Best and Most Memorable
Film Kisses of All Time
in Cinematic History
Part 7
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Best and Most Memorable Part 7 |
Most of these scenes come from vintage, classic Hollywood films, rather than more recent films, and even stretch back to the scandalous The Kiss (1896)! Other discussions of notable romantic or sexual scenes (with more examples of great kissing scenes) may be found elsewhere in this site: Romance Films Genre, or Erotic/Sexual Films Genre, or the History of Sex in Cinema.  are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 100 Greatest Films |
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(in chronological order by film title) Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 |
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Cynthia (1947)
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This was the coming-of-age film of 15 year-old screen star Elizabeth Taylor, in the title role of small-town, physically-frail, musically-talented teenager Cynthia Bishop. She received her first (grown-up) on-screen kiss from beau Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon) - a quite restrained and modest one on her front porch, following their attendance at the Spring Prom. It was Cynthia's first romance and first high-school dance, to the chagrin of her over-protective parents (Mary Astor and George Murphy). [Elizabeth Taylor and James Lydon were reteamed as a romantic couple in the same year's Warner Bros. production of Life with Father (1947).] | 
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When leaving the wagon train, Tom Dunson (John Wayne) decided to abandon his young, pretty sweetheart Fen (Coleen Gray) with plans to send for her later. Before they parted, Fen begged Tom to let her come along so she wouldn't be deserted: "I know you have work to do, Tom, but I want to be part of it. I love you. I want to be with you." But Tom stubbornly refused her pleas, thinking that the arduous drive would be "too much for a woman." When she kissed him, she asked him if she really appeared weak, and then pleaded with him to balance his human actions by listening with his heart as well as his head: ("Oh, you'll need me. You'll need a woman. You need what a woman can give you to do what you have to do. Oh listen to me, Tom."), but his mind was made up; shortly afterwards, she died in an Indian attack on her wagon train | 
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After three fantasy scenarios (to the music of Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky) in which self-assured but jealous orchestra conductor/husband Sir Alfred De Carter (Rex Harrison) proposed to murder his American wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) while he conducted a symphony, he at last realized how deliriously silly he'd been - he embraced and kissed his loving wife, who had never been unfaithful, and had no idea that he had been plotting against her, while he spoke: "A thousand poets dreamed a thousand years. Then you were born, my love" |
  
