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 4

B (continued)

Beautiful Girls (1996)

The memorable scene of Paul Kirkwood's (Michael Rapaport) monologue about "supermodels" and "beautiful girls" ("Supermodels are beautiful girls, Will. A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinkin' Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high - full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow...."); also the scene of the bar-room singing of "Sweet Caroline"; and the scene of down-to-earth Gina Barrisano's (Rosie O'Donnell) smart-mouthed put-down monologue about the centerfold beauty myth and unrealistic expectations that guys have about supermodels to Tommy Rowland (Matt Dillon) and high-school grad Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton) - ("Oh, guys, look what we have here. Look at this, your favorite, oh you like that?...Yeah, that's nice, right? Well, it doesn't exist, OK? Look at the hair, the hair is long, it's flowing. It's like a river. Well, it's a f--king weave, OK? And the tits? Please! I could hang my overcoat on them. Tits, by design, are intended to be suckled by babies. Yeah, they're purely functional. These are silicon city. And look, my favorite, the shaved pubis. Pubic hair being so unruly and all. Very vain. This is a mockery, this is sham, this is bulls--t..."); and the advice-giving scenes between Willie and precocious, well-versed 13 year-old neighbor girl Marty (Natalie Portman) - from a window (Marty: "Romeo and Juliet, the dyslexic version") and Marty's recognition of their age difference: "Alas, poor Romeo, we can't do diddly. You'd be taken to the penitentiary and I'd become the laughing stock of the Brownies," and Willie's follow-up comment about growing up: ("I can't play Pooh to your Christopher Robin") at the edge of a frozen pond while Marty ice-skates, in director Ted Demme's coming-of-age comedy/drama

Beauty and the Beast (1946) (aka La Belle et La Bete)

The fanciful scenes including the one in which Beauty's merchant father (Marcel André), and then Beauty (Josette Day) enter the Beast's (Jean Marais) enchanted and haunted castle and move down its corridor - with human arm candelabra (that light themselves) reaching out from the walls; also the magnificent costuming of the Beast himself, who has steaming claws (symbolic of a recent kill of deer), and the image of Beauty’s tear that transforms into a diamond, in director Jean Cocteau's visual fantasy

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

The moving ballroom dance scene in Disney's film between Belle (voice of Paige O'Hara) and the Beast (voice of Robby Benson), in which an anthropomorphic, grandmotherly talking teapot - or Mrs. Potts (voice of Angela Lansbury) sings the memorable title ballad, "Beauty and the Beast", in Disney's landmark film - the first (and only) animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture

Becky Sharp (1935)

A landmark 3-color technicolor film (the first), taking advantage of the rich color process in the grand ball scene, in director Rouben Mamoulian's period drama

Beetlejuice (1988)

The sight of Michael Keaton as the demonic, over-the-top title character Betelgeuse (the "afterlife's leading bioexorcist"); also the scene of the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis) haunted 'parlor trick' dinner-table in which they attempt to spook the yuppie Dietz family at a hosted dinner party by having obnoxious wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara) belt out the calypso "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" - in Harry Belafonte's voice; also the Maitland's waiting room scene full of other recently dead clients, especially the explorer with a shrunken head and ping pong ball eyes; also, the final scene with Betelgeuse's shrunken head and his hilarious deadpanned statement about his messed up hair: ("Hey, this might be a good look for me!"), in Tim Burton's haunted comedy

Being There (1979)

The enigmatic character of illiterate, TV-watching gardener Chance the Gardener or Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers), and his simpleton lecture to President Bobby (Jack Warden) about how the garden grows ("In a garden, growth has its season . . . as long as the roots are not severed, all will be well"); and his shocking but understandable line to love-starved, seductive Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) - the wife of a rich industrialist: "I love to watch" as she demonstrates self-love to him, and the cryptic, mystical final shot of Chauncey strolling on water as his Presidential candidacy is discussed off-screen, in Hal Ashby's satire adapted from Jerry Kosinski's screenplay

Belle de Jour (1967, Fr.)

