All the Best Lines

by George Tiffin

  Harry Cohn, who produced the film, always kept a keen eye on costs and insisted his directors only be allowed to print one shot per set-up. Capra circumvented the rule by keeping the cameras rolling at the end of each take; instead of calling ‘cut’, he would just tell the actors and crew to ‘do it again’.

  1939 MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

  Junior senator Jefferson Smith may be new to politics but he is determined to uphold his beliefs.

  SMITH

  Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I’m free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn’t, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that.

  Dir: Frank Capra • Scr: Sidney Buchman, Myles Connolly • Cast: James Stewart (Jefferson Smith)

  1940 THE GRAPES OF WRATH

  Tom Joad promises to be a tireless champion of the oppressed.

  TOM

  I’ll be all around in the dark — I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look — wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build — I’ll be there, too.

  Dir: John Ford • Scr: Nunnally Johnson • Based on a novel by John Steinbeck • Cast: Henry Fonda (Tom Joad)

  Darryl F. Zanuck paid $100,000 [$1.6 million] for the rights to John Steinbeck’s novel, a huge amount of money for the time. Steinbeck insisted the film-makers treat the book – and its subject, the plight of the working man during the Great Depression – with due respect; when he saw the result he was delighted and said Henry Fonda’s performance as Tom Joad made him ‘believe my own words’. Before production started, Zanuck sent undercover investigators to the migrant camps to see if Steinbeck had exaggerated the appalling conditions, but discovered the reality was even more shocking than the book had suggested.

  1946 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

  An angel shows a suicidal man what the world would be like without him.

  CLARENCE

  Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?

  Dir: Frank Capra • Scr: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra • Based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern • Cast: Henry Travers (Clarence)

  1946 THE BIG SLEEP

  The wayward Carmen resents private investigator Marlowe’s intrusion into her family’s life.

  CARMEN

  You’re not very tall, are you?

  MARLOWE

  Well, I, uh, I try to be.

  Dir: Howard Hawks • Scr: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman • Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler • Cast: Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe)

  ‘MY GOD, THE HERO IS A BEE!’

  Hollywood has always enjoyed the lustre of a famous name, so when the talkies took off and screenplays began to require dialogue as well as spectacle, producers sought the best talent money could buy. So many contemporary novelists were happy to work for the inflated fees offered that when the Film Daily Product Guide published a ‘List of Available Writers’ in 1937, the names for hire included three Nobel prize nominees (Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Thornton Wilder) and one future winner, William Faulkner (he received the award in 1950).

  The rest of the bunch included such literary luminaries as James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Mary McCarthy, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, J. B. Priestley, Ayn Rand, Damon Runyon, James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, Alexander Woollcott, Stefan Zweig and, astonishingly, the experimental writer and poet Gertrude Stein.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, producers entranced by literary fame were not always fully aware of their protégés’ oeuvre. Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck had won the Nobel prize in 1911 largely for a play about fairies, The Blue Bird, and in 1919 Samuel Goldwyn lured him to Los Angeles with a contract worth $100,000 [$1.3 million]. He installed the great man in a hilltop villa and left him alone to adapt some of his earlier works. Each day a translator would take away the scant pages and translate them; after three months a script took shape. Goldwyn read it at once in his office but is said to have burst out immediately, waving the papers in astonishment: ‘My God, the hero is a bee!’

  Not all producers were so lavish in their inducements: after signing Faulkner to work for him, Jack Warner once crowed to another screenwriter that ‘I’ve got America’s best writer for $300 [$4,000] a week.’

  Noted authors hired to adapt their own work for the screen or to contribute to other films include:

  • Arnold Bennett (Piccadilly, 1929)

  • John Steinbeck (The Red Pony, 1949)

  • Somerset Maugham (Trio, 1955)

  • Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, 1962)

  • Roald Dahl (You Only Live Twice, 1967)

  • Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange, 1971)

  • Mario Puzo (The Godfather, 1972)

  • Martin Amis (Saturn 3, 1980)

  • William Boyd (Chaplin, 1992)

  • Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1997)

  • Harold Pinter (Sleuth, 1997)

  • John Irving (The Cider House Rules, 1999)

  • Frederic Raphael (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999)

  • Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 2000)

  • Ian McEwan (Atonement, 2007)

  • Dave Eggers (Where the Wild Things Are, 2009)

  • Robert Harris (The Ghost, 2010)

  One of the most bizarre encounters between the highbrow and the lowbrow occurred in 1957 when United Pictures of America approached Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, to devise a screenplay for a full-length Mr Magoo cartoon. The story was to have been based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote but the project was abandoned after the studio encountered a small hitch: Mr Magoo is comically short-sighted, and none of the executives had had the courage to tell Huxley (who was virtually blind himself) this key fact.

