of the greatest, most romantic
performances ever filmed, in an extended
scene of their budding romance, the film
captures the sensuous and electrifying
romantic interplay between them at the dance.
Dancing with her, he appears sullen and
Angela misinterprets his mood. She thinks that
he seems strange, deep, reserved, and far
away - holding something back. He doesn't
want to spoil their nice evening by telling her
that he has impregnated a co-worker, so he
confesses his love to Angela, a love of an ideal
woman which has now been discovered in her:
"I love you. I've loved you since the first
moment I saw you. I guess maybe I've loved
you before I saw you."
In a sensuous scene, Angela then begins to
confess her love too, but then becomes totally
self-conscious, looking around anxiously and
hesitantly: "You're the fellow who wondered
why I invited you here tonight. Well, I'll tell you
why. I love...Are they watching us?" She pulls
him out to the balcony terrace for privacy and
replies reticently to his confession: "I love you

too. It scares me. But it is a wonderful feeling."

In these powerful erotic moments, their
enormous, extreme closeups fill the screen as
they reveal innermost emotions and inflamed
passions. Angela tells him she can see him all
summer by the lake on the weekends, when he
isn't working: "We'll have such wonderful times
together, just the two of us." George is on
cloud nine: "I'm the happiest person in the
world." Angela replies: "The second happiest."
However, George is filled with guilt and
repression: "Oh, Angela, if I could only tell you
how much I love you, if I could only tell you all."
She comforts him with an intimate reply while
pulling him closer to her: "Tell mama, tell
mama all." They embrace and kiss
passionately, caught up in something over
which they have no control.
# 56. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Elia Kazan's film challenged the Production
Code's censors with its bold adult drama and
sexual subjects (rape, domestic violence,
homosexuality, and female promiscuity or
nymphomania) - it is the story of the pathetic
mental and emotional demise of a determined,
yet fragile, repressed and delicate Southern
lady Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) born to a
once-wealthy family of Mississippi planters. Her
downfall in the squalid, two-room French
Quarter apartment of her married sister Stella
Kowalski (Kim Hunter) and animalistic husband
Stanley (Marlon Brando) is at the hands of
savage, brutal forces in modern society.
Marlon Brando, in his second screen
appearance and recreating his Broadway role,
delivers an overpowering, memorable
performance. During a drunken, losing poker
hand, Stanley becomes uncontrollably beserk,
charges after his wife and assaults her with a
few blows, causing a fight to break out to
control his "lunacy." His poker buddies hold
him under a cold shower to sober him up.
Dripping wet with water, Stanley realizes he
has struck and abused Stella, and feeling
repentant, he searches for her.
Stella and Blanche have sought protective
refuge in an upstairs apartment. Animalistic
and virile in a wet, torn T-shirt, he bellows
repeatedly for Stella from the street in front of

their building, begging for her return: "Hey Stell

- Lahhhhh!"
This scene is one of the most regularly-chosen
clips played in film excerpts from cinematic
history. With the low moan of a clarinet, Stella
finally responds to her contradictory impulses her anger melts into forgiveness, her fear into
desire. She leaves the shelter of the upstairs
apartment and stands staring down at him from
the upper landing. Then, she surrenders
herself to him - she slowly descends the
spiraling stairs to him and comes down to his
level. He drops to his knees, crying. She
sympathizes with him as he presses his face to
her pregnant belly, and they embrace and kiss.
Stanley begs: "Don't ever leave me, baby," and
then literally sweeps her off her feet - he
carries her into their dark apartment for a night
of passion.
# 57. High Noon (1952)
One of the best and most beautifully-crafted
westerns of all time portrays the lone figure of
Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper) left to face four
vengeful gunslingers who have arrived by train
in the town of Hadleyville. In a powerful,
memorable montage of cross-cut images, a
few minutes before twelve noon, as tension,
fear, and frustration register on Kane's face, he
writes his last will and testament in his office.
The silence is punctuated by the pendulum of
his office's clock and the noon train's whistle.
Kane places his will in a sealed envelope,
writing on the outside: "To be opened in the
event of my death."
Before the exciting finale, he walks out onto the
deserted main street and surveys its
emptiness, resolute and resigned to his duty.
His blonde, newlywed Quaker wife (Grace
Kelly) and his ex-mistress - a half-Mexican
saloon owner Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado)
ride past in an open buckboard wagon bound
for the train station to leave town. The camera
pulls back as he stands there helpless and
immobile and watches them pass. At the
depot, outlaw Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald),
whom Kane helped send to prison years
earlier, arrives on the noon train. Helen notices
that Frank joins the other three gunmen at the
station.

A close-up of Kane's face shows sweat,

exhaustion, and fear. A long, upward-moving
crane shot pulls back, revealing his
forsakenness amidst the storefronts and
rooftops of the small community. His tiny figure
slowly strides down the middle of the dirt street
toward a gripping shootout sequence with the
four killers. All alone, he has been utterly
betrayed - no one is there to come to his aid:
the Judge, his immature deputy, and all his
friends and townspeople have turned their
backs on him. Standing alone, Kane has
decided that he must fight for his principles
against all odds - a challenge he must meet
even if it means his own death.

# 58. Singin' In the Rain (1952)

The joyous title song sequence from this
musical has become movie legend as the most
famous dance number in American film - and it
is Gene Kelly's finest solo performance ever. In
a classic, heart-lifting, enchanting dance scene
during a cloudburst, Don Lockwood (Gene
Kelly) does a glorious performance of the title
song "Singin' In the Rain," a spontaneous
expression of his euphoric mood and
happiness over his new-found love for Kathy
Selden (Debbie Reynolds).
He strolls down the empty two blocks of street
in the rain passing shop windows (including a
Pharmacy/Drug Store with a 'Smoke Mahout'
window display, the Richard Carlane Music
Studio, the LaValle Millinery Shop, the 'First
Editions' Book Store, and Mount Hollywood Art
School). At first, he keeps his umbrella open
above him to keep dry, but after a few short
steps, he shrugs and closes it (and either lays
it on his shoulder, swings it, keeps it to his
side, or imaginatively incorporates it into the
number).
He skips on the sidewalk, climbs on and
swings around a lamppost, and saunters and
sloshes along. Then, he jumps, and tapdances through the puddles - becoming more
and more child-like. He lets a drainpipe of

rainwater drain on his upturned face, kicks up

water, splashes, cavorts, and stamps around
with sheer delight. After twirling on the cobblestoned street, he balances on the street curb
like a tightrope walker. When a mystified and
vaguely hostile policeman finally walks over to
find out what he is doing jumping up and down
in deep puddles, and looks at him suspiciously,
he reacts guiltily toward the authority figure.
[When the camera cuts from one view to
another, Kelly's two hands on the umbrella
change to only his right hand on the umbrella.]
He slows down, turns, and answers simply:
"I'm dancin' and singin' in the rain." He closes
his umbrella, grins boldly, walks off, hands his
umbrella off to a needy passerby, and waves
back toward the policeman from afar.
# 59. The Big Heat (1953)
The film noirish, big-city crime classic and
violent melodrama - Fritz Lang's film contains
one of the most celebrated but disturbing
scenes ever filmed - although the audience
never sees it on camera. The film's heroine
Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) is the beautiful
moll and kept-woman of sadistic, cold-blooded
Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), crime boss Mike
Lagana's (Alexander Scourby) chief
henchman.
In the film's most vivid and frightening scene,
Stone, in a rage, suspecting that she has lied
to him about her whereabouts, maybe "played
footsie when my back was turned," or has
given out information to vengeful ex-cop Dave
Bannion (Glenn Ford), the dressed-up punk
disfigures one side of her pretty face by flinging
a pot of scalding hot coffee on her. He reaches
for the bubbling Pyrex pot and as the camera
remains stationary on the burner, the
soundtrack records the splash and screams as
her face is scarred and burned.
A victim of brutal violence, she rushes into the
other room crying: "My face! My face!"

# 60. From Here to Eternity (1953)

One image has forever captured the image of
an emotionally-dangerous, forbidden and
career-threatening relationship - the one of two
lovers being covered by rushing waves in the
moonlight as they lie on an Hawaiian beach.
Career soldier First Sergeant Milton Warden
(Burt Lancaster) and the base captain's bored
housewife Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr)
clandestinely meet at a park bench at Kuhio
Beach Park away from Schofield Barracks,
both of them with bathing suits under their
clothing.
Later during their rendezvous on a sandy Oahu
beach, the waves crash in toward them in the
film's most memorable, famous and shockingly
torrid (for its day) love-making scene. Karen
removes her outer clothing, and looks
provocatively at the Sergeant as he strips
down to his shorts.
For a moonlight swim, she runs first into the
water, encouraging him to join her. At the edge
of the Hawaiian beach surf, the waves churn
up white caps and breakers. The water rolls up
the beach and races toward Karen and
Warden, lying together. Their bodies are tightly
locked and intertwined in an embrace as they
kiss each other and the waves pour over them.
She rises, prances up the sand, and collapses
onto their blanket.