The fantasy, masochistic erotic dream sequence of bored, repressed upper-class Parisian housewife Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) who takes up afternoon prostitution with the name "Belle de Jour" -- she is driven in a carriage into the woods where her husband society doctor Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel) instructs the coachman to tie her to a nearby tree where her dress is torn and her bare back is whipped (pleasurably), before a presumed scene of rape -- the scene cuts back to Severine's bedroom where she sits in bed with her husband and refuses to pay attention to him; also the scene of Severine's reply to fearful but sympathetic brothel maid Pallas (Muni) after she services a strange East Asian client (Iska Khan) - "What do you know about it, Pallas?", in Luis Bunuel's first color film

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)

The original, thrilling chariot race sequence (filmed with 42 cameramen) between Judah Ben-Hur (Ramon Novarro) and Roman centurion Messala (Francis X. Bushman), in this silent film religious epic from director Fred Niblo

Ben-Hur (1959)

The opening nativity scene, the moment that Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is given water by Jesus (and the reverse scene on the road to the crucifixion), the interior sequences aboard the galley ships and the exciting slave galley ship battle, and the most famous sequence of all - the thrilling 40 minute chariot race scene between Ben-Hur and his villainous childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) before an immense crowd, Messala's gruesome deathbed scene, and the final crucifixion and healing scene of Ben-Hur's leprosy-afflicted mother and sister, in William Wyler's monumental, Best Picture-winning Biblical epic

Best in Show (2000)

The quirky views and interviews with neurotic dog owners - and the national dog show itself, the Mayflower Kennel Club's annual competition, emceed by the comical TV commentator Buck Laughlin (Fred Willard) and his co-host Trevor Beckwith (Jim Piddock) ("And to think that in some countries these dogs are eaten"), in director/writer Christopher Guest's satirical mockumentary film

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The early scene in the B-17 bomber nose when three returning veterans have their first glimpse of their hometown; the poignant shot of Homer's mother having an uncontrollable reaction at the first sight of double-amputee son Homer's (Oscar-winning Harold Russell) hooks for hands; also husband Sgt. Al Stephenson's (Fredric March) homecoming reunion scene in which he enters the apartment complex and then the door of his apartment and silences with his cupped hand the mouths of his son and daughter and then Milly's (Myrna Loy) first realization ("Who's that at the door, Peggy? Peggy? Rob? Who is...?") that he has come through the door; the moving sequences in which Homer thrusts his hooked hands through a window at tormenting neighbor children, and later how he demonstrates to loyal girlfriend Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell) his helplessness without a harness as he prepares for bed; the scene of Fred's father reading with pride his son's citation for a Flying Cross honor; and Air Force Captain Fred Derry's (Dana Andrews) walk through a junked airplane graveyard where he relives his wartime memories in the nose of an abandoned B-17 bomber, and the film's final scene of Wilma's and Homer's wedding and the skill with which Homer places a ring on her finger, in William Wyler's insightful, Best Picture-winning homefront drama

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Beyond the Forest (1949)

Trampy dark-haired Rosa Moline's (Bette Davis) immortal words, "What a dump!" (later imitated by Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)); and the scene in which Rosa forces her husband Dr. Lewis Moline (Joseph Cotten) to stop the car so she can leap into a ravine, forcing an injury and miscarriage of her unwanted pregnancy; and the last scene of Rosa's death as she staggers from her house to the train station, in King Vidor's melodramatic camp classic

Big (1988)

The joyous Heart and Soul and Chopsticks tap dances of 13 year-old Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) - in a 35 year old's body - with toy executive boss "Mac" MacMillan (Robert Loggia) on a giant, floor-sized and mounted electronic piano keyboard in an F.A.O. Schwartz toy store; and the scenes of Josh's eating of a miniature ear of corn at a fancy cocktail party, and then his jumping on a trampoline (viewed from outside) and the sharing of his bunk bed with yuppie toy executive Susan Lawrence (Elizabeth Perkins) - who had asked to spend the night for a 'sleep-over' followed by Josh's guileless reply about sleeping on the top bunk: "Well, OK, but I get to be on top"; also the tender, simple and innocent scene in which he gently touches her breast through her bra before kissing her, and in the conclusion the poignant final shot of Susan seeing Josh, after waving goodbye, transformed into a 13 year-old boy again (with clothes that now don't fit him) - as he runs toward his home, calling out: "Mom?...I missed you all so much" followed by a short epilogue in which Josh and his friend Billy (Jared Rushton) walk down the street discussing playing stick ball (to the instrumental tune of Heart and Soul), in director Penny Marshall's body transference fantasy

The Big Chill (1983)

The reunion of aging college friends from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who ponder the subject of death ("the big chill") and loss of idealism during the funeral-weekend of a suicidal friend (an off-screen Kevin Costner), but in one scene they boogie-dance to The Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" while cleaning up in the kitchen and wrapping up left-over food -- the tune was also heard during the opening credits montage as the news of the death reaches all the characters and preparations are made for the funeral by the mortician, in writer/director Lawrence Kasdan's classic nostalgia film

