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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 21 |
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Greatest Movie Twists, Part 21 |
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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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Stardust Memories (1980)
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In writer/director Woody Allen's self-indulgent, often incoherent, impressionistic and dark semi-autobiographical comedy, it was revealed in the ending's twist/plot device that the entire movie was a 'film-within-a-film'; the film was being screened at a retrospective film festival/charity event at the Stardust Hotel beach resort in New Jersey for pretentious and self-absorbed comedic film-maker/director Sandy Bates (or Woody Allen's?); during the gathering of fans, groupies, scriptwriters, and autograph-seekers, Bates also struggled with his own career and personal demons, aspirations, daydreams, and expectations; in particular, he faced the loves of a tangled trio of women: intriguing but troubled violinist Daisy (Jessica Harper), Sandy's drug-abusing ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), and a married French mistress named Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) who had just left her husband for him -- all the characters were actually actors or actresses in his own film |
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Starship Troopers (1997)
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This film was a combination spoof of militarism, science-fiction saga set in the 23rd century, and violent, gung-ho action-adventure war film; it told about a group of fresh-faced college graduates who enlisted and trained in the futuristic Federal Service (military) based on Earth, but with technology were allowed to explore other regions of the universe, including Klendathu - the homeworld of giant, intelligent, lethal pseudo-arachnid enemy insect-inhabitants; the entire film was revealed to be the broadcast of a propaganda film (a movie within a movie) to recruit young men and women to sign up for military service; the film ended with a commercial to "JOIN Up Now!" - a recruitment ad by a futuristic totalitarian military government in a 'fascist utopia'; the ending also posed the question about who the aggressor was - it was strongly suggested that the humans were the would-be world-conquering invaders! |
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The Stepford Wives (1975)
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This satirical, cautionary feminist sci-fi thriller opened with new Stepford, Connecticut suburban wives Joanna Eberhart and Bobbie Markowe (Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss) noting suspiciously that their seemingly-perfect neighbor housewives only cleaned house and bowed to their husband's needs; the housewives all appeared to be perfect homemaker robots (who wore flowery dresses and cooked gourmet meals) in order to please their husbands; the first shock came when Joanna suspected that her friend Bobbie had been transformed into a 'perfect' housewife when Bobbie began to act robotically in the kitchen while serving coffee; to test her humanity, Joanna stabbed her in her lower abdominal/genital area ("Do you bleed?") - causing her android friend to go berserk due to severed wiring as she twirled and repeated monotonously: "I was just going to give you coffee? How could you do a thing like that? I thought we were friends!"; in another startling scene, Joanna came face to face with her semi-complete, sunken dark-eyed robotic double; the film ended with all of the flowery-dress-wearing, android wives pushing their shopping carts in the supermarket |
  
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The Sting (1973)
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In this old-fashioned comic caper film set in the mid-30s, Robert Redford (as Johnny Hooker) and Paul Newman (as Henry Gondorff) teamed up again (after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)) as con men intent on vengefully swindling big-time gangster boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) out of his fortune with an elaborate "sting"; after setting up a bogus gambling parlor in Chicago and boastfully showing off a slick horse-race betting system called "past-posting" (placing bets after the results were known but not to the betting parlor), Lonnegan was convinced to make one last bet on a horse; when he was about to lose his wager, the Feds arrived; con-artist Gondorff - believing that he had been betrayed by Hooker - shot him, causing FBI agent Polk (Dana Elcar) to shoot Gondorff; Lonnegan was hustled out of the betting parlor by corrupt Lieut. William Snyder (Charles Durning) to protect him from getting involved - leaving his suitcase of cash behind; in the brilliant twist ending, it was revealed that all was a complex scam executed by a team of con artists, pick-pockets, and grifters, with Hooker and Gondorff masquerading as rivals: the two killings were faked, and even the FBI agents were phony! |
 