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In their drab, cheap hotel room, a domestic squabble brewed between sharpshooting bank robbery couple Annie Laurie (Peggy Cummins) and Bart (John Dall) - she emerged from the bathroom behind him, wearing a white, terry-clothed robe (and naked underneath) - she was complaining and dis-satisfied with her unexciting life. As he cleaned his gun barrel by thrusting (phallically) a brush within it, she pulled on her nylons and rejected his proposal of a forty-dollars a week job at Remington. When he suggested pawning his guns to "make another start," she countered with an appeal to his flagging masculinity, telling him that she wanted "a guy with spirit and guts" - if he couldn't deliver, she suggested: "You'd better kiss me goodbye." Agonizing over what to do (his dangling hand opening and closing at his side), he finally succumbed to her wily, fearless, and ruthless ultimatum - goaded to illicitly pursue happiness and acquire "things". The blackmail scene ended with his sexual acquiescence and gratification, his decision to remain, and a close-up of his mouth inching towards hers for a passionate kiss, and it dissolved into the gunshot blast of a gumball bowl - an orgasmic, erotic/violent beginning of their crime rampage as gun-toting 'wild animals' | 
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While ensnared by deluded, tragic, ambitious actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), B-movie hack screenwriter/narrator Joe Gillis (William Holden) began to have feelings for 22 year-old clean-cut, Paramount script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), when they began to work on their own script together; he told her that she was tempting and a "smart girl. Nothing like being twenty-two. And may I suggest that if we're ever to finish this story, you stay at least two feet away from me. Now the first time you see me coming any closer, I want you to take off a shoe and clunk me on the head with it"; their budding relationship was threatening to Norma, and to Betty's fiancee Artie Green (Jack Webb) -- especially when Betty confessed that she was no longer in love with her fiancee -- Betty: "Of course I love him. I always will. I'm not in love with him any more, that's all." Joe: "What happened?" Betty: "You did" (He spontaneously took her in his arms and they kissed, obviously in love); earlier in the film, he had playfully but affectionately kissed her on the nose - after she told him that she had a nose job |  
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In one of the most romantic performances ever filmed, in an extended scene of budding romance, this film captured the sensuous and electrifying romantic interplay between rich socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) and poor factory worker George Eastman (Montgomery Clift); in a sensual series of images as they danced together and talked intimately with each other, George finally confessed his love to Angela - hers was the promise of the love of an ideal woman which had now been discovered: "I love you. I've loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I even loved you before I saw you"; breathlessly, Angela was worried that they were being watched, so they retreated to an outer balcony terrace for more privacy, where she began to confess her love for him in kind: "I love you too. It scares me. But it is a wonderful feeling"; they made plans to be together for the entire summer when he wasn't working on weekends, as she told him: "I'll be at the lake. You'll come up and see me. Oh, it's so beautiful there. You must come. I know my parents will be a problem, but you can come on the weekends when the kids from school are up there. You don't have to work weekends. That's the best time. If you don't come, I'll drive down here to see you. I'll pick you up outside the factory. You'll be my pick-up. Oh, we'll arrange it somehow, whatever way we can, and we'll have such wonderful times together, just the two of us"; George was overwhelmed during these powerfully-erotic moments; enormous, extreme closeups of their faces filled the screen as they revealed innermost, heightened emotions and inflamed passions, and they pledged themselves to each other. George confessed: "I'll be the happiest person in the world" - but Angela corrected: "The second happiest"; George revealed: "Oh Angela, if only I can tell you how much I love you. I can only tell you all" - and she comforted him: "Tell Mama. Tell Mama all" as they closely embraced and kissed passionately, caught up in an all-consuming relationship over which they had no control In the final scene, Angela, wearing black (with a white collar), loyally and faithfully visited him in prison just before George's scheduled execution in the electric chair for his part in his pregnant girlfriend's death - she still clung to her deep love for him. Angela promised: "I'll go on loving you for as long as I live." George replied: "Love me for the time I have left. Then, forget me" before they kiss one last time |
    