The Big Clock (1948)

The opening scene of 1940's New York media executive and Crimeways weekly magazine journalist George Stroud (Ray Milland) inside his company's gigantic $600,000 privately-owned corporate clock in the building's lobby (which synchronizes with all other clocks in the entire building and in secondary printing plants and dozens of other foreign bureaus) - in a symbolic race against time to clear his own name (as he narrates: "How'd I get into this rat race anyway? I'm no criminal. What happened? When did it all start? Just 36 hours ago, I was down there crossing that lobby on my way to work, minding my own business, looking forward to my first vacation in years. 36 hours ago, I was a decent, respectable, law-abiding citizen with a wife and a kid and a big job. Just 36 hours ago by the big clock"); and the flashback to 36 hours earlier when he was implicated in the murder of his clock-obsessed, ruthless and detestable boss Earl Janoth's (Charles Laughton) blonde mistress Pauline York (Rita Johnson), in the intense scene of the jealous Janoth killing Pauline by striking her in the head with a phallic-shaped, heavy metal sundial after seeing a male figure exiting (whom Pauline elusively identified as "Jefferson Randolph" to protect Stroud) - with a contorted closeup of Janoth's grotesque face with a twitching upper lip; and the ensuing cat-and-mouse game to find the killer (who was witnessed accompanying Pauline during the evening by many individuals) by Stroud as he used a method of "irrelevant clues" while steering the manhunt away from himself; and the taut confrontational scene at the film's end when the framed Stroud, after all clues pointed to him as the prime suspect, accuses Janoth's right-hand man Steve Hagen (George Macready) of being the killer in order to smoke out Janoth - causing a raging Janoth to shoot Hagen (after he confessed: "Janoth killed Pauline") and then fall to his death down the building's elevator shaft in his attempted escape, in director John Farrow's film noirish suspenseful thriller (later updated as the spy thriller No Way Out (1987) with Kevin Costner)

The Big Combo (1955)

The opening scene of mobster hood-kingpin Mr. Brown's (Richard Conte) weak-willed, abused, and unwilling society blonde girlfriend Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) pursued through the dark underground of a boxing arena by two thugs - and then caught and appearing naked with only her bare shoulders visible; the sadistic Brown's philosophy: "First is first and second is nobody"; also the torture scene in which obsessed police detective Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is tormented through a hearing aid - and forced to drink a bottle of hair tonic; also the scene of the psychological suicidal meltdown of Alicia (Helen Walker), Brown's estranged and supposedly-murdered wife ("I’d rather be insane and alive...than sane and dead"); the scene of the merciful death of Brown's right hand man - the hearing impaired McClure (Brian Donlevy); and the almost-prohibited suggestive scene of Brown kissing Susan in his apartment - first her ear, cheek, then neck, and then traveling behind her body and out of sight, as the camera dollied in for a stunning erotic close-up; and the film's climax in a dark, fog-shrouded airport when Brown is trapped by headlights, in Joseph H. Lewis' melodramatic crime noir

The Big Country (1958)

The memorable credits sequence including Jerome Moross' sweeping thematic score; the confrontational sequences over access rights to water at Big Muddy between patriarchal enemies/landowners Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) and Rufus Hannassey (Oscar-winning Burl Ives); the marathon night-time fist-fight without witnesses (sometimes filmed in long-shot) between non-violent, transplanted Eastern ex-sea captain James McKay (Gregory Peck) and Terrill's foreman Steve Leech (Charlton Heston) ending with McKay's question: "What did we prove? Huh?"; and the gentlemen's duel between McKay and Hannassey's own no-good, cowardly son Buck (Chuck Connors) - ending with Buck's death by his own father ("I told you I'd do it"); and the final stalking in Blanco Canyon between Terrill and Hannassey - ending with both men dead and lying on top of each other (filmed from a high-angle long shot), in William Wyler's widescreen Western epic

Bigger Than Life (1956)

The image of ill and frustrated schoolteacher and middle-class family man Ed Avery (James Mason), while being treated with an experimental wonder drug (cortisone) for a severe illness, standing in front of a cracked bathroom mirror - expressing how his tormented character goes through wild personality changes and fractured mood swings; the scene in which he constantly belittles and tyrannizes his pre-teen son Richie (Christopher Olsen) during home-schooling - with his presence (and shadow) towering over him, in a low-angle shot, during a mathematics lesson; the dinner scene in which he tells his long-suffering and loving wife Lou (Barbara Rush) that their marriage is over although he stays in the house "solely for the boy's sake"; and his criticisms of every tenent of 50s life including denouncing the school at a PTA meeting for "breeding a race of moral midgets" - the film was a superb critique of the suffocating conformity of 50s middle-class life; also the scene of Avery reading from the Bible (with a knife in his hand) about Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac in the Old Testament and his emphatic declaration to his wife: "God was wrong," in this insightful Nicholas Ray drama