# 61. Shane (1953)

The echoing finale, as Shane rides off into the
bluish distance of the empty Wyoming
landscape after a poignant goodbye and
farewell is an unforgettable sequence.
Young Joey (Brandon de Wilde) is the only one
to bid Shane, his mythical idolized hero,
farewell. As gunfighter Shane starts to leave,
he indicates to Joey that he will never return.
Tears well up in Joey's eyes and Shane
whispers quietly: "Bye, little Joe." The fringejacketed, lonely hero then rides off into the
twilight meadow toward the distant hills framed
against the sky and mountains, growing
smaller and smaller in the distance. Young,
anguished, and heartbroken Joey sadly calls
out to his hero/idol in one of filmdom's most
famous and haunting endings, as tears streak
down his face:
"Pa's got things for you to do, and Mother
wants you. I know she does. Shane. Shane.
Come back. 'Bye, Shane."
The mountains echo Joey's plaintiff call.
[Another most memorable scene: The gunningdown of innocent victim "Stonewall" Frank
Torrey (Elisha Cook, Jr.) on a dark, black
storm-clouded day by mean, murderous,
merciless, hired gunman Wilson (Jack
Palance). He is shot down on the primitive,
muddy main street of the frontier town violently thrown backwards and slamming into
the thick black mud.]
# 62. On the Waterfront (1954)
The most famous, truthful scene of Elia
Kazan's film is the one in the back of a New
York taxi-cab between two brothers:
Charley Malloy (Rod Steiger) - a
smartly-dressed lawyer for the criminal
union boss
Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) - his
younger brother, an ex-prize-fighter
and waterfront bum
Charley advises Terry to keep his mouth shut
and not testify about what he knows about the

corrupt union bosses. He becomes

exasperated with his stubborn brother's
unwillingness to immediately comply. Charley
suggests that if they get to their destination,
437 River Street, and Terry hasn't made up his
mind, there may be serious consequences.
Terry is stunned by his brother's words.
Suddenly, Charley pulls a gun, threatening him
to accept an easy dock job in exchange for
keeping quiet. Surprised, Terry pushes the gun
away, gently guiding it down: "Charley ...
Charley ... Oh Charley. Wow."
Embittered, Terry faces up to the fact that he
has made nothing of his life, blaming his
brother instead of his ex boxing manager.
Terry is reminded of how he was given "a oneway ticket to Palookaville" in his boxing days
when he knew he had a winner inside himself,
but was told to lose. At one point in his life, he
could have risen about his low-life condition
through his skill as a prizefighter. He poignantly
looks back to the night of the fight when he lost
all his sense of personal worth and integrity.
He realizes that his brother betrayed him and
sold him out. He continues his sad, pitiable
lament, and blames his brother for
compromising and sacrificing his boxing career
and his life, preventing him from becoming a
contender for the title:
"You was my brother, Charley. You should've
looked out for me a little bit. You should've
taken care of me - just a little bit - so I wouldn't
have to take them dives for the short-end
money...You don't understand! I could've had
class. I could've been a contender. I could've
been somebody, instead of a bum, which is
what I am. Let's face it (pause) ...... It was you,
Charley."
# 63a. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
One of the greatest American films of all time is
Charles Laughton's sole directorial effort, a
truly compelling and terrifying classic
masterpiece thriller filled with an array of
startling images. A sinister, crazed,
psychopathic, black-cloaked and hatted
'Preacher' Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), one
of the 'false prophets' of the 30s presents a
chilling, perversely evil and memorable
monologue to the Lord in the film's opening.

He glances heavenward and delivers an

insane prayer, revealing that he is a serial killer
who receives divine inspirations to first marry,
and then murder and rob women, usually rich
lonely widows who do not see the evil in him.
His left hand is tattooed with the letters "H - A T - E" on his four fingers, and his right hand's
knuckles with the letters "L - O - V - E" - which
he explains in a memorable hand-wrestling
scene.
When a criminal's execution takes the secret of
the location of stolen money to his death, the
smooth-talking Preacher marries his widow
Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) and then knifes
her to death in a frightening yet subdued scene
in their A-frame bedroom. The grisly sight of
her corpse is a nightmarish, hypnotically-eerie
image. It dissolves into view - water reeds flow
in the underwater current with Willa's corpse
strapped to the front seat of her model T
submerged in the river. Her long hair is tangled
with the river reeds and her throat is slashed.

# 63b. The Night of the Hunter (1955)

[In a classic confrontational scene between the
phony, blaspheming 'false prophet' and a true,
pure and strong Bible-fearing farm woman - a
matriarchal widow named Mrs. Rachel Cooper
(Lillian Gish), Powell lurks outside the farm
house, singing his rendition of a gospel hymn
("Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" with the
words: "Leaning, leaning..." In silhouette,
Rachel appears like the portrait of Whistler's
Mother, sitting in a rocking chair on her
screened-in porch with the shotgun across her
lap. Rachel counters his song, defiantly and
harmoniously singing the authentic version of
the Protestant religious hymn with a spiritual
reference to Jesus: "Lean on Jesus, lean on
Jesus," filling in the words that he has chosen
to leave out in a simultaneous duet.]

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 64. The Seven Year Itch (1955)
The luscious, sexy screen goddess Marilyn Monroe
will always be remembered for her immortal image
filmed in Billy Wilder's comedy. As The Girl
(Marilyn Monroe), a stunning, curvaceous, sexy,
wide-eyed blonde wearing a tight white dress, she is
the new upstairs tenant for the summer in a building
occupied by Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell), an
imaginative book publisher who has remained in
Manhattan rather than join his wife and son on
vacation. He has been married for seven years and is
entering the phase when married men's eyes and
attentions are tempted to wander for extramarital
adventures, but he has always been faithful.
However, his new neighbor's arrival puts his
virtuous resolutions to the ultimate test. He invites
the Girl to dinner and then to an air-conditioned
movie on a hot summer evening.
In the film's most remembered scene, the famous
"skirt scene," they leave a movie theater screening.
They discuss the movie they have just seen: The
Creature From The Black Lagoon. She feels
sympathy for the creature: "Didn't you just love the
picture? I did. But I just felt so sorry for the creature
at the end...He was kinda scary-looking, but he
wasn't really all bad. I think he just craved a little
affection - you know, a sense of being loved and
needed and wanted."
In an immortal image, finding it unbearably hot, she
cools off by standing astride a vent-grating over the
subways. She smiles as moving trains below blow
and lift her dress upwards above her legs with a rush
of air: "Oh, do you feel the breeze from the subway.
Isn't it delicious?" She attempts, unsuccessfully, to
keep her dress down. Sherman stands to her side,
gaping at her, commenting: "Sort of cools the
ankles, doesn't it?" Soon, another train comes by,
and she squeals with child-like delight as it blows
her skirt up one more time ("Oh, here comes another
one!").

Screenshots

# 65. The Searchers (1956)

Both the beginning and ending of John Ford's
classic western symmetrically involve a framed
door. The film begins with a frontier cabin door
opening onto the horizon of the Monument Valley
wilderness, the passageway between two worlds.
The interior area in the cabin represents civilized
values and the settled family. The bright, glaring,
sunny outdoor area represents the savage and
threatening land of the frontier loner. The black
silhouette of a frontier woman Martha Edwards
(Dorothy Jordan) moves from the darkness through
the door to the brightly sunlit wilderness outside.
Moving excitedly to the porch, she notices a man
approaching - in the center of the frame - who
slowly rides in from the desert in a mythic entrance
- the man is framed between two distant buttes.
After several years of mysterious absence following
the Civil War, loner Ethan Edwards (John Wayne),
her brother-in-law, suddenly appears with no
explanation, returning on horseback to his brother
Aaron Edwards' (Walter Coy) family, living on a
solitary, Texas frontier farm.
In the film's finale, after Ethan's obsessive, long,
vengeful campaign to retrieve his kidnapped niece
Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood) from Comanche
Indians, he remains a tragic figure - a loner and
outsider. He stands for a few moments, lingering
outside as the camera pulls back into the darkened
inside of the home, the doorway framing the scene.
Ethan steps up onto the porch, then hesitates and
steps to one side as others behind him enter,
reunited once and for all - unlike Ethan who is fated
to wander and cannot live in a civilized, familybased community. He grasps his right elbow with
his left hand (a fond remembrance of the stance of
silent western star Harry Carey, Sr.), and then
decides to remain behind, looking after them.
He turns away, his silhouette framed in the open

doorway, walking into the swirling dust. The eternal

loner, he wanders alone (like the fate of the dead
Indian whose eyes he shot out) back into the alien,
desert wilderness, similar to how he entered the
picture so many years before, but now reversed. The
door to civilization and the family hearthside swings
shut on him, making the screen black.
# 66. The Ten Commandments (1956)
The last film of legendary director/producer Cecil B.
DeMille was a remake of his earlier film from 1923,
the melodramatic Biblical epic - a spectacular, at
times vulgar, wide-screen special effects
extravaganza. The familiar tale of the Hebrews'
Exodus is not remembered for its script or most of
its static acting, but for its excessive, gigantic scale.
Following a series of vivid, beautifully-staged
plagues that Moses (Charlton Heston) unleashes
upon the bare-chested Pharaoh Rameses (Yul
Brynner) and the royal house (one in which water
turns to blood), the children of Israel are permitted
to leave Egypt in an elaborately-filmed Exodus.
Blasts from horns provide a signal as thousands of
former slaves are released from bondage and set on
their way toward the Promised Land.
"And it came to pass after the stifling night of terror
came a day such as the world had never seen. From
East and West, from North and South, they came
with all they had, driving their flocks and their herds
and their camels before them. By tens, by hundreds,
by thousands - unending streams of man and beast
and burden, and even very much cattle poured into
the Avenue of Sphinxes, beneath the stone peaks of
the four colossal images of Rameses which their
own sweat and blood and sinew had hewn from
solid rock. A nation arose, and freedom was born
into the world."
As the gray-bearded Moses views the mass of
Hebrews preparing to leave Egypt, he exclaims
during this enormous crowd scene: "There are so
many, so many." Aerial shots capture the liberating
moment as their maroon-robed leader takes them
into the wilderness ("And he brought forth the
people with joy and gladness. He bore them out of
Egypt as an eagle bears its young upon its wings").
The much-anticipated scene of the parting of the
Red Sea never fails to entertain audiences - it is one
of the most miraculous special effects scenes in film
history, prefaced by Moses' statement as he
summons a pillar of fire to delay the pursuing

chariots: "Fear not. Stand still and see the salvation

of the Lord." At the water's edge on a rock
promontory, he holds his staff up to the sky, as
black clouds roll in behind him. To part the swirling,
wild waters of the Red Sea swirl, he commands with
outstretched arms: "The Lord of Hosts will do battle
for us. Behold his mighty hand." A blind old man
comments: "God opens the sea with a blast of His
nostrils!"
After the Hebrew people are led through the midst
of the walls of water, the Egyptians take chase after
them. The waters crush down and cover the chariots
when Moses commands on the other side: "Who
shall withstand the power of God?"
# 67. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
David Lean's war epic features the psychological,
confrontational struggle of wills between a
determined British Army Colonel Nicholson (Alec
Guinness) and the commander of a Burmese POW
camp in SE Asia Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa).
The two protagonists are symbols of different,
opposing cultures, but actually they share much in
common - pride, dedication, and stubborn obedience
to their codes and rules.
Although the exciting finale of the film is
spectacular - including the attack of the commandos,
the destruction of the railroad bridge by Nicholson's
own death as he falls on the dynamite plunger as he
exclaims: "What have I done?", and the image of the
trainload of Japanese dignitaries plunging into the
Kwai river, there is another more compelling scene.
Stoically and stubbornly, Nicholson keeps his men
standing in the hot sun all day long after their arrival
in the POW camp, rather than letting his officers
work side-by-side in physical labor with the enlisted
men. After being beaten, Nicholson is dragged to a
corrugated, metal-encased, "oven" sweat box to be
tortured in the blazing sun so that he will change his
mind. The power struggle continues for many days
as both commanders rigidly refuse to give in - until
Saito finally breaks.
In a triumphant scene, an exhausted, near-collapse,
but composed Nicholson is released and walks
bulldoggedly under his own strength and power to
Saito's quarters. He determinedly staggers across the
compound yard and up the steps. In honor of the
anniversary of the Japanese defeat of the Russians in

