Greatest Film Moments and Scenes

GREAT MOMENTS and SCENES FROM THE GREATEST FILMS

An extensive collection of the most famous, distinguished, unforgettable or memorable images, scenes, sequences or performances, many from the greatest films of all time

Part 15

F (continued)
Footlight Parade (1933)	The famous Busby Berkeley numbers, including Sittin' on a Backyard Fence featuring chorines dressed in cat-suits, and the three fantastic extravaganza finales back-to-back at the conclusion: the film's Honeymoon Hotel sequence featured married (?) couples (all named Smith) preparing for the evening, along with hapless honeymooners Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler who had to put up with a lecherous baby (midget Billy Barty) who almost shared their wedding night - a segment that was heavily edited by censors; the 15-minute naughty pre-Code By a Waterfall featuring an elaborate aquacade of 100 bathing-suited girls/chorines (clothed to appear naked) performing amazingly intricate dances and artistic patterns in the water while shot kaleidoscopically from overhead - and then forming a revolving 70 foot high human wedding cake/fountain formation at the climax; and then the exotic Shanghai Lil (providing commentary on Paramount's Shanghai Lily character (Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932) from the year before) in a backstreet opium den and brothel on the waterfront of Shanghai (with Ruby Keeler in Oriental makeup and James Cagney as a tap-dancing sailor looking for his lost love), before the closing shots of an imperialistic US Navy drill team, the Stars and Stripes flag, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the NRA's Blue Eagle, in director Lloyd Bacon's and Warner Bros' musical
Forbidden Planet (1956)	The first appearance of friendly servant Robby the Robot (voice by Marvin Miller) (who influenced future sci-fi works such as Star Trek and Star Wars); and the scene of the night attack of the ID monster on the flying saucer spaceship - Dr. Morbius' (Walter Pidgeon as Prospero) face-to-face encounter with his own projected sub-conscious, incestuous feelings for his lovely 18 year-old daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) (who innocently asks: "What's a bathing suit?"), in the first science-fiction film in color and CinemaScope - an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, in director Fred Wilcox' classic science-fiction space adventure
Force of Evil (1948)	Young, successful, and on-the-make Wall Street lawyer Joe Morse's (John Garfield) opening voice-over (during a high-angle camera view of towering skyscrapers surrounding St. Andrew's Church near Wall Street): "This is Wall Street and today was important because tomorrow, July Fourth, I intended to make my first million dollars, an exciting day in any man's life. Temporarily, the enterprise was slightly illegal. You see I was the lawyer for the numbers racket," the long takes of Joe's discussion in the back seat of a taxi with secretary-bookkeeper Doris Lowry (Beatrice Pearson), Joe's walk in a deserted Wall Street and his realization that he was indebted to the syndicated mob for life, and his descent of a great stone staircase ("I just kept going down and down there. It was like going down to the bottom of the world to find my brother") from Riverside Drive to find his estranged, older dead brother Leo's (Thomas Gomez) bullet-ridden body that has been dumped on the rocks by the Hudson River lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge, in Abraham Polonsky's film noir crime drama
Foreign Correspondent (1940)	The assassination scene when a statesman is shot in the face as he mounts the stairs in the rain by a photographer with a gun - and the image of a sea of bobbing black umbrellas revealing the escape route of the assassin; the windmill set (including the sounds of the wind in the sails and the wooden gears) and the mystery of the blades turning the wrong direction, the tense scene atop Westminster Cathedral's bell tower as Rowley (Edmund Gwenn) cajoles Johnny Jones/Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) as he readies to push him off; the spectacularly convincing trans-atlantic plane crash disaster from the cockpit's point of view and the sequence of survivors clinging to the plane's crowded wing and the villain Stephen Fisher's (Herbert Marshall) attempts to heroically rescue others in the turbulent waters, and the final, provocative radio appeal to America to end its neutrality ("It's as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America"), in Alfred Hitchcock's political thriller