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The Straight Story (1999)
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The very low-key reunion scene between 73 year-old Iowan widower Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) - after a long 6-week ride across Iowa and into neighboring Wisconsin on his lawn mower/tractor - and his sick brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) on the front porch, with only one exchange of dialogue: "(Did) you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?" with Alvin's short response: "I did, Lyle" before the camera panned up into a star-studded nighttime sky, in the conclusion of director David Lynch's atypical drama |   
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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
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This sordid, noirish melodrama told about three childhood friends who were brought together 18 years later for a climactic denouement; the film opened in 1928 with young heiress Martha Ivers (Janis Wilson) bludgeoning her domineering, mean-spirited, wealthy Aunt Iverson (Judith Anderson) to death (on a flight of stairs where she tumbled to her death) during a raging thunderstorm - for killing Martha's cat Bundles; the murder was witnessed (possibly?) by her street-smart boyfriend at the time Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman) who fled town and by young Walter O'Neil (Mickey Kuhn) - who lied about the killing to save Martha and as co-conspirators condemned an innocent man for the death of Martha's aunt; the love triangle clashed when they were brought together again years later; femme fatale Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) - who had lovelessly married district attorney alcoholic Walter (Kirk Douglas) in the steelworks town - was still attracted to her former beau Sam (Van Heflin) when he returned, although she feared his knowledge of the awful crime and would try blackmail; Martha decided, however, to seduce Sam and then have him heartlessly kill her weak-willed husband, but Sam refused ("I've never murdered"); the shock double-suicide ending included Martha's death when she pulled the trigger herself as her jealous and drunk husband Walter held a gun to her stomach during a deadly embrace - and then with her draped limply in his arms, Walter shot himself to death |
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In this lurid, melodramatic film adaptation of the 1957 Tennessee Williams play, pretty Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), now the institutionalized niece of rich widow Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn), was threatened with a 'brain-cutting' lobotomy; in the film's climactic monologue and surreal murder scene (with impressionistic flashbacks), the tormented woman described the horrifying incident (a chase ending with a cannibalistic homicidal attack by Mexican youths) from the past summer that had happened to her homosexual cousin Sebastian Venable (never speaking and unseen fully in the film, although wearing a full-white suit when attacked); she told how he had used her (and earlier Violet's) youthful beauty as a ploy or decoy (in her words: "I was procuring for him...he used us as bait...we procured for him") to lure and attract Italian beach boys closer to him for his own pleasure: "He-he was lying naked on the broken stones...and this you won't believe! Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it! It looked as if-as if they had devoured him!...As if they'd torn or cut parts of him away with their hands, or with knives, or those jagged tin cans they made music with. As if they'd torn bits of him away in strips!"; by the film's end, At the film's end, Catherine (referring to herself in the third person) told Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) that she has returned to a less painful present: "She's here, Doctor. Miss Catherine's here" |
 
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This classic, dark film noir about Tinseltown opened with a shocking twist beginning -- out-of-work screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) narrated (in voice-over) and told the film's story (in flashback) as his corpse floated in a swimming pool; he had been killed by former silent-screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) when she became jealous of his associations with young screenwriter Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) and when he threatened to leave her; the film ended with his corpse being retrieved from the pool, and news cameras were rolling in the estate as Norma Desmond regally descended her staircase and delusionally announced: "All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up" |
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Suspicion (1941)
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In this Hitchcock suspense thriller, prim and mousy wallflower Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) had always been suspicious of her charming, wolfish and handsome husband Johnny Aysgarth (Cary Grant), especially after the mysterious sudden death of Beaky Thwaite (Nigel Bruce) and the fact that Johnny had made inquiries about borrowing against her own life insurance policy; when he brought Lina a glass of milk up a dark staircase in the film's most famous scene, she thought it was laced with a lethal dose of poison; a wild ride along a coastal cliffside with Johnny driving made her fear that he was going to push her out of the vehicle; in the end (one of many alternative conclusions that were considered for the film by the studio), it was revealed that Johnny was not a homicidal killer, but that he had contemplated suicide by poisoning for himself because of his mounting debts |
 
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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 