1905, Saito gives the troops a day of rest, declares a

"general amnesty," and accepts Nicholson's terms:
"You and your officers may return to your quarters.
As part of this amnesty, it will not be necessary for
officers to do manual labor."
Nicholson smiles proudly, buttons his disheveled
uniform and then strides onto the porch to leave
Saito's quarters. His men watch expectantly and then
when their commander emerges free, someone
jubilantly exclaims: "He's done it!" and the men
cheer for his triumph and surround their commander
from all sides. The victorious commander weaves
into the rush of ecstatic soldiers. The other officers
are released from their punishment hut and
personally greeted. Inside Saito's quarters, the
Japanese commander has saved face, but he cries on
his bed - his honor has been shamed.
# 68. The Defiant Ones (1958)
The single-most symbolic image of the encouraging
state of the development of race relations in the US
was in Stanley Kramer's social commentary film.
Two convicts - white John Jackson (Tony Curtis)
and black Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier), are
shackled together. When they escape from a
southern chain gang, they must cooperate with each
other and put aside their racial animosities as they
evade the oppressive search of the police. Held
together by a 29 inch steel chain, they are manacled
to each other, and only bound by their will and
determination to escape.
In the film's final sequence, the two men hear an
approaching freight train. They frantically pursue it
and Cullen is able to get onto one of the moving
cars. He reaches back with one free hand and pleads
for his white companion to "run" faster. They lock
hands with his each other (a memorable image of
black and white hands and arms locked together) but
he cannot pull Jackson up onto the moving train. So
he sacrifices his own freedom and falls back off the
train onto the ground.
In their final few moments of freedom, they share a
cigarette, and Cullen sings the blues classic "Long
Gone" as the sounds of bloodhounds on their trail
closing in on them are heard in the distance.

# 69. Touch of Evil (1958)

Probably the most dazzling opening sequence in any
film is the one in the greatest B movie ever made Orson Welles' late film noir. The film opens with an
audacious, incredible, breathtaking, three-minute,
uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the credits
(appearing superimposed on the left of the screen).
In a close-up, hands set an explosive, timed device.
A shadowy figure runs and places it in the trunk of a
parked convertible. The pounding of bongo drums
and blare of brass instruments are heard (Henry
Mancini's score), accompanied by the ticking of the
mechanism on the soundtrack. The camera pulls
away sharply, identifying the car's location - it is
parked on a street in a seedy Mexican border town.
An unsuspecting, wealthy American man - Rudi
Linnekar (the boss of the town) and his giggling,
blonde floozy, mistress/girlfriend (a striptease
dancer named Zita) emerge out of the background
darkness and get into the car, driving off through the
streets toward the US-Mexican border.
From high above, the camera tracks the movement
of the doomed pair in the shiny car through the
squalid-looking town. It is a dark night as they drive
through the town, the setting for the rest of the film.
In the border town, there are flashing neon and
electric signs, tawdry hotels and stripjoint nightclubs
("The Paradise"), crumbling arches, dark roofs,
winding streets and twisting alleys with peeling
posters on sides of walls and houses, heaps of trash,
and vendors pushing carts. The black-and-white
visuals emphasize the seedy atmosphere and the
moral decadence, decay, and nightmarish dirtiness
of the scene. As the convertible moves along and
then turns a corner and stops at a traffic light, the
camera descends and picks up another cheerful
couple, Ramon Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton
Heston), a handsome, Mexico City narcotics
investigator with his voluptuous blonde,
honeymooning American bride Susan Vargas (Janet
Leigh). They are walking down the street, moving
across the road where the car has stopped at the
traffic light. (The rigged car and the Vargas couple
are both on their way through the town to the
US/Mexican border.)
Each group arrives at the border checkpoint at the
same time. The walking couple must answer a few
formal questions. The blonde floozy complains to
the border guards about the ticking noise she hears
in the back of the car, but she is ignored by the
border official and her companion. The car moves

past the checkpoint across the border after

clearance, driving out of the frame. Just as the
newlyweds kiss, the sound of the explosion of the
detonated car overlaps on the soundtrack, and they
turn their faces toward the blast. The film makes its
first cut (after almost three minutes) to a view of the
flaming body of the car in midair.

# 70. Vertigo (1958)

Hitchcock's psychological, dramatic masterpiece of
sexual obsession, follows a vertigo-inflicted ex-San
Francisco policeman John "Scottie" Ferguson
(James Stewart) who takes a job from former
classmate Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to shadow
his wife Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). Just when
he is falling in love with her, she falls to her death
and he slips into a deep depression.
And then he meets another woman Judy Barton
(also Kim Novak) who looks just like Madeleine.
Falling in love with her, he suggests clothes - the
gray suit - like Madeleine wore, obsessively trying
to mold, remake and groom Judy into the dead
woman's image. His desire to design and make her
into his idealized image of Madeleine becomes a
fetish. In Scottie's apartment, Judy appears
frightened that Scottie loves his lost-love Madeleine
more than herself, the real-life Judy. She pleads with
him to love her for who she is and to stop
psychologically stripping her of her own identity.
Judy insists on not being a reminder of his lost love,
also fearing that she will become the Madeleine of
the deadly plot and may be recognized. Pathetically,
she finally gives in, allowing him to exploit her and
change her appearance, fulfilling his dream.
In the film's most memorable sequence, when Judy
has finally made the full transformation into
Scottie's image of Madeleine, the camera focuses on
Scottie pacing around before she emerges from the
bathroom. Slowly, the door opens and we see
Scottie's hopeful eyes filled with wonder and
emotion in an unforgettable image, as he (and the
viewer) sees the reborn reincarnation of his lost
love. Anxious to please him because of her love for
him, Judy slowly walks toward him, remade to look
exactly like "Madeleine" - a fabricated image of a
woman created by Elster to masquerade a murder
plot. We see from Scottie's point of view - the

ghostly figure appears in the eerie green-tinged neon

light reflected from the hotel sign outside the
window.
Her metaphysical, spiritual figure assumes solid
shape as she moves out of the ghostly green light
and crosses the floor to him, to embrace and kiss
passionately. The camera pans and swirls around
them (their background surroundings dissolve and
place them in the livery stable in Scottie's subjective
imagination, the location where he had attempted to
cure Madeleine's hallucinations) - the sensation
must be the same distorted but gratified feelings
Scottie is experiencing - vertigo. Completely lost in
the dream, overlapping fantasy and reality, the
loving couple continue kissing in front of the pale,
greenish haze of the window.
# 71. Ben-Hur (1959)
The spectacular, memorable eleven-minute chariot
race in this epic was filmed on a gigantic racing set the largest single film set in cinematic history. The
setting for the exciting action scene is majestically
impressive with a central divider strip composed of
three statues thirty feet high, and grandstands on all
sides, rising five stories high and filled with
thousands of extras. Before the race, the charioteers
parade around the ring in a display of pageantry the focus is on the two chariots of Ben Hur
(Charlton Heston) and arch-enemy Messala
(Stephen Boyd) - with white and black horses
respectively. A crown of victory will be given to the
victor - the chariot that first completes nine rounds.
The eager horses and chariots are held back at the
starting point until the signal to begin the race is
given. The battle between the competitors is
highlighted by a series of close ups of the action, as
the chariots race around the great stone idols in the
center of the arena. One by one, Messala eliminates
the other drivers in the ferocious race, shattering
their chariots.
The climactic ending to the race occurs when the
chariots of the two dueling rivals run neck-and-neck
and slash at each other. Messala tries to destroy
Ben-Hur's chariot by moving close with its rotating
blades, but as the wheels lock and he loses one of
his wheels, Messala's chariot is splintered into
pieces. He is dragged by his own team, then
trampled, and run over by other teams of horses.
Defeated, he lies in the dirt, his body a broken

bloody pulp.
[The chariot race in the 1925 silent film of the same
name between Ramon Novarro (Ben-Hur) and
Francis X. Bushman (Messala) is equally
spectacular.]

# 72. North by Northwest (1959)

In the most-renowned and brilliant sequence of
director Alfred Hitchcock's career, handsome
business executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is
lured into the flat countryside by enemy spies on the
pretext of meeting the fabled Kaplan. He arrives at a
barren road-crossing out in open farm country
surrounded by plowed-up dirt and cornfields,
incongruously dressed in a neat business suit in
bright sunlight. He is entirely exposed and
vulnerable - a modern, urban individual without any
amenities or artificial resources. There is a graphic
contrast between his vertical figure and the flat
horizon. Surrealistically, suspense slowly builds as
cars pass through the desolate area. A truck sprays
him with road dust.
A car drops a man on the other side of the road from
him to wait for a bus - is this man Kaplan? A cropdusting plane is engaged in dusting a nearby field.
The man remarks that it is odd to have a small plane
crop-dusting a crop on a field devoid of crops:
"That's funny...That plane's dustin' crops where
there ain't no crops."