Forrest Gump (1994)	Big-hearted dullard Forrest Gump's (Oscar-winning Tom Hanks) flashbacks while sitting on a bench - with the uplifting moments including when young, innocent and crippled Forrest Gump (Michael Conner Humphreys) quickly runs away (with young Jenny yelling: "Run, Forrest, Run"!) -- twice -- from mean schoolmates when his leg braces fall off - and when he streaks ahead into a football game as a running star; his simple-minded statement to a listener at a bus stop bench: ("My mama always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get"); Forrest's transforming progression through the decades (as a war hero, shrimp tycoon, and father); Bubba Blue's short speech about all the ways that shrimp ("the fruit of the sea") can be prepared; the computerized special-effects and imaging that put intellectually-challenged Forrest Gump into comedic situations with historical events (i.e., Gov. Wallace's stand-off in Little Rock, and his assassination attempt) and with Presidents and other celebrities (JFK - with his plea: "I gotta pee", LBJ, Nixon, Elvis Presley, John Lennon); his reunion scene with true love Jenny Curran (Robin Wright) in Washington DC's reflecting pool; Forrest's ping-pong prowess; also the scene of his first meeting young Forrest, Jr. (Haley Joel Osment) and being told that he was the father of Jenny's very normal child: ("You're his daddy, Forrest") and her reassurances: ("You didn't do anything wrong") followed by his reply: ("He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen") - and the scene of them happily watching Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie on TV together; and Forrest's moving eulogy-meditation for his newly-wed bride Jenny at her gravesite under a tree after she died of the AIDS virus: ("Mama always said dyin' was a part of life" and "... I miss you, Jenny. If there's anything you need, I won't be far away"); and the floating feather uplifted into the sky at the conclusion, in Robert Zemeckis' Best Picture-winning tearjerker comedy
Forty Guns (1957)	The character of ruthless, whip-wielding Arizona rancher Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) with black skin-tight outfits, and usually accompanied by an armed posse of '40 guns' riding after her or joining her at an elongated dinner table; the film's love theme: "High Ridin' Woman With a Whip"; the film's innuendo-laden sexual dialogue such as: "She’s quite a girl. I’d like to stay around long enough to clean her rifle"; the scene of tough ex-marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) stroking his gun in front of Jessica and his smirking warning when she asks to touch it: "Be careful - that thing may go off in your face" - and her reply: "I'll take a chance"; the tornado scene with Jessica dragged behind her horse; also the scenes of Bonnell's brother Wes (Gene Barry) in a passionate relationship with the gunsmith's busty blond daughter Louvenia Spanger (Eve Brent) whom he romantically stares at down the bore of his rifle's gunsight; and the finale in which Jessica is held captive hostage by her crazy brother Brock (John Ericson) and is fired upon by Bonnell and wounded - and his cold comment: "Get a doctor. She’ll live", in maverick director Sam Fuller's unusually weird b/w widescreen B-western with Freudian overtones
42nd Street (1933)	The first of Busby Berkeley's films with chorus girls as kaleidoscopic patterns in the movie musical that invented all the cliches, most notable for the show's director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) coaxing understudy chorus girl Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) onto the stage from the wings on the opening night to replace the show's star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) -- with the famous words: "And Sawyer, you're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star"; also the film's three production numbers in the finale: "Shuffle Off to Broadway" in which the observation deck on the caboose of the newlyweds' train opens up into the interior of the train, "I'm Young and Healthy" with circles and lines of endlessly-reproduced chorus girls, and the "42nd Street" production number in which Peggy and Billy Lawler (Dick Powell) peek over the top of the skyscraper and Peggy's performance of a clumsy and heavy-footed tap-dance, and all the other crisp dialogue and performances, in Lloyd Bacon's classic backstage musical
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)	The famous scene in a sleeping bag under the stars between American mercenary Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) fighting on the side of the Republicans in Spain and blue-eyed, short-haired Maria (Ingrid Bergman) with their subsequent kissing scene ("I'd like - I don't know how to kiss, or I would kiss you. Where do the noses go?"), and the conclusion with ill-fated hero Jordan's final soliloquy to Maria when he chooses to be left behind to meet his certain death ("You go now, Maria...what I do now I do alone. I couldn't do it if you were here...There's no good-bye, Maria, because we're not apart") - with smoky machine-gun fire and a bell tolling his fate in the dissolve ending, in director Sam Wood's romantic war drama
