All the Best Lines

by George Tiffin

She was worth a stare, she was trouble.

  The Big Sleep (1946)

  I can be framed easier than ‘Whistler’s Mother’.

  The Dark Corner (1946)

  How I detest the dawn. The grass always looks like it’s been left out all night.

  The Dark Corner (1946)

  Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you’ve served your time, or when you’re dead.

  Brute Force (1947)

  LEROY: Is he dead?

  CAPTAIN FINLAY: He’s been dead for a long time — he just didn’t know it.

  Crossfire (1947)

  ADRIENNE: Do you fall in love with all of your clients?

  MARLOWE: Only the ones in skirts.

  Lady in the Lake (1947)

  KATHIE: Oh Jeff, you ought to have killed me for what I did a minute ago.

  JEFF: There’s still time.

  Out of the Past (1947)

  He couldn’t find a prayer in the Bible.

  Out of the Past (1947)

  It was the bottom of the barrel, and I was scraping it.

  Out of the Past (1947)

  I want you to do something. I want you to get yourself out of the bed, and get over to the window and scream as loud as you can. Otherwise you only have another three minutes to live.

  Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

  Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.

  The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

  COP: Can I help you?

  BIGELOW: I want to report a murder.

  COP: Where was this murder committed?

  BIGELOW: San Francisco, last night.

  COP: Who was murdered?

  BIGELOW: I was.

  D.O.A. (1950)

  I saw the two of you, the way you were looking at each other tonight, like a couple of wild animals. Almost scared me.

  Gun Crazy [aka Deadly is the Female] (1950)

  You’ll always be a two-bit cannon. And when they pick you up in the gutter dead, you’re hand’ll be in a drunk’s pocket.

  Pickup on South Street (1953)

  Every extra buck has a meaning all its own.

  Pickup on South Street (1953)

  MIKE: You’re never around when I need you.

  VELDA: You never need me when I’m around.

  Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

  I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.

  Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

  1945 THE LOST WEEKEND

  A struggling writer confesses he only feels alive when drinking.

  DON

  It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yeah. But what it does to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo, moulding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore before movies got him by the throat. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer. It’s the Nile. The Nile, Nat, and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra.

  Dir: Billy Wilder • Scr: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett • Based on a novel by Charles R. Jackson • Cast: Ray Milland (Don Birnam)

  1950 HARVEY

  VETA LOUISE

  Myrtle Mae, you have a lot to learn and I hope you never learn it.

  Dir: Henry Koster • Scr: Mary Chase, Oscar Brodney • Based on a play by Mary Chase • Cast: Josephine Hull (Veta Louise Simmons)

  1953 GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

  ESMOND SR

  Have you got the nerve to tell me you don’t want to marry my son for his money?

  LORELEI

  It’s true.

  ESMOND SR

  Then what do you want to marry him for?

  LORELEI

  I want to marry him for your money.

  Dir: Howard Hawks • Scr: Charles Lederer • Based on a musical by Joseph Fields and a novel and play by Anita Loos • Cast: Marilyn Monroe (Lorelei Lee), Taylor Holmes (Mr Esmond Sr)

  Although Monroe had not yet become a major star, she was already behaving like one, demanding time-consuming retakes even after director Howard Hawks was satisfied.

  When the studio asked Hawks how to speed up the production, he replied: ‘Replace Marilyn, shorten the script and get a new director.’

  1954 SABRINA

  Sabrina refuses to let her father stand in the way of her love for David, a millionaire.

  THOMAS

  He’s still David Larrabee, and you’re still the chauffeur’s daughter. And you’re still reaching for the moon.

  SABRINA

  No, father. The moon is reaching for me.

  Dir: Billy Wilder • Scr: Billy Wilder, Ernest Lehman, Samuel A. Taylor • Based on a play by Samuel A. Taylor • Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina Fairchild), John Williams (Thomas Fairchild)

  1956 THE SEARCHERS

  A settler in 1860s Texas contemplates the devastation on both sides as ranchers battle Comanche braves.

  MRS JORGENSEN

  Some day this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.

  Dir: John Ford • Scr: Frank S. Nugent • Based on a novel by Alan Le May • Cast: Olive Carey (Mrs Jorgensen)

  1957 THE SEVENTH SEAL (DET SJUNDE INSEGLET)

  In a medieval community ravaged by plague, the knight Antonius Block wonders how God can permit such horror.

  ANTONIUS

  Faith is a torment. It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.