After the man boards a bus, the distant, innocent and

harmless crop-spraying plane immediately and
without warning terrorizes him, swooping down like
a bird of prey out of a clear blue sky, flying almost
at ground level and spraying machine-gun fire.
Thornhill ducks for cover from the strafing attack,
but there is nowhere to hide and no way to defend
himself in the vast expanse of the setting - the third
vicious attack on his life.
The plane circles and returns a few times as he fails
to flag down and stop a car. Thornhill runs for cover
in an open cornfield, but the bi-plane showers him
with a load of poisonous pesticide to flush him out.
He returns to the road and runs in front of an
approaching semi-trailer Magnum Oil truck, forcing
it to stop. He falls under the truck's front bumper as
the plane uncontrollably crashes and explodes into
the truck's gas tank.

# 73. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Billy Wilder's outrageous, comedy farce favorite is
one of the most hilarious films ever made. It is a
clever combination of many elements: a spoof of
1920's gangster films with period costumes and
speakeasies, a comedy with one central joke entangled identities and cross-dressing, and nonstop action, slapstick, and one-liners. To escape
from vicious gangsters in Chicago, Joe/Josephine
(Tony Curtis) and Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon)
disguise themselves as members of an all-girl
orchestra. While Joe sneaks out looking like a
millionaire and sounding like Cary Grant to woo
Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), one of the band
members, Jerry is wooed by yacht owner Osgood
Fielding III (Joe E. Brown).
In the film's classic closing scene in a pre-arranged
getaway boat, Jerry attempts to end his relationship
with Osgood, breaking the news gently to him by
discouraging his affection - but he isn't successful:
Osgood: "I called Mama. She was so happy she

cried. She wants you to have her wedding gown. It's

white lace."
Jerry-Daphne: "Yeah, Osgood. I can't get married in
your mother's dress. Ha ha. That-she and I, we are
not built the same way."
Osgood (unflappable): "We can have it altered."
Jerry-Daphne: "Aw no you don't! Osgood, I'm
gonna level with you. We can't get married at all."
Osgood: "Why not?"
Jerry: "Well, in the first place, I'm not a natural
blonde."
Osgood: "Doesn't matter."
Jerry-Daphne: "I smoke. I smoke all the time."
Osgood: "I don't care."
Jerry-Daphne: "Well, I have a terrible past. For three
years now, I've been living with a saxophone
player."
Osgood: "I forgive you."
Jerry-Daphne: "I can never have children."
Osgood (unperturbed): "We can adopt some."
Jerry-Daphne (whipping off his wig, utterly
exasperated): "You don't understand, Osgood.
(Changing to manly voice.) I'm a man."
Osgood (unruffled and still in love): "Well,
nobody's perfect."

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

# 74. Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock's psychological thriller still shocks especially the brutal shower-murder montage. A
young, in-love, attractive real estate office secretary
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) impulsively steals
$40,000, flees from Phoenix, and eventually ends up
at the deserted Bates Motel. Following a
conversation over dinner with the sympathetic, shy,
and nervous motel manager Norman Bates
(Anthony Perkins), she vows to return and extricate
herself from her predicament involving the
larcenous crime. As a cleansing act before retiring
for the night, she prepares to take a shower.
In the next scene, the vulnerable woman is
shockingly stabbed to death - it is the most famous
murder scene ever filmed. The infamous scene
begins peacefully enough. She closes the antiseptic,
white-tiled bathroom's door, removes her robe, steps
naked into the bathtub, pulls the curtain across,
opens up a bar of soap, and turns on the overhead
shower water. There in the privacy of her bathroom,
she begins to bathe, visibly enjoying the feel of the

Screenshots

cleansing water on her skin, relieved as the water

washes away her guilt. Large closeups of the shower
head reveal the water pouring down on her.
The bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey
figure enters the bathroom - seen through the cloudy
shower curtain, whips aside the curtain, wields a
knife high in the air and repeatedly slashes and stabs
at her, shattering her sense of security and salvation.
Split-second images of her flesh, the knife, blood,
and the bathroom tile flash on the screen. The
piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin
strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a
large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific
scene.
Marion resists and screams - the killing is
kinetically viewed from many angles and views. She
is standing in water mixed with blood. She falls
against the bathtub tiles, her hand 'clawing and
grasping' the back shower wall after the murderer
(resembling a grey-haired woman) quickly turns and
leaves.
In a closeup, Marion holds her hand out, grabs the
shower curtain and pulls it down from its hooks as
she collapses over the edge of the bathtub - her face
is pressed to the bathroom floor. She lies bleeding
on the floor, with the shower nozzle still spraying
her body with water.
The camera slowly tracks the blood and water which
flows and swirls together counterclockwise down into the deep blackness of the
bathtub drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable
closeup of Marion's dead-still, open right eye with
one tear drop (or drop of water).
The camera pulls back up from the lifeless, staring
eye, spiraling in an opposite clockwise direction and
revealing her face - stiff, lying flat on the bathroom
floor.

# 75a. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The story of the eccentric British officer T.E.
Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is pervaded with a
romantic, golden-hued glow in David Lean's
sweeping epic . At age 29, young Lawrence began
his career in the British headquarters in Cairo in
1917, working at a desk job, but disgruntled and
uninterested in his work as a cartographer coloring
maps, he wants to get involved in adventures out in
the desert. The dedicated, knowledgeable, but
undisciplined Lawrence is assigned to special duty
with a transfer to Arabia ("For ordinary men, it's a
burning, fiery furnace"). Thinking "it's going to be
fun," he contemplates his future while gazing into a
lit match as it burns down - it is an exultant image.
As he blows the burning hot match out, rather than
snuffing it out with his fingers ("The trick...is not
minding that it hurts"), the screen becomes
overwhelmed by the magnificent glow of the
blazing, reddish-orange Arabian sun, first seen as a
growing sliver of bright light, then slowly rising
over the endless horizon of the golden sand-duned
desert - the site of his new mission.
# 75b. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
[Two other resonant images in the film]:
(1) Lawrence is positioned on a sand dune ridge in
one of the film's most memorable sequences - he
pushes a plunger to detonate dynamite laid on the
tracks of a Turkish train. The Arabs open fire with
British machine guns on the derailed train.
Lawrence calls for his men to stop, then rises in his
flowing white robes and runs in front of the line of
fire, shooting flares to get his men's attention and
crying "Stop it!" Then, with one sweeping hand, he
leads the bloody desert assault down the sand dune
hillside: "Come on, men!" The men loot the train for
treasures. Lawrence strides atop the wrecked train,
where he is shot in the right upper arm by a
wounded Turkish officer and falls to the ground. He

faces and watches as the Turkish man unsteadily

empties his revolver directly at him. After the man
is swiftly dispatched by the swipe of a sword,
Lawrence is photographed in front of his heroworshipping followers. His arm bloodied, he climbs
back aboard the roof of the train in his sandals and
long-flowing robe, parading triumphantly like a god
before rows of cheering Arabs enthusiastically
chanting: "Aurens, Aurens." In a long tracking shot,
the charismatic, egotistical figure casts a giant
shadow on the ground that his men follow. He is
framed against the bright sun - his arms
outstretched.
(2) The suspenseful scene of the appearance of
Sheik Sherif Ali Ibn el Kharish (Omar Sharif) with
the effective use of a long lens - at a Harith watering
well at Masruh (belonging to a rival Bedouin tribe),
Lawrence's (Peter O'Toole) assistant Tafas draws up
water at the start of one of the longest, most
memorable entrances in film history. A dust cloud
and then a tiny speck appear through shimmering,
mirage-like heat waves on the desert horizon Lawrence fears it is "Turks." In the haze, the
ominous image steadily enlarges and grows into a
human being as it comes closer and closer.
Dramatically, the black-robed Bedouin Sherif Ali
shoots down Lawrence's escort in cold-blood,
illustrating through this ugly, ferocious act the fact
of ancient Bedouin tribal warfare.

# 76. Lolita (1962)

Stanley Kubrick's brilliant adaptation of Vladimir
Nabokov's celebrated yet controversial novel was a
satire on American sexual attitudes evidenced in a
middle-aged man's unusual sexual passion/obsession
for a very young girl. The film's publicity posters
asked the audacious tagline: "How did they ever
make a film of Lolita?" with a picture of Lolita
wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a red
lollipop. Toward the beginning of the film, Humbert
Humbert (James Mason), an impeccable, European
intellectual examines summer lodgings in New
Hampshire in the home of a matronly-looking,
boorish, wealthy Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters).
He is convinced to board there after being shown the
garden in the backyard: "My flowers win prizes

around here! They're the talk of the neighborhood.

Voila!"
Juxtaposed with these lines from Charlotte is the
first view of her nubile, young, sultry twelve-yearold daughter, Dolores 'Lolita' Haze (Sue Lyon)
languidly sunbathing on a blanket on the lawn. She
looks up and stares cooly at the new prospective
boarder with a blank expression - the soundtrack
plays a nymphet tune. The first image of her
youthful figure is impossible to forget - Lolita wears
a two-piece skimpy, flower-patterned bikini, and she
sports heart-shaped sunglasses and a broadbrimmed, feathered straw hat.
# 77. Tom Jones (1963)
The British production Best Picture winner in 1963
was Tony Richardson's wildly irreverent period
comedy based on Henry Fielding's 18th century
novel - the bawdy story of a young rogue's (Albert
Finney) travels across Britain. The oft-played
excerpt from the film is one of its high points - the
famous food-orgy, dining sequence with erotically
sexual overtones. On the road, the boyish Tom
encounters a lusty Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman)
with whom he finds sexual fulfillment during their
multi-course dinner meal.
Their repast serves as foreplay as they obscenely
eye each other and devour lobster, chicken legs,
oysters, and fruits by various means - swallowing,
sucking, ravaging, gobbling, licking, and biting. At
the last moment, Tom covers the camera with his
hat to avoid having his further amorous adventures
spied upon.
# 78. The Sound of Music (1965)
Could there ever be a better opening for the film
version of a stage musical than this? With a
sweeping aerial view, the film opens with a left-toright camera pan through the clouds and across
rocky, snow-covered mountains. The camera dips
into a green, wooded valley with steep cliffs that
descend into a snow-fed lake. Reflections of the
hills are viewed in the mirror-like images on the
water's surface. As the camera moves over the
European landscape and village, it discovers an
open, green area nestled between the peaks.
It moves closer and zooms into the green field,
where it finds a happy and joyous Maria (Julie

Andrews), a novice Salzburg Austrian nun, walking

across the wide expanse of land. With open-armed
appreciation of the beauty of the surrounding
majestic peaks and vistas of the Austrian Alps, she
twirls and sings the title song. For her: "The Hills
Are Alive With the Sound of Music."
Because she spends so much time singing and
dancing on the mountainside, she has neglected
most of her postulant duties and is asked to leave the
nunnery. She takes a job as governess for the family
of the widowed Captain von Trapp (Christopher
Plummer), and wins over the seven singing children
- the Trapp Family Singers, with her warmheartedness and sense of humor.