  1952 HIGH NOON

  Retired sheriff Martin Howe explains why he refuses to help the new lawman in town.

  MARTIN

  It’s a great life. You risk your skin catchin’ killers and the juries turn ’em loose so they can come back and shoot at ya again. If you’re honest, you’re poor your whole life, and in the end you wind up dyin’ all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothin’. For a tin star.

  Dir: Fred Zinnemann • Scr: Carl Foreman • Based on a story by John W. Cunningham • Cast: Lon Chaney Jr (Martin Howe)

  High Noon was directly responsible for the existence of Rio Bravo, itself a classic Western. John ‘Duke’ Wayne, the genre’s most enduring star, hated it and teamed up with Howard Hawks to fashion a personal response. Hawks explained: ‘I made Rio Bravo because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off, asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good Western.’

  1954 JOHNNY GUITAR

  A mysterious gunslinger enters town.

  OLD TOM

  That’s a lot of man you’re carrying in those boots, stranger.

  Dir: Nicholas Ray • Scr: Philip Yordan • Based on a novel by Roy Chanslor • Cast: John Carradine (Old Tom)

  1962 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  Lawrence puts out a lit match between his thumb and forefinger. Corporal Potter watches and tries to copy him.

  POTTER

  It damn well hurts!

  LAWRENCE

  Certainly it hurts.

  POTTER

  What’s the trick then?

  LAWRENCE

  The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it h
urts.

  Dir: David Lean • Scr: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson • Cast: Harry Fowler (William Potter), Peter O’Toole (T. E. Lawrence)

  The film was based on T. E. Lawrence’s military memoirs Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926); he turned down several offers to film the story during his lifetime. In 1960 Michael Wilson wrote a screen version explicitly to persuade Lawrence’s literary executors that a worthy adaptation could be made, and the rights were granted to producer Sam Spiegel. Robert Bolt received sole credit for the final script until the Writers Guild of America reinstated Wilson’s name in 1995.

  David Lean shot the entire film favouring movement from left to right across the screen to emphasize the sense of a journey. When Technicolor released a subsequent master print, they inadvertently flipped one of the reels and the error persisted through the film’s release on video. Lean had to wait until the material was restored and reissued in 1989 to correct the mistake. Although the original version is over three and a half hours long, it contains not a single line spoken by a woman.

  1964 A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS

  A Wild West drifter risks his life to free a family from their violent captors.

  MARISOL

  Why do you do it for us?

  JOE

  Why? I knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help. Now, get moving.

  Dir: Sergio Leone • Scr: Victor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas Gil, Sergio Leone • Cast: Marianne Koch (Marisol), Clint Eastwood (Joe)

  1965 LORD JIM

  Lord Jim, a sailor ashamed of having abandoned his ship with passengers still aboard, tries to come to terms with his past.

  LORD JIM

  I’ve been a so-called coward and a so-called hero and there’s not the thickness of a sheet of paper between them. Maybe cowards and heroes are just ordinary men who, for a split second, do something out of the ordinary. That’s all.

  Dir: Richard Brooks • Scr: Richard Brooks • Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad • Cast: Peter O’Toole (Lord Jim)

  Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) – originally Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski – was a Polish author who wrote in English after becoming a British subject in 1886. Although his most famous story is almost certainly Heart of Darkness, films have also been made of his other works including Lord Jim, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line and The Boxer.

  1971 DIRTY HARRY

  Policeman Harry Callahan is forced to adopt the tactics of the criminal he is pursuing.