  Dir: Ingmar Bergman • Scr: Ingmar Bergman, based on his play • Cast: Max von Sydow (Antonius Block)

  1958 AUNTIE MAME

  The wild and unconventional Mame is determined to raise her nephew with a true zest for life.

  AUNTIE MAME

  Live! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!

  Dir: Morton DaCosta • Scr: Betty Comden, Adolph Green • Based on a novel by Patrick Dennis and a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee • Cast: Rosalind Russell (Mame Dennis)

  1958 THE MATCHMAKER

  Dolly, a divorcée–turned–matchmaker, addresses the audience as she tries to persuade us that adventures lie ahead.

  DOLLY

  Life’s never quite interesting enough, somehow. You people who come to the movies know that.

  Dir: Joseph Anthony • Scr: John Michael Hayes • Based on a play by Thornton Wilder • Cast: Shirley Booth (Dolly ‘Gallagher’ Levi)

  1959 PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE

  NARRATOR

  Greetings, my friends! We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  Dir: Edward D. Wood Jr • Scr: Edward D. Wood Jr • Cast: Criswell (Narrator)

  The production was funded by a Baptist church; it took three years to find a distributor who would take it on, only for it to be voted Worst Film of All Time in The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).

  1960 BREATHLESS (À BOUT DE SOUFFLE)

  An aspiring journalist interviews a writer whose answers are always unexpected.

  PATRICIA

  What is your greatest ambition in life?

  PARVULESCO

  To become immortal. . . and then die.

  Dir: Jean-Luc Godard • Scr: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol • Cast: Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco)

  THE NEW WAVE

  Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) may be the only director in film history to have won his career break by insulting a producer: Georges de Beauregard was so impressed by Godard’s scathing honesty about a recent film that he hired the young press agent to work on a script he was developing. Godard quickly became bored of the pro
ject but had read a treatment for another film about a petty criminal by two star directors, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. De Beauregard was intrigued, Truffaut and Chabrol liked the idea of Godard directing it, and since the budget was modest they quickly secured funding.

  Across the Atlantic, the golden age of Hollywood was waning and studios were relying increasingly on glossy epics and musicals in their fight against the lure of television. In Europe, a new school of simpler, more realistic film storytelling was gaining popularity: Breathless was the picture that fully captured this spirit in a way that was to transform cinematic narrative across the world. It also established the career of Jean Seberg, the young American who played Patricia; on seeing her performance, Truffaut declared her ‘the best actress in Europe’.

  Godard’s production style would have shocked his American counterparts. Working from an ever-changing script, he shot in real locations across Paris without official permission with a small crew and portable equipment. In order to accommodate low light levels, cinematographer Raoul Coutard used Ilford HPS negative intended for stills cameras and forced its development in the laboratory, giving the image a grainy look. This, combined with the fact that the camera itself was light enough to be hand-held, contributed enormously to the rough-and-ready immediacy of the action.

  Godard would write or rewrite scenes each morning in an exercise book nobody else was allowed to read and would sometimes only give the actors their lines as they were being filmed to increase the feeling of spontaneity. On the first day of filming, 17 August 1959, the crew only shot for two hours. Thereafter, the schedule essentially followed the amount of material the director needed, or had prepared. Truffaut, whose involvement had enabled the funding, only visited the set twice and Chabrol never appeared at all. Producer de Beauregard worried that the production was proceeding erratically, and on one occasion got into a fist-fight with Godard when he discovered him in a café after the director had called in sick.

  The film also broke conventions in the way it edited the footage together, and the frequent ‘jump cuts’, which made no attempt to match related action or angles, added to the sense of energy and realism. So bold were the innovations that critics coined a new term for the school of pioneering directors: Nouvelle Vague, or the New Wave. If the writing about this new style was occasionally overwrought – Andrew Sarris claimed the jagged narrative revealed ‘the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions’ – the legacy of Breathless and similar films changed cinema for ever, influencing directors as diverse as Bertolucci, Scorsese, Wenders and Tarantino.

  1963 THE LEOPARD (IL GATTOPARDO)

  During the upheavals of the nineteenth century in Sicily, the aristocratic Corbera family take stock of the turmoil around them.

  TANCREDI

  If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

  Dir: Luchino Visconti • Scr: Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, Luchino Visconti • Based on a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa • Cast: Alain Delon (Tancredi Falconeri)

  1966 THE WILD ANGELS

  A Hell’s Angel explains his credo.

