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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 13 |
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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 13 |
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Note: The films that are marked
with a yellow star |
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Greatest Movie Twists, Spoilers and
Surprise Endings |
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| Film Title | Brief Scene Description | Example |
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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
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The film ended with a climactic and miraculous shootout in which "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) lefthandedly shot dead the drunken, abusive, violent, horse whip-wielding villain Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin); and then the scene of rugged homesteader and gunslinger Tom Doniphon's (John Wayne) private confrontation with Ransom to inform him that he never shot Liberty - with an ensuing flashback ("Think back, Pilgrim") revealing how he hid and had shot Liberty to sacrificially protect the love of his life Hallie Stoddard (Vera Miles) from heartbreak, and also for the greater good of the territory poised for statehood |
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Manon of the Spring (1986, Fr/It.) (aka Manon des Sources)
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In part two of the Jean de Florette (1986, Fr.) tale, there were two noteworthy deaths and a surprise ending: (1) ugly, half-witted nephew Ugolin Galinette (Daniel Auteuil), a co-conspirator with his cruel, wealthy landowner uncle Cesar Soubeyran ('Le Paper') (Yves Montand), suicidally hanged himself because of his unrequited love for blonde shepherdess Manon Cadoret (Emmanuelle Beart), and (2) Cesar Soubeyran died in his sleep after learning that hunchbacked Jean de Florette Cadoret (Gerard Depardieu), the son of Florette - the man he had betrayed ten years earlier and driven to his death in the prior film by plugging up a well spring - was actually his son; the truth was brought out during a confession from elderly Delphine (Yvonne Gamy), a friend of Cesar's old flame Florette who had borne and raised the child in secret; Cesar also realized that the vengeful Manon, who despised him for killing her father, was actually his grand-daughter; unable to accept such revelations, the remorseful and guilt-ridden Cesar wrote Manon a long letter explaining his regretfulness over killing the son he thought he'd never had, and left her his entire estate; then he clasped a memento -- Florette's comb -- and a rosary in his hand and then died without his will to live |
 
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Marnie (1964)
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The finale of Hitchcock's 'sex-mystery' (about frigidity, marital rape, and murder) revealed that blonde phobic con artist and compulsive thief Margaret 'Marnie' Edgar's (Tippi Hedren) mother Bernice (Louise Latham) was a 20 year-old wartime prostitute when Marnie was a 5 year-old girl; Marnie remembered, in flashback, a repressed, traumatic childhood experience that occurred during a thunderstorm; one of her mother's sailor customers (Bruce Dern) had touched her, and her protective mother had intervened; when the sailor attacked her mother, young Marnie defensively delivered a blow to his head with a fire poker - and murdered him - crimson blood ran down the white T-shirt of the mortally-wounded seaman; Marnie's mother was the one who took the blame and stood trial for the murder; these events were revealed to be the source of all of Marnie's phobias, recurring nightmares and fear of the color red and white - she was desperate for love, but couldn't allow a man to get close to her; she had subconsciously attempted to 'repay' (with monetary gifts) her mother for standing up for her, although she had almost entirely erased the memory of the killing; her husband Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) had earlier explained: "When a child of any age feels unloved, it takes what it can get, however it can get it" -- the mentally-ill Marnie had secretly feared that she would never be loved or have children, so she compensated by stealing and cramming robbed goods into her purse (a symbol of her empty womb) |
 
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Matchstick Men (2003)
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Angela (24 year-old Alison Lohman) was not neurotic veteran con man Roy Waller's (Nicolas Cage) newfound, long-lost teenaged "daughter" conceived before he split 14 years earlier from his wife Heather (Melora Walters); after an elaborate scheme that bilked Roy out of his own money (stashed in a plastic doggie bank in his living room), he learned that blonde Angela was part of the scam -- she was hired by Roy's younger partner Frank Mercer (Sam Rockwell) along with others (such as psychiatrist Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman) and mark Chuck Frechette (Bruce McGill)) to trick him; in the surprising conclusion one year later, the ultimate 'con' of sorts, it was revealed that the betrayed Roy was working a legitimate job as a rug salesman and that he had turned his back on crime; he was virtually cured of his extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder; when he met an apologetic, dark-haired Angela in his store with her boyfriend, he forgave her - and then it was revealed when Roy went home that his slowly-developing love interest with long-haired brunette Kathy (Sheila Kelley) - the observant cashier at the supermarket (from whom he bought canned tuna and cigarettes) throughout the film, was fulfilled - she was his new and pregnant wife |
  
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The Matrix (1999)
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Computer programmer/hacker Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) was contacted by black leather-clad Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) and later by mysterious cyber-terrorist freedom fighter and 'fatherly' mentor Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and told about the "Matrix" - essentially it was a fabricated, illusory dream world created by an intelligent, mechanized and artificial life form that was using enslaved, but unaware humans as its power source for heat and electricity by growing them in pods and connecting them to the Matrix with cybernetic implants; according to the Matrix's premise, the world was really a virtual reality computer program that actually existed in the 22nd century; Neo was informed that only a small number of free humans (Morpheus, Trinity, Switch, etc.) really lived in the real world - in an underground refuge city called Zion; the Messianic figure Neo (the "One") must save and liberate humanity from indestructible government agents - powerful sentient software programs such as villainous lead Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), by hacking into the Matrix, 'unplugging' others and recruiting them for further resistance; Neo learned to have control over the Matrix and in doing so was able to dodge bullets, bend the laws of physics, and attain superhuman powers; by film's end, Neo was shot dead, but then resurrected (with a kiss from Trinity), and he realized that the Matrix was literally downward streaming lines of green code |
     