The Fountain (2006)	The early scene of the couple: Izzy Creo (Rachel Weisz, the director's real-life wife) and husband Tom (Hugh Jackman) viewing the stars on a snowy rooftop ("it's actually a nebula wrapped around a dying star. That's what makes it look gold...The Mayans called it Xibalba...it was their underworld...a place that dead souls go to be reborn"); also the hospital scene in which cancer-suffering and dying patient Izzy told her cancer-drug developer/researcher husband (who somewhat ignored her in search for a cure) that she wanted him to finish the last and ninth chapter of her writings titled "The Fountain" about the search for eternal life in New Spain by conquistadors, including Tomas as a Spanish explorer (also Hugh Jackman) sent by his 16th century Queen Isabel (also Rachel Weisz) - and that she had accepted her impending death: "Death was (the)...road to awe" and "I'm not afraid anymore, Tommy"; and the masterful way in which all of the parallel stories came together - the deliverance of Spain from bondage, acceptance of the thought: "Together we will live forever", and the space journey of balding 26th century immortal cosmonaut (also Jackman) with the Tree of Life, in a bubble enroute in the lotus position to the nebula they saw in the sky (the Mayans believed the dying star was actually the origin of life) after finding the gateway to life, in Darren Aronofsky's profoundly meditative and metaphysical, 3-pronged (past, present, and future) sci-fi drama about immortality
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)	Argentinian Julio's (Rudolph Valentino) sexy (but forbidden) tango dance scene in a smoke-filled Argentinian cantina, in director Rex Ingram's war drama
The Four Feathers (1939)	The magnificent panoramic battle scenes - especially the attack of the Fuzzy Wuzzies against the British lines, in director Zoltan Korda's classic adventure epic
The 400 Blows (1959) (aka Les Quatre Cents Coups)	The definitive and original, but ambiguous freeze-frame ending - the conclusion of a lengthy sequence in which young boy Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) escapes from a reformatory and runs along the streets and onto an empty beach at Normandy, stops, turns, and looks tellingly at the camera - and then is unexpectedly frozen in time - trapped or caught between the land and sea and between his past and future (as "Fin" appears on-screen), in critic-turned-director Francois Truffaut's innovative New Wave film (his feature film debut)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)	The opening scene, with many F-words, of bachelor Charles (Hugh Grant) and Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman) waking up and realizing that they are late to a wedding, also the scene of Charles seated at a wedding table with many of his ex-girlfriends - squirming and cringing while listening to their recollections; the scene of an inept, fumbling, malaprop-spouting vicar (Rowan Atkinson) reciting the vows for the "awful-wedded" marital couple in the second of the film's four weddings; the scene of Charles discussing his deficient sexual history with charming American girl Carrie (Andie MacDowell) who hilariously recounts her experiences with 33 sexual partners ("...So there you go, less than Madonna, more than Princess Di - I hope"); the stuttering 'romantic' declaration of love of timid, upper-class Charles for Carrie after she has bought a wedding dress: ("Uhm, look. Sorry, sorry. Uh, I just, uhm, well, this is a really stupid question and, uhm, particularly in view of our recent shopping excursion, but, uh, I just wondered, if by any chance, uhm, ah, I mean obviously not because I guess I've only slept with nine people, but-but I-I just wondered...uhh. I really feel, umm...in short, to recap in a slightly clearer version, uh, in the words of David Cassidy in fact, uhm, while he was still with the Partridge Family, uh, 'I think I love you,' and uh, I-I, uh, just wondered by any chance, you wouldn't like to... Umm...Uh...Uh...No, no, no of course not...Uhm, I'm an idiot, ha, he's not... Excellent, excellent, fantastic...lovely to see you, sorry to disturb...Better get on...Well, I thought it over a lot, you know, I wanted to get it just right"); and the film's highlight - Matthew's (John Hannah) poignant reading of W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues at the moving funeral of "splendid bugger" Gareth (Simon Callow): "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum, Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come...", and the final scene of Charles, after an aborted 'fourth' wedding ceremony, finally declaring his real love for Carrie in the rain (Carrie: "Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed") and awkwardly asking for her hand in marriage - with Carrie's response: "I do", accompanied by a kiss and a lightning bolt in the sky, in Mike Newell's surprise hit