# 79. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

This film is one of the sixties' most talked-about,
controversial crime/gangster films - its graphically,
lyrically violent finale permanently changed the
form and substance of popular films forever. Drifter
Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and his bored,
beautiful, and sexually-frustrated, Depression-era
partner Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) go on a
cross-country, bank-robbing rampage, and are
eventually betrayed. The most classic of all scenes is
the shocking and tense "ballet of blood" finale, an
ultra-violent, country backroads ambush set for
Bonnie and Clyde, the doomed lovers. Sidekick C.
W.'s Moss's (Michael J. Pollard) father Ivan (Dub
Taylor) fakes a flat tire on his truck, knowing that
the couple will be driving by.
The ambush scene is marvelously choreographed
and edited as it carefully builds to the climax. Quick
shots jump through each moment and capture the
faces of the characters. Moss notices their car
coming down the road and flags it down for help.
Another unexpected car appears, a flock of birds
flies upward, thick shrubs rustle across the road, and
Moss dives beneath his truck for safety. In the
shooting and editing of the massacre, slow motion
scenes are intercut with sped-up motion - creating a
nervous montage of images.
In their final freeze-frame of life, with a silent

glance at each other, Bonnie and Clyde reveal both

panic and love. Then, from the point of view of the
deputies, their frenzied corpses agonizingly writhe
in slow-motion as they vainly grasp for each other.
Gunned down, 'shot,' and riddled with bullets, they
die prolonged, cinematically-beautiful deaths to
accentuate the romance of the myths and the largerthan-life legends that surrounded them. Their
corpses are re-animated with slow, jerking spasms
by gunfire that shreds them and the shrubbery.
Clyde's body hits the brown dirt, and Bonnie's is hit
over and over again in the front seat of the bulletmarked car. Her golden hair hangs down in the
sunlight. Texas Ranger (Denver Pyle) walks up with
the other officers, lowers his carbine, and stares at
the scene of carnage.
# 80. The Graduate (1967)
This biting satire/comedy perfectly captures the
theme of an innocent youth, exploited and betrayed
by a corrupt, decadent, and discredited older
generation - the coming of age film beautifully
epitomized the spirit of its times. In the memorable,
climactic rescue scene at the film's conclusion,
recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin
Hoffman) makes a mad rush to stop the wedding of
Elaine (Katharine Ross), the girl he loves - and the
daughter of her seductive mother Mrs. Robinson
(Anne Bancroft). He runs toward the West Coast
church, filmed with an extreme depth of focus
camera that makes him appear to be running in place
and not getting anywhere. He halts the marriage
from the church balcony, looking down through a
pane of glass (in a crucifixion image) as the
ceremony concludes. He pounds on the glass,
calling out "Elaine! Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!" The
bride looks up - startled. Elaine is torn between
Benjamin and her parents and new husband. Mr.
Robinson reacts to his appearance with anger:
"Who's that guy? What's he doing? I'll take care of
him." Mrs. Robinson clucks: "He's too late." Elaine
walks slowly to the back of the church, her eyes
transfixed on Benjamin. She chooses him over her
bridegroom, screaming out: "Ben!"
Benjamin knocks Mr. Robinson to the floor, pushes
the bridegroom back, and grabs Elaine, as Mrs.
Robinson confronts her daughter, again exclaiming:
"It's too late." Elaine rebelliously disagrees: "Not for
me." Mrs. Robinson slaps Elaine twice across the
face to bring her back to reality, but the blows have
no effect. Elaine and Benjamin run out of the church
together, using a large church cross he has pulled

down from the wall - first as a weapon to clear a

path and then as a barrier for the large glass doors to
prevent everyone from following. With the glass
door securely locked, they symbolically and literally
hold back the forces of resistance.
Elaine, still in her bridal gown, and Benjamin,
grubby and unshaven, run to flag down and board a
passing yellow municipal bus while giggling and
laughing at their triumphant victory. They rush to
the rear seat of the bus and look out the rear glass
window, amidst puzzling, stern and cold looks from
the other elderly passengers. Oblivious to the other
gawking passengers in front of them, the two of
them face each other and grin, but their self-satisfied
moods begin to fade and disappear. Appropriately,
Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" is
reprised on the soundtrack. Emotionally exhausted
and confused in the final image, they ride staring
silently ahead, uncharacteristically silent and not
looking at each other. [Their relationship is maybe
not much different from the one Benjamin
experienced with Elaine's mother.] They are
traveling toward an undefined, uncertain future stunned and out of breath - well aware that their
futures are wide-open and very ambiguous. Ben has
won the object of his Holy Grail quest, but nothing
is certain for him. The final image views the couple
through the rear glass windows of the bus as it pulls
away - they are separated from their families and
each other.
[Another of the film's quintessential scenes was the
one in which the lecherous, close family friend Mrs.
Robinson (Anne Bancroft) brazenly seduces the
bewildered Benjamin as she perches with her legs
spread on a bar stool in her home (with the camera
shooting under her upraised leg) - and he asks the
classic befuddled reply-question: "Mrs. Robinson,
you're trying to seduce me! - Aren't you?"]
# 81. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Stanley Kubrick's towering sci-fi epic was a film in
three parts. It opens with The Dawn of Man in the
prehistoric past four million years ago, the location
where the human race itself began. As the sun rises
on the dawn of civilization in a landscape of desert
on the African savannah, a peaceful band or tribe of
prehistoric ape-men (Australopithecines) appear,
squat and hairy, eating grass, scratching and
chattering in groups around a slowly diminishing
watering hole. They scrape together a meager life,
unable to fully protect themselves from the elements

or from other competitors, predators and carnivores.

There are endless eons of time that pass during
which the apes live in eternal boredom - and cope
with the struggle for survival. The band of
vegetarian man-apes huddle in fear.
After the appearance - in the first light of dawn - of
a tall, black, rectangular monolithic slab, with an
eerie humming sound, they react nervously but soon
approach it cautiously, drawn to its color, form, and
smoothness - and then they touch it. The leader
man-ape plays with one of the ravaged bones from
an antelope skeleton. In a slow-motion sequence, he
uses the bone to smash at and shatter the skeleton.
The ape learns to grasp and use skeleton bones as
tools, extending his reach and strike power.
Somehow, the monolith has been presented as a gift
to mysteriously assist the man-ape in his transition
to a higher order with an ability to reason and the
power to use tools (such as bones). The creature is
able to kill a water buffalo with his new tool, in a
brilliant intercut image. The man-ape is on the verge
of intelligence - the beginning of steps toward
humanity. No longer vegetarian, the group of manapes that have experienced the breakthrough eat the
raw meat from their fresh kill.
When other man-apes come over to the water hole,
the intelligent man-apes drive them away by
attacking and swinging with their bonetools, now using them as weapons to kill or threaten
other man-apes. They gain domination in the animal
world, establish their territorial domain, and take an
evolutionary step or leap toward (or away from)
humanity. The leader man-ape uses the bone to
crush an opponent's skull from the nearest other
tribe of proto-humans. While continuing to demolish
the skeleton with the bone, in slow-motion, he
throws his weapon, a piece of the bone, exultantly
into the air. It flies and spins upwards, twisting and
turning. In a great transitionary image to the next
segment, the tossed tool/weapon instantly rotates
and dissolves into an Earth-orbiting satellite - a
technological instrument, tool, or machine from
another era that was ultimately derived from the first
tool-weapon.
[Another superb sequence: as the two astronauts
speak to each other in a sound-proof chamber so that
the spaceship's malevolent computer HAL cannot
hear them, the computer's electronic red 'eye' reads
their lips through the window of the compartment.]

# 82. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

George Roy Hill's entertaining, whimsical, hit
production of the comedy/drama western was about
two legendary, turn-of-the-century Western outlaws
faced with inevitable changes in the twentieth
century.
Train-robbing Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and
Sundance (Robert Redford) are endlessly pursued
by a relentless, superhuman posse (often filmed with
a long focal-length lens) led by a feared lawmen in
the West - a sheriff in a white hat named Joe Lefors,
and an expert Indian tracker named Lord Baltimore.
They repeatedly ask each other the bewildering
question - as they look over their shoulders and try
to evade the Pinkerton posse: "Who are those
guys?" The outlaws are chased over rocks and
creeks, and eventually trapped on a ledge at the edge
of a steep canyon with nowhere to go. Their
frequent comic bantering is a highlight of the film,
especially illustrated when they overlook raging
rapids far below and are faced with a choice
between a hopeless shoot-out and a near-suicidal
leap. At the last moment, Sundance confesses: "I
can't swim!" His partner Butch guffaws: "Why, you
crazy - the fall'll probably kill ya!" Sundance shakes
his head as he ponders the insanity of actually
jumping to escape their pursuers. He grabs a gun
belt held out by Butch, jumps with him in tandem,
and wails: "Ohhh . . . s - h - i - i - i - i - i - t !"
[In the film's final sequence, the two are cornered
and wounded by Bolivian troops in an empty stucco
building - they still bicker with each other, giving a
mocking, ironic edge to their words. While bleeding
badly, they are quickly surrounded by an entire
regiment, but they daydream and optimistically talk
of new places to go, even debating wistfully about
the possibility of emigrating to Australia and
starting a new life there. The two are unable to
comprehend the reality of their doomed situation
that awaits them outside. Escape is impossible. After
they have loaded their guns and positioned guns in
their hands, they ready themselves for a daylight
dash toward their horses. They emerge with guns
blazing from their hiding place for their last
shootout against impossible odds in the small-town
courtyard. Rather than ending the film in bulletridden deaths, the picture ends with a freeze-frame
of their final glorious charge, drowned out by the
echoing sounds of thousands of guns firing on them
from all angles. The image freezes, blurs, and then
keeps a sepia-toned focus on the legendary, eternal