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Meet Joe Black (1998)
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Martin Brest's tedious, manipulative and overly-long romance film told about a handsome young lawyer (Brad Pitt) who was killed in a vehicular accident and then reappeared as an inarticulate, often silent Angel of Death - renamed Joe Black; veteran actor Anthony Hopkins played the role of dying, imperious mid-60-ish entrepreneur magnate William "Bill" Parrish, who was given a negotiated reprieve from death by Death (Pitt) in exchange for introducing him to new things and experiences in earthly life; Parrish's beloved, dark-eyed, vacuous, vulnerable and thin daughter Susan (Claire Forlani) fell in love with the passionless, metaphysical doppelgänger Joe Black in a doomed relationship. (Although engaged to be married, she had recently met the young lawyer in a coffeeshop before his startling death, after which his deceased body was inhabited by Death, and she couldn't understand why he acted differently.) The film ended with an underwhelming, tear-jerking, fireworks-filled conclusion in which Joe revealed his true identity to Susan and then Bill and Joe walked over a bridge into death and the afterlife on the horizon; Joe gave Susan a second chance at love by returning his body to its previous mortal owner and returning to her out of a bright light - arm in arm, they both then watched the fireworks celebrating her father's birthday. |
  
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Memento (2000)
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This thought-provoking thriller - told in reverse - was challenging in itself just to watch, and actually had a twisted twist ending; short term memory loss sufferer Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) was investigating a case - the brutal and cold-blooded rape and murder of his wife, through the use of tattoos, Polaroids, and cryptic notes to aid his short-term memory and provide clues; the secret of the entire film was that Leonard had acquired severe memory loss because of a traumatic event (the killing itself) that he didn't want to remember; he was actually trying to kill the 'wrong guy' - someone who wasn't really responsible for his wife's death -- Teddy Gammell (Joe Pantoliano); he had convinced himself that Teddy was the guilty one ("DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES" was written on Teddy's Polaroid) because Teddy actually knew the 'truth' about Leonard and the death, which was that (1) Leonard was actually an individual named Sammy Jenkis (tattooed in cursive writing on his left hand as "Remember Sammy Jenkis"), (2) Leonard's wife had survived the rape, (3) as revenge, Leonard killed the suspected rapist Teddy (shown at the beginning and end of the film), and (4) Leonard's wife had tested him with an insulin overdose -- and he let her die in a diabetic coma; Leonard even admitted to himself in the film: "I'm worried someone's trying to get me to kill the wrong guy" - and as Teddy was quoted as saying: "Maybe it's time you started investigating yourself" |
   
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Men in Black (1997)
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The sweet, heartfelt conclusion after Men in Black (MIB) agents J (Will Smith) and K (Tommy Lee Jones) saved the Earth from destruction by recovering a miniature galaxy from the belly of evil cockroach alien and extra-terrestrial terrorist Edgar (Vincent D'Onofrio); K revealed he was not training J as a partner, but as a replacement after he retired: (K: "They're beautiful, aren't they? Stars...I never look at them anymore, but they actually are quite...beautiful... I haven't been training a partner, I've been training a replacement"); K then instructed J how to use the amnesia-creating Neuralyzer to erase his memory: ("Days... Months... Years. Always face it forward"); before J could protest, K told him in a tortured voice: "I've just been down the gullet of an interstellar cockroach, kid, and that's one of a hundred memories that I don't want"; after Agent K (Kevin) was neuralized, he lived happily ever-after reunited with his wife and appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer (in a lead story about being in a 35-year coma), while medical examiner Dr. Laurel Weaver (Linda Fiorentino) became Agent J's replacement partner Agent L; the film famously ended with a bizarre non-sequitur pull-back sequence as the Earth inside the vast Milky Way was shown to be a marble (one of many, and dropped into a collection bag of many marble-galaxies) - a play toy of a tentacled green alien |      
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Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
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The plot of this Woody Allen comedy-romance film was based on the classic Greek myth of Pygmalion (the basis of George Bernard Shaw's play and My Fair Lady), and used a mask-wearing Greek chorus device (composed of F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, David Ogden Stiers and Jack Warden) with characters who performed songs and dances to comment on the film's events; by this film's happily-ever-after "smile" ending in a postscript a few years later, ditzy, foul-mouthed, high pitch-voiced porn actress-prostitute Linda Ash/Judy Cum (Mira Sorvino) had been revealed as the real mother of Manhattan sportwriter Lenny Weinrib (Woody Allen) and his wife Amanda's (Helena Bonham-Carter) adopted bright boy named Max - the product of a broken condom; conversely and ironically, Linda ended up with Lenny's child: ("Lenny and Linda did make love that night like he was Zeus and she was Aphrodite with an aphrodisiac...The point is Linda did that night conceive a child. She became pregnant with Lenny's child, but not wanting to complicate his life with Amanda, she never told him. lnstead she went off with her new husband who stood behind her loyally as she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl...they have each other's child. And they don't know"); they both met years later and ended up with each other's children - without each other's knowledge; Linda left her hooker business and exchanged it for a normal suburban life with marriage, kids and a hairdresser job |
   
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(alphabetical by film title)
Intro
| 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
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
Greatest
Movie Twists, Spoilers, and Surprise Endings: Avid filmgoers often
speak about seeking rare movie surprises in the movie-going experience,
such as discovering films that have cunning plot twists, a shocking
surprise ending, a surprise revelation about a particular character,
or some other unknown or unsuspected narrative element. Compiled here
in this comprehensive collection is a detailed set of films with the
greatest movie twists, spoilers, and surprise endings.
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 