Frankenstein (1931)	The opening memorable grave-robbing sequence with hunchback servant Fritz (Dwight Frye) helping to dig up bodies, the remarkable creation sequence in which the monster's body (Boris Karloff) is raised to the top of the tower where lightning electrifies it, Dr. Frankenstein's (Colin Clive) hysterical reaction: "It's alive..." when the monster comes to life ("Now I know what it feels like to be God"), the first chilling appearance of the monster when he backs in a doorway, the moving sequence in which the monster reaches for the sunlight, the scene in which the monster plays with a little eight year-old girl Maria by a lakeside, throwing flower petals in the water - but innocently murders her by tossing her in the water when the petals run out; Frankenstein's approach toward bride Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) through the window, and the townspeople's pursuit of the monster in the dark with torches, and the film's finale - the life and death struggle in the windmill between the monster and its creator, in James Whale's horror classic
Freaks (1932)	The many oddities and grotesque deformities of the freak circus side show members (the Siamese twins, a human skeleton, a bird woman, the larva man or living torso, the androgyne, the trunk man, the women without arms, the bearded woman, and the pinheads), the wedding feast scene that welcomes trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) with the passing of a loving-cup and the singing of the song to welcome her: "We accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us, Gobble-Gobble, Gobble-Gobble," followed by Cleopatra's rejection of them: "You dirty slimy FREAKS...You filth, make me one of you, will you?"; and the final stormy night sequence of the freaks making good on their threats as they crawl through the mud (some with knives in their mouths) to murder or emasculate (the film's dialogue and action are unclear on this point due to studio editing) muscleman Hercules (Henry Victor) and then pursue gold-digging Cleopatra to exact a horrible revenge on account of her treatment of midget circus owner Hans (Harry Earles) - turning her into a mutant, feathered hen (her introduction by the barker: "She was once a beautiful woman...She was known as the peacock of the air...How she got that way will never be known. Some say a jealous lover, others that it was the code of the freaks, others the storm. Believe it or not, there she is"), in Tod Browning's severely-censored horror classic
French Cancan (1955, Fr./It.) (aka Only the French Can)	The visually-stunning, colorful, high-kicking scene of choristers in the Parisian Moulin Rouge dance-hall/nightclub in the final dance scene, in director Jean Renoir's comedy/drama
The French Connection (1971)	The exciting opening scene in Brooklyn with two NYPD cops pursuing their mark: racist 'Popeye' Doyle (Gene Hackman) dressed as a Santa Claus and Russo (Roy Scheider) as a hot dog vendor; the scene of Doyle's hassling and shake-down of the lined-up clients in a sleazy black bar, French drug kingpin Charnier's (Fernando Rey) elusive escape waving from a subway car at his pursuer; also the shocking for-its-time statement made by Doyle to his injured partner: (Doyle: "You dumb guinea" Russo: "How the hell did I know he had a knife?" Doyle: "Never trust a nigger"); and the film's centerpiece -- the dazzlingly-edited scene of the frantic car pursuit of French smuggler Nicoli (Marcel Bozzufi) in a hijacked, elevated subway train as he barely misses pedestrians and other vehicles, and Doyle's killing of the hijacker at the top of the train depot's stairs, and the final unsuccessful pursuit of Charnier in an underground warehouse on Wards Island when Doyle mistakenly shoots a federal narcotics agent, in William Friedkin's Best Picture-winning crime/action film
Frenzy (1972)	The long and intense necktie strangulation scene of Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), and later the brilliantly-executed, incredible staircase shot in which the camera slowly retreats from a closed doorway behind which a 'necktie' rape/strangulation murder is taking place - and then proceeds down the stairs and out into the brightly-lit street where pedestrians are unaware of the horrors inside; and the tense scene of the killer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) frantically searching through a stack of burlap potato sacks in the back of a moving, jostling amd swerving truck to find his missing, incriminating initialed/monogrammed stickpin (clenched in a death grip by the nude corpse in a state of rigor mortis) torn from his lapel while his victim struggled - and his breaking of the corpse's clutching fingers to retrieve it; also the scene of the Chief Inspector's wife Mrs. Oxford (Vivien Merchant) snapping breadsticks as her husband (Alec McCowen) explains the breaking of the corpse's fingers while they eat an inedible 'gourmet' meal, and the final clever apprehension of the necktie murderer and the investigator's clincher line of dialogue: "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie", in Alfred Hitchcock's first R-rated film