bravura image of the two compadres in their final

gallant moments as they meet their fate together.]
# 83. Easy Rider (1969)
This is the late 1960s "road film" tale of a search for
freedom (or the illusion of freedom) in a conformist
America, in the midst of paranoia, bigotry and
violence. The iconographic "buddy" film is both
memorialized as an image of the popular and
historical culture of the time and a story of a
contemporary journey eastward through the
American Southwest by two self-righteous, antihero, free-wheeling, long-haired, social misfits /
dropouts / hippies.
The bikers are the cool and introspective "Captain
America" Wyatt (Peter Fonda) with an American
flag on the back of his black leather jacket and a
stars-and-stripes helmet, and mustached Billy
(Dennis Hopper) with a tan-colored bush hat and
fringed jacket on his gleaming, silver-chromed, lowriding motorcycle.
When they are both thrown in jail in a small town in
New Mexico for crashing a parade and "paradin'
without a permit," they meet a genial, drunken
ACLU Southern lawyer, George Hanson (Jack
Nicholson). George presents the most unforgettable
image of the film after he tells them he has "a
helmet." He is grinning from ear to ear, wearing a
gold football helmet, and riding on the back of
Wyatt's motorcycle, as "If You Want to Be A Bird"
(by The Holy Modal Rounders) plays on the
soundtrack. George sits up and flaps his arms.
# 84. The Wild Bunch (1969)
The best of Sam Peckinpah's westerns - the harsh,
extremely violent cinematically visualizes at both its
beginning and end (with rapid-fire and slow-motion
segments) the horrific, savage, yet glorified
spectacle of death for a romantic band of men whose
time had come.
The film's opening with freeze-frame credits is
brilliantly presented. To the sound of snare drums
and cymbals, the over-the-hill Wild Bunch outlaws
(including William Holden, Ernest Borgnine,
Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson) masquerade in the
disguise of tan-colored, khaki outfits as U.S.
Cavalry soldiers. They appear heroically-positioned,
riding stiffly and formally into a dusty town of San

Rafael along railroad tracks. The frame freezes into

a static, black and white chiaroscuro image when
each of the credits appear, unfreezing to continue
with the colorful action.
On the outskirts of the southwestern Texas town,
they ride by a large gathering of Mexican children
who are being entertained by toying with scorpions
(a symbol or parable of the Wild Bunch itself)
placed in the middle of a caged colony of red fighter
ants - in reaction shots, the children watch and
giggle as the struggling scorpions are surrounded,
tortured and consumed by the swarming ants. In the
opening street scene outside railroad offices that
they rob, they are unaware that they are hugely
outnumbered - there is an ambush prepared by the
railroad bosses who have placed bands of bountyhunting riflemen on a rooftop. To increase the
tension of the scene, the film is sharply edited, intercutting rapidly from the Bunch in the bank, to the
bounty hunters, to the temperance marchers. The
oncoming temperance union marchers on parade
through the street are used to the Wild Bunch's
advantage as shields and cover.
In the blood ballet (partially filmed in poetic slow
motion), many of the bullets strike innocent
bystanders in the crowd - men, women, and children
in the parade are caught in the crossfire. Bullet
wounds spray gushing blood and chunks of flesh,
and bodies writhe in agony and pain. One of the
memorable images is the sight of one of the
escaping, yellow-raincoated riders being shot from
his horse and cascading-smashing through a storefront glass window of a dress shop and rolling into
three dress mannequins. On the outskirts of town,
the decimated gang pauses by the children who are
still playing with their captured and devoured
scorpions. The youngsters toss dry straw on the
caged scorpions and ants, setting the whole pile
afire.
[The closing scene of the ultimate showdown with
the Mexican soldiers - a bloody orgy of carnage and
slaughter, is equally lyrical and repellent.]

Film Title/Year and Film Scene Description

Screenshots

# 85. Patton (1970)

George C. Scott's towering portrayal of the
obsessive, arrogant, colorful, heroic World War II
general begins with his classic, six-minute
monologue about Americans and their fighting
spirit. This was the role and performance for which
Scott was given an Academy Award that he
declined and refused to accept. The opening scene
featuring the larger-than-life, egotistical, muchdecorated general is set before the backdrop of a
huge American flag. After the anthem concludes, he
ends his salute and with a cold, mean look, delivers
his speech to offscreen troops, peppering it with
numerous profanities. He praises those who would
fight, promising potential glory for his soldiers:
"...Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever
won a war by dying for his country. He won it by
making the other poor dumb bastard die for his
country. Men, all this stuff you've heard about
America not wanting to fight - wanting to stay out
of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans
traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love
the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all
admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest
runner, big league ball players, the toughest boxers.
Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a
loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't
give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed.
That's why Americans have never lost and never
will lose a war, because the very thought of losing is
hateful to Americans. Now, an army is a team - it
lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This
individuality stuff is a bunch of crap...
Now, we have the finest food and equipment, the
best spirit, and the best men in the world. You
know, by god, I actually pity those poor bastards
we're goin' up against. By god, I do. We're not just
gonna shoot the bastard, we're going to cut out their
living guts and use them to grease the treads of our
tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun
bastards by the bushel. Now, some of you boys, I
know, are wondering whether or not you'll chicken
out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you
that you will all do your duty. The Nazis are the
enemy. Wade into them, spill their blood, shoot
them in the belly. When you put your hand into a
bunch of goo that a moment before was your best
friend's face, you'll know what to do.
Now there's another thing I want you to remember. I
don't want to get any messages saying that we are

holding our position. We're not holding anything.

Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly
and we're not interested in holding onto anything
except the enemy. We're going to hold onto him by
the nose and we're gonna kick him in the ass. We're
going to kick the hell out of him all the time and
we're gonna go through him like crap through a
goose. Now, there's one thing that you men will be
able to say when you get back home, and you may
thank god for it. Thirty years from now when you're
sitting around your fireside with your grandson on
your knee, and he asks you: 'What did you do in the
Great World War II?', you won't have to say: 'Well,
I shoveled s--t in Louisiana.' All right, now you
sons-of-bitches, you know how I feel and I will be
proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle
anytime, anywhere. That's all."
# 86. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
One of the most controversial of all of Kubrick's
films is his ultra-violent, over-indulgent, graphic
film of the near future - its sadistic scene of a rape
coupled with song and dance from one of
Hollywood's most famous musicals is particularly
sensational and perverse.
An ebullient young punker Alex de Large (Malcolm
McDowell), wearing a bowler hat and one false
eyelash (upper and lower), joins with other teenaged "droogs" to engage in a night of sado-sexual
escapades (beatings, pillaging, mayhem, break-ins
and rape). At the ultra-modern residence of the
Alexanders (Patrick Magee and Adrienne Corri), the
elderly writer and his red pajama suit-dressed wife
are assaulted by the gang, now attired with
grotesque face masks.
Acting like Gene Kelly, Alex ironically punctuates
his rhythmic, soft-shoe kick-dance with the lyrics of
"Singin' in the Rain" while assaulting and kicking
the husband in the belly as he is restrained and
prostrate on the floor, and slapping the wife. The
rhythmic scene is one of the most disturbing,
conflicting scenes in the film, with its juxtaposition
of the familiar lyrics of playful music with images
of brutality and horrible ultra-violence.
Both victims and bound and gagged, with a rubber
ball painfully inserted into their mouths and
wrapped with long strips of Scotch tape around their
heads. Alex overturns the writer's desk, typewriter,
and bookshelves. Mr. Alexander is forced to
helplessly watch the ugly rape of his wife, who is

held upright by one of the other thugs. As a prelude

to the rape, Alex begins by snipping off two circles
of cloth around her breasts, and then slits her entire
suit from bottom to top.

# 87. The French Connection (1971)

The multiple Academy Award-winning, fast-paced,
realistic police/crime film features the exciting,
frenetic, car-and-elevated train chase scene - one
which has been endlessly copied in dozens of films it is a terrifying, staggering series of effectively
intercut segments.
The vulgar, brutal, tireless, unlikable, maniacal and
sadistic Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman)
stars as the main undercover New York City
narcotics cop who passionately and obsessively
pursues drug pushers.
In the film's centerpiece, one of the drug ring's
murderous snipers Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi)
nicknamed "Frog Two" muffs his attempt to kill
Doyle, and is pursued in an exciting and brilliant
car-train chase sequence through Bensonhurst,
Brooklyn. In one of the best pursuits ever put on
film [rivaling the producer's previous car-chase

scene in the film Bullitt - and the reason the film

was awarded an Oscar for Best Editing], Doyle flags
down, commandeers, and hijacks a car (for a "police
emergency") and pursues the drug dealer on board
an out-of-control, roaring, runaway elevated commuter subway train (where he
has terrorized passengers, forced the engineer not to
stop at the next station, killed the train's cop and
conductor, and caused the motorman to have a
heart-attack).
The psychopathic detective weaves and swerves in
and out of traffic and track/girder supports at top
speed through the streets of New York below the
scaffolding of the elevated subway, barely missing a
mother and baby carriage at one point. He bangs his
fists on the steering wheel, angered at the delays and
frustrations.
At the end of the chase after a climactic train crash
when the train smashes into another train
[photographed with the train moving away from the
camera - and then reversed], Nicoli escapes from the
wreckage, believing that he is freed of Doyle. But
Doyle guns him down at the top of the train depot
stairs - the image became the famous promotional
still used to advertise the film on posters.