The Big Heat (1953)

The scene of the car bombing (with a blinding explosion outside his house) that kills Police Sergeant Bannion's (Glenn Ford) wife instead of himself as he tends to his young daughter, and the scalding hot coffee in the face scene (off-screen) between an angry henchman named Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) and girlfriend Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), and Debby's moving death scene, in director Fritz Lang's film-noirish police/crime drama

The Big House (1930)

Used as a model for subsequent prison films, the realistic and brutal portrayal of prison conditions; also Wallace Beery's portrayal of convict ringleader Machine Gun Butch, and the scenes of the attempted prison escape and massacre, in George Hill's early prison flick

The Big Lebowski (1998)

The scene in which bearded hippie, pot-smoking, slacker slob Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), wearing shorts and a T-shirt, complains and demands compensation from his wheel-chair bound philanthropist millionaire namesake Jeffrey 'The Big' Lebowski (David Huddleston) for two debt-collector hoods that peed on his favorite carpet ("that rug really tied the room together"); the Dude's introduction of himself: "I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing"); the scene of living erotic art (with Julianne Moore as eccentric, super-stoic feminist artist Maude Lebowski, an estranged daughter), and the Dude's fantasy musical dream sequence called Gutterballs after being slipped a mickey by sleaze king mobster Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) - filled with images including the Viking Queen, Saddam Hussein, and bowling; and the scary scene at a bowling alley in which uptight nutcase war veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) tells bowler Smokey (Jimmie Dale Gilmore) that he has committed a minor infraction of bowling league rules by fouling over the line - accompanied by gun-wielding threats: "You're entering a world of pain" and "Mark it zero", in this quirky Coen Brothers stoner comedy - a Philip Marlowe-style LA neo-noir

The Big Parade (1925)

The scene in which World War I American soldier James Apperson (John Gilbert) introduces French girl Melisande (Renee Adoree) to chewing gum (she swallows it), the spectacular view of 200 trucks and hundreds of troops moving up to the front in a single-file "big parade" and the memorable farewell sequence in which Melisande looks toward the army truck taking away her lover as he throws her his watch, dog tags chain and shoe which she clutches to her breast; the harrowingly realistic battle scene of the soldiers' chilling march into enemy machine gun sniper fire at Belleau Wood, the scene of being trapped in a shell hole with a young dying German soldier and the moving moment when he gives him a cigarette, the scene of his desperate search for Melisande, the homecoming scene in which he appears missing a leg and the shocked reaction of his parents (especially his mother who recalls him as a healthy baby boy with two legs), and the finale of his return when he hobbles with a wooden leg toward a long-overdue reunion in France with Melisande, in King Vidor's war-drama epic

The Big Sleep (1946)

Private detective Philip Marlowe's (Humphrey Bogart) encounter with flirtatious Carmen (Martha Vickers) ("she tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up") in the hallway of General Sternwood's (Charles Waldron) mansion, Carmen's taunt: "You're not very tall, are you?"; the hothouse talk with Sternwood, Marlowe's dalliance with a bookshop proprietor (Dorothy Malone); the famous sexy, innuendo-laden dialogue between Philip Marlowe and Vivian (Lauren Bacall) - a metaphoric, horse-racing, over-drinks and cigarettes conversation (Marlowe: "...Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but, uh...I don't know how - how far you can go." Vivian: "A lot depends on who's in the saddle. Go ahead, Marlowe, I like the way you work. In case you don't know it, you're doing all right"), their joking phone call to the police department from his office; and the scene of her request for another kiss in a car: "I like that -- I'd like more"; and their final clinch: (Vivian: "You've forgotten one thing. Me."
Marlowe (pulling her to him): "What's wrong with you?" Vivian: (with a smoldering glance) "Nothing you can't fix"), in Howard Hawks' classic private detective film

Big Wednesday (1978)

The scene at the draft board of the attempted ruses of some of the young, Southern California surfing friends, Jack Barlow (William Katt), Matt Johnson (Jan Michael Vincent), Waxer (Darrell Fetty), and Leroy Smith (Gary Busey) - to avoid being drafted for Vietnam, and their reunion at the Great Swell in the spring of 1974 following the war, when they come together to ride the big wave, in writer/director John Milius' surf classic

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