From Here to Eternity (1953)	The famous, erotic lovemaking scene - a wet kiss and embrace in the Hawaiian beach surf as it breaks over them during a secretive, torrid affair between Sgt. Warden (Lancaster) and the Captain's promiscuous wife Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr) - and Karen's breathless reaction ("I never knew it could be like this"); the scene of lone Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) playing "taps" for his dead friend Maggio (Oscar-winning Frank Sinatra) who was killed by the sadistic Sgt. 'Fatso' (Ernest Borgnine); the scene in which Prewitt says: "Nobody ever lies about being lonely," and the macho moment when Warden grabs a giant machine gun and shoots at Japanese planes flying over the barracks during the Pearl Harbor attack; and the final scene of Karen and Prewitt's hostess/hooker-girlfriend Alma (Lorene) (Oscar-winning Donna Reed) sailing away from Honolulu and the throwing of two leis onto the water, in Fred Zinnemann's Best Picture-winning adaptation of James Jones' novel
From Russia With Love (1963)	The requisite Bond elements, including the opening credits sequence, pretty Bond girl Daniela Bianchi (Miss Universe 1960) as Soviet defector/double agent Tatiana Romanova, and Lotte Lenya as ex-KGB agent/assassin Rosa Klebb with a poisonous switchbladed shoe; the amazingly-edited and choreographed fight scene in the film's climax in a tiny sleeper compartment aboard the Orient Express train between Agent 007 James Bond (Sean Connery) and ruthlessly-evil SPECTRE assassin Donald "Red" Grant (Robert Shaw), and the death-defying chase between Bond and a helicopter, in Terence Young's second Bond film
The Front (1976)	The silent opening credits with stark white-on-black titles, the opening newsreel montage depicting the 1950's to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "Young at Heart", intercut with HUAC and McCarthy-era footage; the despairing character of unemployed and blacklisted TV comedy actor Hecky Brown (played by Zero Mostel) who eventually commits suicide by jumping from a hotel room window, and the ending in which Howard Prince (Woody Allen) tells the HUAC committee: "Fellas... I don't recognize the right of this committee to ask that kind of question. And furthermore, you can all go f--k yourselves"; and the closing credits (also shown to the sounds of "Young at Heart") in which the most of the actors are accompanied by their real-life dates of blacklisting, in director Martin Ritt's comedy
The Fugitive (1993)	The spectacular collision between the prison bus and a train in the opening train wreck scene, federal Deputy Samuel Gerard's (Tommy Lee Jones) reaction: "My, my, my, my, my. What a mess," Gerard's pursuit instructions to his men to catch a fugitive: ("...What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at 15 miles. Your fugitive's name is Dr. Richard Kimble - Go get him!"), and the chase sequences in drainage tunnels and the unforgettable dive of wrongly-accused murder suspect/fugitive Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) from a dam and down into a cascading waterfall as he shouts back to the uncaring deputy - "I didn't kill my wife!", and the exciting finale in which Kimble battles the real villain Charles Nichols (Jeroen Krabbe) while eluding his police pursuit - in this film production of the popular TV series about Kimble's quest for a mysterious one-armed man who killed his wife, in director Andrew Davis' suspenseful action-thriller
Full Metal Jacket (1987)	The striking opening credits sequence of Marine recruits having their heads shaved on Parris Island, and the training scene of their first meeting with their foul-mouthed drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (real-life DI R. Lee Ermey) spewing one-liners, and his demanding "Private Joker" (Matthew Modine) show him his "war face" and that the recruits go to bed with their rifles, and his recitation to them of a US Marine Corps love poem; Hartman's speech about the great Marine marksmen of the past (including mass murderer Charles Whitman and JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald) - "Those individuals showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do", the scenes on the obstacle course, and the gory scene of insanely-disturbed Private 'Gomer Pyle' (Vincent D'Onofrio) going crazy in the barracks' latrine after being abused by Hartman and his fellow Marine roommates and ending his own painful life by blowing his brains out; the film's next second-half transition to a Saigon hooker looking for GI clients to the contrasting feminist tune of "These Boots Were Made For Walkin'," the 'Joker's' voice-over narration throughout the film and his helmet labeled "Born to Kill", and the final scene of the surviving troop members singing "The Mickey Mouse Club Song" as they pass by burning buildings, in Stanley Kubrick's searing war film
The Full Monty (1997, UK)	The car suicide scene, and the famous short dole queue scene - a Chippendales-style, feel-good moment in which unemployed working-class men hear Donna Summer's Hot Stuff on the radio and rhythmically start moving - ultimately devising a get-rich-quick scheme; and the actual amusing stripping scene of the stripper group - dubbed "Hard Steel" - to the delight of female fans, in director Peter Cattaneo's international buddy comedy