This is really a deceptive title. What follows is not about Movies that are purely great, nor is it really a quiz.
It’s just that one day I got to thinking about memorable lines in film… lines that have crept into our lexicon like “play it again, Sam…” And after I scribbled down a few entries (films and parts, really), I pledged myself to find the actual words… I didn’t want to leave it to my memory (which of recent has turned to mush).
Then I thought it might be fun to throw a few lines and see if someone could guess the film. I tested a couple of favorites on Zack. He scored 100%. He knows film. He knows his Dad.
So what can I say? I found the exercise fun.
Then I spent several days in “assemblage”… dredging up from memory movies, roles, scenes & voices that have made a lasting impression on me. I sourced the correct words from the net, and for your consideraton I have selected 45 passages. 45 “lines” that for one reason or another that I enjoy.
You will find these listed below. And if you are of the mind… guess the film… guess the actor… and for “extra credit” give me the name of the character in the film. The titles of the films and the actors are listed conveniently in alphabetic order, the lines themselves are scrambled to further confuse you.
But before you proceed, this you should know: I am not really trying to stump you.
You may note that in a certain film there maybe several lines worthy of inclusion. I have made a choice. There is only one film that is represented with two lines. There are two actors with two lines, and one actor with three (all from different films).
You will also note… I have not included my favorite line in film… Bette Davis’ “Fasten your seat belt, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” Ladies and Gentlemen, I adore that line… but the force and meaning of it depends too much on the previous action and visual… Bette as Margot Channing in All About Eve, descends the staircase, Martini in hand… learning that her love interest has been diverted to another lady, gulps down her Martini, reaches for another from the tray of a serving girl, drains that Martini, and then reaches for a third… “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Also note… some of the best lines in film occur in “repartee”. And those lines have been excluded. Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on first?” is not here, nor any of the countless hilarious Marx Brothers’ dialogues.
I did put a line in from a Mae West/W.C. Fields exchange. I just couldn’t help myself. I went looking for a specific Fields line… from memory it went like, “Milton, sit outside Mrs. Twilly’s door while I seek out the nearest purveyor of gin…” I couldn’t pin down the specific words. However, my research uncovered another gem that I simply could not pass up. It is included herein.
As I say… this is really not a quiz… I am just sharing a few snippets with you. So do not think of this as a definitive compilation… I couldn’t find all the ones that I went looking for… but overall, I am thoroughly pleased and sated by this exercise…
I feel like I have just finished two pieces of New York cheese cake. Now it’s time to digest.
THE LINES
1. “Playgoers, I bid you welcome. The Theatre is a temple, and we are here to worship the gods of comedy and tragedy. Tonight, I am pleased to announce a comedy. We shall employ every device we know in our desire to divert you.”
2. “You don’t throw away a whole life just ’cause he’s banged up a little.”
3. “I know how you feel. I know you don’t believe me, but I do. I’m going to tell you something I learned when I was your age. I had prepared a case. Mr. White asked me, ‘How did you do.’ I said, ‘I’ve done my best.’ He said, ‘They don’t pay you to do your best. They pay you to win.’ That’s what pays for this office. And that’s what pays for the pro bono work that we do for the poor. And for the kind of law that you want to practice. And that’s what pays for your clothes and my whiskey, and the leisure that we have to sit back and discuss philosophy. As we’re doing tonight. We’re paid to win the case. You finished your marriage. You wanted to come back and practice law. You wanted to come back to the world. Welcome back.”
4. “The sky is pocked with stars. What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many.”
5. “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax… You’re goddamn right I’m living in the fucking past!”
6. “You can’t hunt, you can’t ride, you can’t shoot, you can’t fence! What kind of a marriage is this?”
7. “On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse – bassoons and basset horns – like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.”
8. “The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.”
9. “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in ****** felt free.”
10. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
11. “I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”
12. “Labiche! Here’s your prize, Labiche. Some of the greatest paintings in the world. Does it please you, Labiche? Give you a sense of excitement in just being near them? A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape. You won by sheer luck: you stopped me without knowing what you were doing, or why. You are nothing, Labiche — a lump of flesh. The paintings are mine; they always will be; beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it! They will always belong to me or to a man like me. Now, this minute, you couldn’t tell me why you did what you did.”
13. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
14. “I’ve been thinking. Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day that I’ve been in the service. Twenty-eight years in peace and war. I don’t suppose I’ve been at home more than ten months in all that time. Still, it’s been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy; but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time.”
15. “Well, Jones, at least you haven’t forgotten how to show a lady a good time.”
16. “I told myself it was beneath my dignity for arresting a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the party is beneath the dignity of any man, and the party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for a bit of fuel will destroy a city. That was the first time I ever saw by brother, but I knew him and I knew I would disobey the party. Perhaps it was the tie of blood between us, but I doubt it. We were only half-tied anyway. Indeed as a policeman I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was the better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.”
17. “Who are those guys?”
18. “My father, the most beloved gynecologist in Vienna, before they took him away on a morals charge for indecent exposure at the State Opera House, said, and I quote: ‘Please do not take me away, I will not do it again.'”
19. “Here is your king’s scepter, and here is your kingdom, with the scorpion, the cobra, and the lizard for subjects. Free them if you will. Leave the slaves to me.”
20. “Thank you Mr. Acavano!”
21. “In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn’t always make sense and most of it never happened… but that’s what kind of story this is.”
22. “There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious’, and it goes like this – I’m paraphrasing – um, ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.’ That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.”
23. “Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”
24. “That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability… you’re an improbable person, Eve, but so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition – and talent. We deserve each other.”