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As a lonely woman pathologically desperate and yearning for sexual attention, Blanche (Vivien Leigh) was attracted to a young newspaper delivery boy (Wright King) who came to her door one rainy afternoon. He reminded her of her young husband who committed suicide, and still neurotically grieving, she wanted to subconsciously make up for his death. She caused the bashful young man to linger with small talk, and she seductively offered herself for a maternal kiss. "Young man. Young, young, young. Did anyone ever tell you you look like a young prince out of the Arabian Nights? You do, honey lamb. Come here. Come on over here, like I told you. I want to kiss you just once, softly and sweetly [on your mouth]*." *(originally deleted) But she caught herself after seductively pressing one kiss into his lips, knowing she had a weakness for young males: "Run away now quickly. It would have been nice to keep you, but I've got to be good - and keep my hands off children. Adios. Adios" |
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During a wild and breezy windstorm in his boyhood Irish home, ex-boxer Sean Thornton (John Wayne) arrived at his newly-purchased thatched cottage where a fire burned; red-haired Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara), the shepherd girl from the green del, was flushed out from hiding in the bedroom and rushed for the front door, but he reached for her right arm, pulled her back, twirled her like a ballet dancer into the cottage, twisted her arm behind her back as she resisted, and then bent the stranger over backwards with an embrace and passionate kiss - their first; the storm continued to blow through the cottage, sending Mary Kate's hair whipping around behind her - the wind was an external manifestation of her passion; when she realized what had happened, she stood back, reflected about his bold advances, and then cocked her fist back for an explosive, powerful swing at his face - he flinched, bent backward, and blocked the stiff-armed blow with his hand as she missed; at the end of the poetic, romantic scene, Mary Kate gazed at him for a few seconds, opened the door to leave (unleashing the wind again), turned toward him, boldly and daringly planted a kiss on his lips, and fled into the wild night A second sexier kissing scene occurred during their further courtship in an ancient church graveyard. The sky was filled with threatening dark thunderclouds as their romantic freedom in Innisfree broke more of the customary traditions - he still believed he was dreaming about her ("If anybody had told me six months ago that today I'd be in a graveyard in Innisfree with a girl like you..."); she explained how long they would have to wait for kisses: "...the kisses are a long way off yet" - after courtin', there's the walkin'-out, the threshin' parties, etc., but Sean refused to wait any longer and she quickly agreed: "I feel the same way about it myself"; as they started to embrace each other, foregoing a traditional, long-term courtship, a violent, fierce wind thrust a giant green branch in front of them - lightning strikes and loud thunderclaps were heard as nature unleashed its passionate forces in reaction to their brazen defiance of custom, religion, and superstition; in the place of death, they were chastened for blissfully deciding to kiss each other; Sean's shirt became soaked to the skin as they embraced and clung to each other, as she held her hosiery in her left hand against his drenched chest; her upturned face met his lips for a kiss, and then she rested her right cheek against him. Both looked off toward the awesome storm - and their future together, as the soundtrack played the plaintiff Irish ballad: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"; she initiated a second, more subdued kiss, and then they stared off with solemn expressions in different directions - the scene faded to black |
     
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In the film's finale, as the camera pulled back, Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) and Don (Gene Kelly) were pictured facing each other on a billboard that announced them as the new stellar love team of Monumental Pictures in their first picture together, Singin' in the Rain; they consummated the success of the show (and their budding personal relationship) by kissing in front of the billboard that was positioned on a hillside | 
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This film has always been most
famous for its clothed, entwined beach embrace and forbidden kissing between
Army Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) and adulterous Army Captain's wife
Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr) in the churning Hawaiian waves that covered
them, on a summer night on a deserted sandy beach; after their clinch,
she rose, pranced up the sand, and collapsed onto their blanket; Warden
followed and stood above her, dropped to his knees, and found her lips
in his, and then Karen breathlessly spoke: "I never knew it could
be like this. Nobody ever kissed me the way you do"; but their idyllic, iconic love
scene immediately turned ugly and combative when he queried: "Nobody?" "No, nobody,"
she replied. "Not even one? Out of all the men you've been kissed
by?" he asked. She responded with a question: "Now that would take some figuring. How many men do you think there have been?" He asked again: "I wouldn't know. Can't you give me a rough estimate?" Irritated and insulted by his implication that she was highly promiscuous,
she sarcastically replied: "Not without an adding machine. Do you have your adding
machine with you?"; the scene quickly became one of alienation and conflict, as his probing denegrated her character - his knowledge of her loose promiscuity and numerable other previous affairs at other outposts nagged at him and produced feelings of ambivalence about her sexuality |
 
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Mogambo (1953)
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Aging Clark Gable, as African animal trapper and safari leader Victor Marswell became involved in affairs with his two beautiful leading co-stars in this John Ford remake romance/adventure film (twenty-one years after Red Dust (1932)) - the first relationship began with an evening porch kiss with stranded, provocative wisecracking good-time-girl Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly (Ava Gardner), and a second adulterous affair involved him with Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly) - a cool and prim but lustful wife of a British anthropologist, during a gorilla jungle expedition |
 
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Introduction: What makes
a memorable screen kiss? Is it the passion, the circumstances, the buildup,
the dialogue, the unpredictability, the awkwardness, the sexiness or
eroticism, the cinematography, the unique quality...? Although any list
of the best, most romantic, and most indelible kisses through film history
is difficult to create, there are a number of kissing scenes in movies
that are unforgettable and deserve special mention. 