# 88. Deliverance (1972)

A tale of four Atlanta businessmen whose weekend
canoe trip into the wilderness ends in disaster - one
of the film's highlights is in its opening.
One of the adventurers, Drew (Ronny Cox), is
strumming on his guitar as they are filling up at a
gas station in the mountains. He notices that a
moon-faced, retarded albino hillbilly kid (Billy
Redden) on the porch has a banjo, and answers him

with a few notes and walks forward to sit on a porch

swing. In a captivating banjo duel, "Duelling
Banjos," they are soon challenging each other in a
rousing duet. The boy smiles, and the mountain
man/gas station attendant does a lively jig to the
music.
Drew confesses toward the end of their piece that he
has been beaten by the speed: "I'm lost."
Afterwards, Drew exclaims: "God damn, I could
play all day with that guy," and he extends his hand
to the boy to congratulate him: "God damn, you play
a mean banjo," but is evidently disappointed when
the mute boy turns his head and refuses to shake
hands with him - a suspicious stranger.
# 89. The Godfather (1972)
Francis Ford Coppola's award-winning film is part
of a lush saga/trilogy that has earned its place in
American culture as a modern-day iconic film about
violence, power, corruption, family loyalty, and
revenge. The Corleone crime "family" in Manhattan
in the mid 1940s, is dominated first by wise
godfather/patriarch "Don" Vito Corleone (Marlon
Brando in a tremendous, award-winning acting
portrayal) - the head of one of the five ItalianAmerican "families" that operate a crime syndicate
in New York City.
In the long, opening scene of the film, Corleone is in
his home's dark office, regally and ruthlessly
carrying on business during his daughter Connie's
(Talia Shire) wedding reception, held in the bright,
sunshiny outdoor veranda. It is the custom of the
father of the bride to grant favors to all petitioners
and those who pay homage. In the masterfullyphotographed, underlit office, American justice has
failed. Ostensibly, the Don is a gentle, under-stated,
restrained, 62 year old aging man, sitting behind his
study's desk. His face has a bulldog appearance with
padded cheeks, and he speaks slowly with a highpitched, hoarse, raspy, gutteral mumbling accent.
On his lap is a cat whose head he lovingly and
gently strokes. Although he moves stiffly, he wields
enormous lethal power as he determines the
dispensation of justice - who will be punished and
who will be favored. He listens to supplicants'
requests for extra-legal help and determines how to
make offers that people can't refuse.
[An unforgettable short sequence in the film is the
one of the severed head of prized race horse
Khartoum in the silk-sheeted bed of a recalcitrant

Hollywood film producer Jack Woltz (John

Marley).]
# 90. The Exorcist (1973)
This controversial film is the sensational, tawdry,
shocking horror story about devil possession and the
exorcism of the demonic spirits from a young,
innocent, twelve year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda
Blair). Ghastly expressions of her possession were
masterfully created with remarkable special effects
to manipulate audiences into feeling dread, nausea,
and fright.
At first, Regan's bed is racked with violent
convulsions. Flopping around on the top of the bed,
the young girl frantically calls out: "Make it stop!
Make it stop!" Her mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn)
throws herself on top of Regan on the wildly
bucking bed which bounces up and down on the
floor- there is a cacophony of deafeningly loud,
grating noises. Soon after, Regan's hysterical
despairing screams intensify and "things have gotten
worse...they've gotten violent." Regan's upper torso
is violently being whipped and thrown back and
forth on the bed, battering her body as it slams into
the mattress. She screams: "Oh please, Mother,
make it stop! It's hurting." Then she is tossed
upwards and bounces up and down. Her
uncontrollable seizures are accompanied by low
gutteral growls, almost animalistic. Her throat below
her chin bubbles out.
When one of the doctors reaches for Regan on the
bed, she slaps him back-handed across the face,
knocking him into the door and onto the floor. Her
physically-repulsive voice warns: "Keep away! The
sow is mine!" She pulls up the front of her
nightgown, masturbates by rubbing herself, and in a
deep, strange voice, beckons: "F--k me! F--k me!"
One of the film's most horrifying scenes is the
notorious crucifix-masturbation or stabbing scene.
From upstairs in Regan's bedroom, her mother hears
grotesque sounds, crashes, and screams. She runs up
the stairs towards the door - it opens and she sees 45
rpm records, books, and stuffed animals being
hurled at the tightly-closed window. The camera
registers the horror on her face as she sees her
daughter's sacrilegious self-abuse. In an obscene
gesture simulating masturbation or a stabbing, a
horribly-disfigured Regan repeatedly thrusts her
bloodied hand clutching the crucifix into her vagina
under her blood-splattered nightgown, as she

bellows obscenities in the Devil's voice: "Let Jesus

f--k you, let Jesus f--k you! Let him f--k you!"
When Chris grabs her daughter's super-strong arm
and tussles with her for control of the offending
object. Regan punches her mother with a violent
blow, sending her backwards across the bedroom
floor. With her telekinetic power, Regan moves a
chair against the door to bar everyone's way, and she
sends a tall wooden bureau across the floor toward
her mother.
As a bloody-faced Regan sits on her bed, she spins
her head backwards 180 degrees, threatening and
taunting in a deep malevolent voice as she imitates
the British accent of a recently-murdered friend of
Chris': "Do you know what she did? Your c--ting
daughter?"
In the grossest scene of the film, as Father Karras
(Jason Miller) approaches closer, Regan lurches
forward on the bed and spews bilious, pea-green
soup vomit from her mouth in a single projectile
stream directly into his face. The thick green slime
sticks to his face and clothing. Vomit also dribbles
down onto Regan's nightgown.
# 91. Chinatown (1974)
The superb, private eye mystery and modernday film noir thriller from director Roman Polanski
skillfully blends mystery, romance, suspense, and
elements of hard boiled detective film noirs. The
investigation of a routine story thought to be marital
infidelity by a 1930s Los Angeles private detectivehero J. J. (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) uncovers
secrets under many layers, facades, and networks of
deception.
One night, Jake drives to the Oak Pass Reservoir to
further investigate the scene of the discovery of a
corpse, and to see whether portions of the city's
water supply are being dumped or secretly diverted.
After scaling the locked, chain-link fence with a 'No
Trespassing' sign, Gittes hears two shots of gunfire a signal to open the water sluice. Ignorantly
believing he is a shooting target, he jumps into a
run-off channel for cover. The storm drain
immediately fills with a torrent of rushing water,
slamming him into a barrier and almost claiming
him as the next drowning victim. Then, after
climbing back over one fence in his soggy clothes,
he is threatened for trespassing by Claude Mulvihill

(Roy Jenson), the city's sheriff.

Gittes flippantly asks Claude: "Where'd you get the
midget?" referring to another hired thug dressed in a
beige suit, white shirt, spotted red and white bow-tie
and Panama hat. The maniacal, intimidating, knifewielding hoodlum (director Roman Polanski in a
minor cameo role) wants to scare him off the case.
Jake gets a warning to stop snooping (nosing)
around just before his nostril is viciously cut with a
knife:
"You're a very nosy fellow, kitty-cat, huh? You
know what happens to nosy fellows? Huh, no? Want
to guess? Huh, no? OK. They lose their noses.
(Jake's nose gushes blood after a sharp flick of the
knife.) Next time you lose the whole thing. Cut if
off and feed it to my goldfish. Understand?"
He sports a bloody-bandaged and stitched nose in
the next scene (a symbolic beacon of his trespassing
into other people's business) and an unraveling
bandage for the rest of the film.
[In the film's ending scene set in Chinatown - the
only scene in the film which actually takes place
there, all the characters converge in a startling and
despairing climactic scene.]
# 92. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
A disturbing, tragi-comedic film that swept the
major Academy Awards in the year of its release the film succeeded as a tale of a wise-guy hero who
rebels against institutional authority and attitudes in
a tyrannical mental hospital.
An energetic, swaggering, wisecracking, nonconformist, rebellious patient/prisoner Randle
Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) feigns insanity
to avoid doing jail time, finding himself in
immediate conflict with supervisory Nurse Ratched
(Louise Fletcher), head of the locked, security ward
of a state mental hospital.
In one of the film's many stunning scenes, the
patronizing, parental Nurse disallows the patients
from watching the second game of the World Series
- she refuses to have the usually compliant and
spiritless fellow patients/inmates won over to the
reasoning of McMurphy and changes the rules of
voting to defeat the proposal. Livid with anger,
McMurphy wills the game into existence - he

pretends to be enjoying the baseball game on

television in a contest of wills with the Nurse. He recreates the play-by-play excitement of the game by
the power of his imagination. His excitement proves
infectious and he galvanizes the other patients to
join him, cheer, and look up at the blank television
screen - it reflects the smiles on their faces when a
fantasized ballplayer hits a home run.
# 93. Rocky (1976)
The 1970s action-packed, crowd-pleasing, feel-good
story of the rise of a small-time Philadelphia boxer
against insurmountable odds.
Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), a simple-minded
bum, is a 30-year-old Philadelphia club fighter who
resorts to small bouts, and serves as the strong-arm
collections man for a local numbers racket run by a
local loan shark. When the unknown Rocky is
chosen to be boxing champ Apollo Creed's (Carl
Weathers) opponent for the January 1st event, a
world heavyweight title fight, it is a once-in-alifetime boxing bout opportunity.
Rocky's training program begins in earnest under
weathered gym manager Mickey's (Burgess
Meredith) fight training and management.
In the most memorable sequence of the film, a
montage, Rocky undergoes grueling training from
Thanksgiving to New Years by doing one-armed
pushups, pounding hanging slabs of raw meat in a
slaughterhouse freezer where his buddy Paulie (Burt
Young) works, and making a run through the
Philadelphia streets and up the steps of the art
museum, hands triumphantly raised in the air,
accompanied by the rousing song, "Gonna Fly
Now" (by Bill Conti).
Although his first run up the endless steps is
exhausting, his last run is effortless.