25. “Not many people know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.”
26. “My story starts at sea… a perilous voyage to an unknown land… a shipwreck… the wild waters roar and heave… the brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned… all save one… a lady… whose soul is greater than the ocean… and her spirit stronger than the sea’s embrace… not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story… for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name… Viola.”
27. “Flower Belle, what a euphonious appellation. Easy on the ears and a banquet for the eyes.”
28. “Lisa, I don’t need this. I swear to God, I do not need this right now, okay? I’ve got a judge that’s just aching to throw me in jail. An idiot who wants to fight me for two hundred dollars. Slaughtered pigs. Giant loud whistles. I ain’t slept in five days. I got no money, a dress code problem, AND a little murder case which, in the balance, holds the lives of two innocent kids. Not to mention your BIOLOGICAL CLOCK – my career, your life, our marriage, and let me see, what else can we pile on? Is there any more SHIT we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this case? Is it possible?”
29. “But one must never drive one’s enemy to despair; it makes him strong. Gentleness is better politics, it saps virility. A good occupational force must never crush. It must corrupt.”
30. “He’s a fountain of misplaced rage. Name your cliche; Mother held him too much or not enough, last picked at kickball, late night sneaky uncle, whatever. Now he’s so angry that moments of levity actually cause him pain; give him headaches. Happiness, for that gentleman, hurts.”
31. “Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything… How to sleep, how to eat… how to work… how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it’s a tradition… and because of our traditions… Every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”
32. “I find you very attractive. Your assertiveness tells me that you feel the same way about me. But ritual remains that we must do a series of platonic actions before we can have intercourse. But all I really want to do is have sex with you as soon as possible.”
33. “That gives us exactly… forty minutes to get the fuck out of Dodge. Which, if you do what I say when I say it, should be plenty. Now, you’ve got a corpse in a car, minus a head, in a garage. Take me to it.”
34. “There are two kinds of men and only two. And that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He’s the kind of man the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women. Do you understand? I think you do. There’s another kind. Not high-minded, not pure, but alive. Now, that your tastes at this time should incline towards the juvenile is understandable; but for you to marry that boy would be a disaster. Because there’s two kinds of women. There are two kinds of women and you, as we well know, are not the first kind. You, my dear, are a slut.”
35. “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
36. “You see that fella in the red sweather over there? His name’s Donnie McCoy. Works a few of the protection rackets for Cunnaro when he’s waiting for something better to happen. Donnie and I have known each other since we were six. Take a good look at thtat face, Floyd. Because if he ever finds out I can be beat by one lousy grifter, I’ll have to kill him and every other hood who wants to muscle in on my Chicago operation.”
37. “I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”
38. “And who are you? So full of hate that you have to fight everybody, because you’ve been whipped and chased by hounds. Well that might not be living, but it sure as hell ain’t dying. And dying’s been what these white boys have been doing for going on three years now, dying by the thousands, dying for you, fool. And all this time I keep askin’ myself, when, O Lord, when gonna be our time? Gonna come a time when we all gonna hafta ante up and kick in like men, LIKE MEN! You watch who you callin’ nigger! If there’s any niggers around here, it’s YOU, just a stupid-ass, swamp-runnin’ nigger! And if you not careful, that’s all you ever gonna be!”
39. “James, earn this… earn it.”
40. “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he’d rather I’d shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted – if I could hit ’em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat people’s gardens, don’t nest in the corncrib, they don’t do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”
41. “God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.”
42. “In this Regiment Sergeant Major we dance with our hands held high!”
43. “Now we’ll talk all day if you want to. But, come sundown, there’s gonna be two things true that ain’t true now. One is that the United States Department of Justice is goin’ to know what in the good Christ – e’scuse me, Angie – is goin’ on around here. And the other’s I’m gonna have somebody’s ass in muh briefcase.”
44. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”
45. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
THE MOVIES
Absence of Malice
All About Eve
Amadeus
Annie Hall
A Beautiful Mind
Becket
Big Fish
Big Lebowski
Bridge on the River Kwai
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Casablanca
A Christmas Carol
Con Air
Dr. Zhivago
Fiddler on the Roof
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Glory
The Godfather
Lion in Winter
Magnum Force
Man For All Seasons
My Cousin Vinnie
My Little Chickadee
North By Northwest
The Producers
Pulp Fiction
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Saving Private Ryan
Schindler’s List
Sea Biscuit
Shakespeare in Love
Shawshank Redemption
Star Wars
Start the Revolution Without Me
The Sting
Ten Commandments
The Train
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tunes of Glory
2001 Space Odyssey
The Verdict
What’s New Pussycat?
Wise Guys
Working Girl
THE ACTORS
F. Murray Abraham
Karen Allen
Woody Allen
Humphrey Bogart
Marlon Brando
Yul Brenner
Wilford Brimley
Richard Burton
Steve Buscemi
Chirs Cooper
Russell Crowe
Billy Crudup
Danny DeVito
Keir Dullea
Clint Eastwood
W.C. Fields
Joseph Fiennes
Morgan Freeman
John Goodman
Cary Grant
Melanie Griffith
Alec Guinness
Tom Hanks
James Earl Jones
Harvey Keitel
Kenneth Mars
James Mason
Zero Mostel
Liam Neeson
Paul Newman
Peter O’Toole
Gregory Peck
Joe Pesci
George Saunders
Paul Scofield
Peter Sellers
Robert Shaw
Alastair Sim
Rod Steiger
Topol
Gene Wilder