  HARRY

  I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

  Dir: Don Siegel • Scr: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, Dean Riesner • Cast: Clint Eastwood (Harry Callahan)

  Andrew Robinson, who plays the ‘Scorpio’ killer, is a sworn pacifist and deeply uncomfortable around guns. He would visibly flinch whenever he pulled a trigger, so director Don Siegel had to shut down the production while he was sent to a training range to gain confidence. In some shots in the finished film he can still be seen to blink as he fires.

  1975 JAWS

  Police chief Brody warns bounty hunters they have underestimated the size of the shark that threatens their beaches.

  BRODY

  You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

  Dir: Steven Spielberg • Scr: Carl Gottlieb • Based on a novel by Peter Benchley • Cast: Roy Scheider (Martin Brody)

  According to principal writer Carl Gottlieb, this line was not scripted but improvised by Roy Scheider.

  I SHALL NOT RETURN

  Based on Peter Benchley’s bestselling book, Jaws was the first film to gross $100 million [$430 million] in its theatrical release: over the summer of 1975, sixty-seven million Americans bought a ticket to see it and it recouped its production costs within two weeks. Although it is still hailed as one of the young Spielberg’s finest films, many have lamented that it paved the way for the dominance of the blockbuster, encouraging the industry to focus on the massive marketing campaigns and merchandising tie-ins still favoured today.

  The making of the film, however, gave little reassurance that its release would be such a hit. The producers paid Benchley $175,000 [$750,000] for the rights before the book had even been published, but rejected his first three attempts at a script. When Spielberg – after some hesitation – was hired to direct, he wrote his own version before turning to Howard Sackler, whom he credited with the structural changes necessary for a screen version.

  Spielberg then asked Carl Gottlieb, better known as a sitcom writer, to come on board for a week to ‘polish’ the script and prevent it from feeling too dark. Gottlieb stayed on, only completing the task after the production had already been underway for nine weeks; scenes were often delivered the night before they were scheduled to be shot. Just as Roy Scheider had come up with the much-quoted line ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’, Robert Shaw (Quint) rewrote the famous scene about his survival after the torpedoing of the USS Indianapolis by the Japanese in July 1945.

  QUINT: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. . . just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail fin. What we didn’t know, was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar named ‘The Battle of Waterloo’, and the idea was: shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark will go away. . . but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark. . . he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living. . . until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then. . . ah, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, they all come in and they. . . rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon, the fifth day, Mr Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He swung in low and he saw us. . . he was a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he come in low and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and starts to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. . . waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, 1,100 men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

  Principal photography was originally estimated at fifty-two days but lasted nearly six months as a result of technical delays, bad weather and the inevitable complications of staging complex drama and special effects with real boats as camera platforms. The mechanical shark – nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer – suffered repeated mechanical failures, trapping George Lucas’s head in its mouth during testing and sinking to the ocean floor on its first outing. Desperate to keep to the schedule during Bruce’s frequent trips to the repair shop, Spielberg resorted to filming several sequences
with a moving underwater camera suggesting the predator’s point-of-view. This stop-gap measure eventually contributed hugely to the film’s atmosphere.

  On dry land, things were just as fraught. Robert Shaw, cast only days before shooting started, was in trouble with the US tax authorities and had to be flown to Canada on his days off. Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss (playing Matt Hooper) had frequent disagreements on set – and occasional actual fights – although their animosity benefited the story. Peter Benchley disliked the ending Spielberg had devised and objected so vehemently he was barred from the set.

  By the end of the gruelling production period, the crew were at the end of their tether. Carl Gottlieb recalls how on the last day Spielberg, sensing he would be the focus of their wrath, wore his most expensive clothes in the hope he might avoid being thrown overboard. When the final shot was approved, he leaped into a waiting speedboat and raced away, shouting: ‘I shall not return!’

  When composer John Williams first played the ominous opening theme for the director, Spielberg is reported to have thought it was a joke. The score went on to win an Oscar, although the film suffered one final setback: Williams was conducting the orchestra for the ceremony when the result was announced, and had to run up on stage to collect his statuette before returning to his duties in the pit.

  1976 NETWORK

  On live TV, a news presenter controversially encourages his viewers to become more involved in the world around them.

  HOWARD

  We know things are bad — worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.