  BLUES

  We want to be free! We want to be free to do what we want to do! We want to be free to ride. And we want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man. And we want to get loaded. And we want to have a good time! And that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party!

  Dir: Roger Corman • Scr: Charles B. Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich • Cast: Peter Fonda (Heavenly Blues)

  Shot three years before Easy Rider, Roger Corman’s film about motorcycles, rebellion and counter-culture also starred Peter Fonda. The real Hell’s Angels, some of whom appeared as extras in the film, temporarily abandoned their anarchic beliefs to sue Corman for $5 million [$35 million] for portraying their organization in ‘a negative light’.

  1968 PLANET OF THE APES

  GEORGE

  I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.

  Dir: Franklin J. Schaffner • Scr: Michael Wilson, Rod Serling • Based on a novel by Pierre Boulle • Cast: Charlton Heston (George Taylor)

  Although the actors playing apes were assigned their species randomly they found that even during breaks they congregated in groups according to whether they had been cast as gorillas, chimps or orang-utans. Composer Jerry Goldsmith was reputed to have worn a gorilla mask while writing and even conducting the score.

  1969 BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

  Outlaw Butch Cassidy describes his ambition to his partner in crime.

  BUTCH

  I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

  Dir: George Roy Hill • Scr: William Goldman • Cast: Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy)

  1969 THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

  A headstrong, visionary teacher intends to mould her pupils as she sees fit.

  MISS BRODIE

  Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

  Dir: Ronald Neame • Scr: Jay Presson Allen Jay, based on his play • Based on a novel by Muriel Spark • Cast: Maggie Smith (Jean Brodie)

  1975 LOVE AND DEATH

  During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Boris, a cowardly intellectual, chats with his cousin Sonya.

  BORIS

  Nothingness. . . non-existence. . . black emptiness...

  SONJA

  What did you say?

  BORIS

  Oh, I was just planning my future.

  Dir: Woody Allen • Scr: Woody Allen • Cast: Woody Allen (Boris Grushenko), Diane Keaton (Sonja)

  1978 CALIFORNIA SUITE

  Hannah argues with her ex-husband about their daughter’s future.

  HANNAH

  You’re worse than a hopeless romantic. You’re a hopeful one.

  Dir: Herbert Ross • Scr: Neil Simon • Cast: Jane Fonda (Hannah Warren)

  1984 GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES

  Explorers sail to the coast of an uncharted Africa.

  D’ARNOT

  This is not the world, John. Just the edge of it.

  Dir: Hugh Hudson • Scr: Robert Towne (as P. H. Vazak), Michael Austin • Based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs • Cast: Ian Holm (Captain Philippe D’Arnot)

  Edgar Rice Burroughs created the jungle-dwelling hero in his novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912). Several silent film adaptations quickly followed but the character was most famously played by Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmüller in various appearances between 1932 and 1948.

  With Greystoke, director Hugh Hudson hoped to deliver a more faithful representation of Burroughs’ original story; Academy Award-winning writer Robert Towne (Chinatown, Reds) was so unhappy with Hudson’s vision that he asked for his name to be replaced with that of his sheepdog, P. H. Vazak. The dog was duly nominated for an Oscar.

  1989 DEAD POETS SOCIETY

  A schoolteacher warns his pupils that life passes all too quickly.

  KEATING

  Now I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve really looked at them. They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. Do you hear it?

  He whispers:

  Carpe. . . Hear it?

  And again:


  Carpe. Carpe Diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

  Dir: Peter Weir • Scr: Tom Schulman • Cast: Robin Williams (John Keating)

  1989 FIELD OF DREAMS

  Ray Kinsella is visited by the ghost of his father.

  JOHN KINSELLA

  Is this heaven?

  RAY KINSELLA

  It’s Iowa.

  Dir: Phil Alden Robinson • Scr: Phil Alden Robinson • Based on a novel by W.P. Kinsella • Cast: Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella), Dwier Brown (John Kinsella)

  1989 NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION

  Clark wants to give his family the best Christmas ever but his plans are thwarted when his boss cuts his bonus.

  CLARK

  Hey! If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah!

  Dir: Jeremiah Chechik • Scr: John Hughes • Cast: Chevy Chase (Clark Griswold)

  1992 GAS FOOD LODGING

  Teenager Darius tries to persuade his date that women are the true adventurers.

  DARIUS

  Well, it’s like Adam and Eve. He was fine grooving in paradise, but Eve wanted something scary. She wanted the fucking edge. She wanted to jump off cliffs just so she could see what it was like to fall.