# 94. Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece depicted one man's
descent into insanity, alienation, and cathartic
violence within the nauseating, squalid landscape of
New York City.
Cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an
enigmatic, 20th century loner has a disastrous date
with a pretty blonde political worker for the
Palantine campaign named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd).
Projecting his anger, bare-chested Travis has
attached guns to himself (first one - and then two
shoulder holsters and a third gun from behind) in his
squalid apartment. He practices drawing the guns in
front of a mirror.
Turning more alienated and violent and harnessing
his puritanical energy, he manufactures a custommade fast-draw, gliding mechanism that he attaches
to his forearm, and another concealed knife-holder
for a horrible-looking combat knife on his ankle.
The weapons and other spring-loaded, metal gadgets
attached to him are extensions of his body - his
gunmanship is astonishing.
In the most terrifying, but classic sequence in the
film, he glares at himself in the mirror and recites
conversations in which he threatens and insistently
challenges imaginary enemies, rehearsing his quickdraw with his spring-loaded holster:
"Huh? Huh? I'm faster than you, you f--kin' son of

a...I saw you comin'. F--k. S--t-heel. I'm standin'

here. You make the move. You make the move. It's
your move. (He draws his gun from his concealed
forearm holster.) Don't try it, you f--ker. You talkin'
to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? (He
turns around to look behind him.) Well, who the hell
else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm
the only one here. Who the f--k do you think you're
talkin' to? Oh yeah? Huh? OK. (He whips out his
gun again.) Huh?"
# 95. Saturday Night Fever (1977)
No other film best captured the disco craze of the
70s generation than this John Badham film and its
image of actor/dancer John Travolta. Cocky young
Brooklyn paint store clerk Tony Manero (John
Travolta), a wanna-be Broadway dancer, escapes
each weekend to the local disco dance floor of 2001
Odyssey. In a tight white leisure suit, bodyshirt,
tight pants and black platform shoes, the sleek and
graceful disco king struts his stuff on a pulsating,
colorful dance floor - his arm pointed in the air - to
the rockin' music of the Bee Gees.
[Seventeen years later, Travolta again showcases his
dance talent in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
(1994). As hitman Vincent Vega, he nervously
entertains underworld boss' wife Mia Wallace (Uma
Thurman) at a retro 50's style diner/club called Jack
Rabbit Slim's - the wait staff is composed of dead
1950s icons like Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly, and
James Dean. They enter the restaurant's hipswiveling dance contest, frugging and ponying a
marvelous composite of faddish dances from the
faded era, including the Batusi from the mid-to-late
60s Batman TV show, to the tune of Chuck Berry's
"You Never Can Tell." The dance's trademark
action was moving the index and middle fingerspread open in a "V" shape-across the face as to
make a mask over the eyes.]
# 96. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola's visually brilliant
masterpiece contains innumerable scenes of
excellence.
At the start of the film's most memorable, greatest
set of sequences, Willard (Martin Sheen) seeks the
captain in charge of the bloody attack on the Viet
Cong. He encounters the commanding officer of the
Air Cavalry - a hawkish, lunatic, flamboyant

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall),

wearing a black horse soldier's Stetson cavalry hat
(a la George A. Custer) with a cavalry sword
emblem, sunglasses, and a yellow dickey. To secure
a Vietcong beachhead at a N. Vietnamese village
because it is one of the Vietcong's best surfing areas
in "Charlie's" territory, Kilgore orders a massive
helicopter air attack on an unsuspecting, seemingly
innocent, quiet, peaceful Vietnamese village the
next dawn after a trumpet cavalry charge is sounded
on a bugle.
The armada of choppers glide silently through the
breaking light like a harmless flock of birds - it is
one of the film's most impressive, memorable
sequences. The crazed Kilgore has ordered the
music: "We'll come in low out of the rising sun, and
about a mile out, we'll put on the music...Yeah, use
Wagner. Scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys
love it." Chef reflexively imitates other soldiers by
removing his helmet and sitting on it - to avoid
having his "balls blown off." Kilgore commands:
"Shall we dance?" as the music is piped out from the
swarm of helicopters - the front of his copter is
painted with the motto adorned with crossed swords:
"Death from Above." The choppers become
menacing as rockets and gunfire spew out along
with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries blasting over
the helicopter-mounted loudspeakers to scare the
enemy. Surfboards are loaded on the side of the
command helicopter.
Later, after the devastating, pyrotechnic attack, with
the jungle leveled and engulfed in flames behind
him, Kilgore smells the napalm, squats on the beach,
and exclaims in a now-famous line of dialogue:
"You smell that? Do you smell that?...Napalm, son.
Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the
smell of napalm in the morning."
# 97. The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick's homage to the horror genre was
illustrated in his adaptation of Stephen King's novel.
Aspiring writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is
hired to be the off-season caretaker with his family
of the Overlook Hotel, a snow-bound Colorado
resort. The effects of isolation, the hotel's disturbing,
murderous history, and other familial pressures lead
to the corrupting and possession of Jack's soul. With
a crazed, homicidal, ferocious temper, he pursues

his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) with a longhandled axe to their apartment's front door: "Wendy,
I'm home."
Both Danny (Danny Lloyd), his young son and
Wendy retreat to the bathroom. Danny escapes and
slides down a giant drift of snow resting next to
their bathroom window, but Wendy is unable to fit
through the ice-jammed window's narrow
passageway. As Jack stalks her into the bathroom,
he lurches after her with a loathsome, macabre sense
of humor, envisioning them in a bizarre, tragiccomic fairytale in which he is the 'big bad wolf':
"Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in...Not by the
hair on your chinny, chin - chin...Then I'll huff, and
I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in!"
He smashes his way into the bathroom door, with
each stroke of the blade jutting through the wood, as
his screaming wife watches his progress with her
butcher knife poised to strike. He peers through the
broken slats with an evil grin and perversely
exclaims:
"Hereeeeee's Johnny!"
# 98. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
A spectacular, cliff-hanger, breathlessly-paced, nonstop action/adventure film of the early 1980s that
was an immensely successful summer box-office hit
that mimicked the great 1930's adventure serials.
The opening sequence which begins under the
credits is a hang-on-to-your-seats experience.
In 1936, American expedition leader Dr. Indiana
"Indy" Jones (Harrison Ford), sporting his signature
short, brown leather flight jacket, a brimmed felt
fedora, and a bullwhip firmly in his hand is in a
South American rainforest jungle making his way to
a cave entrance that conceals a temple. Deep inside
the cave is an altar where the coveted object of
Indy's mission is located - a tiny, gold jeweled
figurine or statuette artifact - a disembodied head.
At the start of a memorable sequence, Indy reaches
the altar where the idol looks both fierce and
beautiful. From inside his jacket, he removes a
small, canvas drawstring bag filled with sand,
bouncing it in his hand to estimate the approximate
weight of the idol and rubbing his chin. With
tremendous concentration, he twitches his fingers

(the guide Satipo twitches his fingers also) and then

deftly and smoothly replaces the idol with the sandfilled bag to avoid triggering another booby trap.
For a few moments, all seems well, until the
pedestal beneath the bag suddenly begins to sink
into the altar stone.
Indy has miscalculated the weight in the swap,
setting off a loud chain reaction of destruction after
pilfering the sacred object. The entire sanctuary
rumbles and shakes and rocks fall loose from the
collapsing walls, as Indy spins and runs through a
tiled floor area, setting off a noisy torrent of
poisonous darts and arrows.
As he hurriedly departs through the perilous cave,
he turns toward a loud rumbling noise and sees
behind him a huge, thundering boulder, tumbling,
roaring and rolling in his direction - perfectly sized
to fit the passageway.
Indy dashes just ahead of the destructive, crushing
boulder, leaping to safety outside the cave, as the
giant rock slams into the entrance of the cave,
sealing it perfectly, but then faces another frantic
chase to his water-plane to escape from natives.

# 99. When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

In the justly-famous restaurant-deli scene, two longtime acquaintances grapple with the difficulties of
relationships.
Commitment-shy Harry Burns (Billy Crystal)
describes how he can "just get up out of bed and
leave" after sex by any number of fake excuses: "I
say I have an early meeting, an early haircut, an
early squash game." Blonde, clean-living Sally
Albright (Meg Ryan) is affronted by his insensitivity
and sexist attitudes: "You know, I am so glad I
never got involved with you...You are a human
affront to all women. And I am a woman." Harry
confidently believes his sexual prowess satisfies his
female partners and brings them to orgasm, until
Sally explains how "most women, at one time or
another, have faked it."
Harry doesn't believe that he has been fooled
because he can tell the difference between a real and
a faked orgasm. Sally looks at Harry seductively,
and begins to illustrate, in the middle of the busy
restaurant, how easily women can convincingly fake
an orgasm. With a loud and long display of groans,
gasps, hair rufflings, caresses, table poundings, and
ecstatic releases, she yells: "Yes, Yes, YES! YES!
YES!" The entire restaurant quiets down and is
attentive to her realistic act. When she is finished
with her demonstration, she calmly picks up her fork
and resumes eating.
This is followed by the film's funniest line,
delivered by another customer (Estelle Reiner director Rob Reiner's mother) who tells the waitress,
"I'll have what she's having" - referring to the meal
ordered by Sally.
# 100. Schindler's List (1993)
Steven Spielberg's unanimously-praised historical
epic presents an uncompromising view of the
Holocaust. In the midst of a dark, frightening period
during World War II, when Jews in Nazi-occupied
Krakow were first dispossessed of their businesses
and homes, then placed in ghettos and forced labor
camps in Plaszow, and finally resettled in
concentration camps for execution, one man - Oskar
Schindler - an enterprising Nazi German
industrialist/opportunist, first exploited
Jewish/Polish workers in a successful enamelware
factory and eventually rescued more than one

thousand of them from certain death.

In one of the film's most stunning images, the keys
of his accountant/business manager Itzhak Stern's
(Ben Kingsley) typewriter are magnified as they
crisply rap out names to create a list of the
individuals who will be saved from extinction from
the Nazi war machine by being bought for
employment - they are Schindler's List: Dresner,
Wein, Rosner, Poldek Pfefferberg, Mila Pfefferberg,
Stagel, Scharf, "all the children," Lewartow, and
more.
Names and lists are two of the film's major visual
motifs. The list grows from four hundred, to six
hundred, to eight hundred, to almost 1,100
individuals. When the list nears completion, Stern
comments: "The list is an absolute good. The list is
life. All around its margins lies the gulf."
[Another remarkable sequence: the liquidation of
the ghetto and of the Jews in Krakow by
Untersturmfuhrer Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) and
his commandos, and the final modern day epiloguesegment of Schindler's Jewish survivors lined up on
a hillside.]