100 top film moments: 71 to 80

(John Ford, US 1956)

All but ignored by the Academy Awards on its release, The Searchers is perhaps the very epitome of the American western - certainly the perfect crystallisation of all John Ford's favoured themes and the best, most complex performance given by its star, John Wayne.

Fittingly for a film about a brutal outsider, The Searchers begins and ends with a shot of an open door filmed from inside a ranch house, looking out - and both the first and last time we see Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, he is framed by darkness.

A mysterious figure whose personal background is shady and possibly criminal, Ethan vows revenge when his brother and sister-in-law are butchered by Indians and their youngest daughter, Debbie, is kidnapped. Ethan begins a five-year quest to find her, but when he does, he finds to his disgust that the child is now a young woman and acclimatised to 'her' people. Ethan is forced to confront his racism through Debbie's part-Cherokee brother Marty, who persuades her to return, and after a tense scene in which his rage suggests that he's more likely to kill her than save her, Ethan safely delivers Debbie to her father's neighbour. He doesn't, however, enter the house, silently returning to his frontier world, a wandering loner who doesn't belong in the stable world of family and relationships. And as the screen fades to black, there's a reprise of the opening music: 'A man will search his heart and soul, go searchin' way out there, his peace of mind he knows he'll find, but where, O Lord, oh where? Ride away, ride away.'

(Bobby and Peter Farrelly, US, 1998)

When drag terrorist Divine ate poodle excrement in John Waters' 1972 arthouse shocker Pink Flamingos, it was a milestone of sorts in cinema. At the time, it was seen by a comparatively small crowd - students, druggies, drop-outs - and reviled by the critics, which makes the mainstream success of There's Something About Mary all the more remarkable. The key point finds Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) facing a date with his longtime fantasy girl Mary (Cameron Diaz). He's nervous, but a friend recommends masturbation as a relaxation technique. So Ted tries it, but at the crucial point he finds no sign of his issue - and Mary is at the door. Giving up his search for the missing semen, Ted goes to meet her but is horrified when she spots the errant seed swinging from his earlobe. Mistaking it for styling gel, she sweeps it into her hair, which, in the very next scene is shown to be a brittle coxcomb.
Unsurprisingly, the Farrelly brothers make no claim to art. "We're not film buffs," says Bobby, whose Rhode Island hometown did not even boast a cinema. "I've never seen Citizen Kane." Peter Farrelly, who raised eyebrows on his debut feature Dumb And Dumber by turning up to a meeting brandishing a book called How To Make A Movie, has no such pretensions either. "We're the anti-Coens," he says. "Nobody analyses our filmmaking, and we don't want them to."

(James Cameron, US, 1997)

Having told steerage free spirit Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) that, as an engaged woman, she cannot go on seeing him, the disenchanted, upper-crust Rose (Kate Winslet) cannot stop herself from slipping off to meet him once more. At the ship's bow, under the reddening evening sky, Jack exhorts her to step up on to the railings, outstretch her arms and lose herself in the exhilarating ocean air. 'Jack, I'm flying!' she exclaims breathlessly - though in reality Winslet and DiCaprio were flailing about on a soundstage, their footage to be integrated later with a computer-generated shot of the great liner powering across the Atlantic. Finally, to the strains of worldwide chartbuster 'My Heart Will Go On' - not to mention the chagrin of teenage girls from Oklahoma to Osaka - DiCaprio moves in for a lingering, illicit kiss. 'Pulling' as only Hollywood can do it: digital artistry and screen chemistry create the most shamelessly romantic clinch since Scarlett O'Hara snared Rhett Butler.

(Cy Endfield, UK, 1964)

When the film's star Stanley Baker couldn't generate enough interest for the film, he decided to invest much of his own fortune in the project. Zulu was based on a true story of epic British Army resistance in Natal in 1879, when 140 soldiers successfully defended the isolated outpost at Rorke's Drift from 4,000 Zulus. Filmed on location in Natal, the second half of the film is characterised by relentless, bloody conflict, until eventually the resilient Brits, aided by good fortune and ingenuity, triumph after the final battle.
Initially, producer Baker couldn't persuade the Zulu extras to re-enact the fighting scenes. The chiefs hadn't seen a movie and failed to grasp what he wanted. Exasperated, Baker sent for an old Gene Autry western to illustrate what he wanted. Once they understood they were being asked to take part in make-believe, they readily agreed.

(Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, Fr, 1990)

Delicatessen is full of dazzling moments of invention, but the grand set-piece - and the one that has recently been 'borrowed' for an ad - is the bedsprings scene. It starts with former clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) trying to paint a ceiling. Upstairs, the cannibalistic butcher and his mistress collapse on to a bed with squeaky bedsprings. Louison decides he'll be able to paint better if he attaches himself to the wall with elastic and is pulled backwards and forwards. Then the camera dives down a pipe to the butcher's daughter who is playing the cello, and then we're back to the bedsprings, now squeaking in rhythm. A woman beating a carpet in another room picks up that rhythm, and so does the cello, and then a man pumping up a bicycle tyre, and the beat speeds up. The two men making the animal noise toys are also testing in time, then an old woman's knitting clicks in, and tempo increases up until finally the butcher climaxes, a cello string breaks, the tyre bursts and the elastic breaks, leaving Louison sprawling on the floor.

(Baz Luhrmann, US, 1996)

During the Nineties we saw Richard III (played by Ian McKellen) as a Nazi, and Prince Hal and Falstaff as homosexuals in Portland (My Own Private Idaho). But BazLuhrmann's MTV-style update was the most gloriously irreverent Shakespeare adaptation seen on the big screen. The Australian director stripped down the Bard's verse, transposing the action from Verona to Verona Beach, LA. Romeo, Mercutio et al sported Hawaiian shirts, carried jewelled semi-automatics and popped ecstacy tablets before the masked ball. In short, Luhrmann took a few liberties. For him the story wasstraightforward. "It's very wild, it's very sexual. It's about two kids who have sex and commit suicide."

The first significant scene between the beautiful kids, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, took place as they locked eyes through an aquarium. It is a rare moment of calm, and they appear to be gazing at their own reflections too: equating young love and narcissism, perhaps. Young audiences certainly fell in love with the film, a raft of Shakespeare-inspired high-school movies followed. None of them contained a scene to match the one in Luhrmann's West Coast Story.

(Brian DePalma, US, 1983)

Still semi-conscious, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) comes to in his Florida crime palace, clutching the bullet-ridden body of his sister Gina. He looks at the security monitors and sees a band of hired assassins flooding into his estate, sent to kill him. 'You wanna play games?' Montana screams. 'I play games with you!' Opening his gun cabinet, he pulls out an M16 assault rifle with a grenade launcher attached. 'You wanna play rough? OK.' Suddenly the mercenaries are at the door, but Montana is ready for them. 'Say hello to my leetle friend.' The grenade blasts through the door, taking half a dozen hoods with it. 'How you like that? My new fuckin' gun!' beams Montana, by now so saturated with cocaine that when death finally comes he's too high to notice. Ridiculed on its release for its astonishing levels of profanity and violence, Scarface is now acclaimed as a scathing attack on Reaganite America. Writer Oliver Stone admitted to being shocked when a Cuban gangster applauded his realism.

(Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1963)

In 1963 the Cold War was particularly icy, following the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. It was into this tense aftermath that Kubrick released Dr Strangelove, the darkest of black comedies. The deranged Colonel Jack D. Ripper seals his airbase and sends his B52 nuclear bombers to attack Russia in the hope of protecting the 'precious bodily fluids' of his American boys from Communist 'preverts' [sic].

The leaders of both superpowers, in a surreally prescient telephone conversation, arrange to shoot down the bombers. However, one bomber, piloted by the wily Major Kong (Slim Pickens) slips into Russian territory, unaware that their attack will trigger Dr Strangelove's doomsday machine and nuclear armageddon.

Reaction to the film varied widely. Mo Rothman, the film's executive producer at Columbia Pictures admonished Kubrick, saying, 'New York does not see anything funny about the end of the world.'

Others thought Kubrick played too hard for laughs. Sellers originally intended to use an asthma inhaler as a prop. Every other sentence he would pause to gasp oxygen from a face mask. The effect was so funny that the crew was frequently incapacitated for the first two days of shooting and after that Kubrick ordered Sellers to play the President straight.

But if one image can sum up the nihilistic machismo of superpower politics and the Cold War it is that of a whooping cowboy riding a plummeting, phallic nuclear bomb.

Ken Adam, production designer
'The scene was actually two scenes. The problem was that the bomb bay had been built at Shepperton, but we had not allowed for practical use of the doors. So Ally Veevers, who went on to do most of the special effects on 2001, came up with the idea of taking a 10x8 still shot of the interior of the bomb bay and the doors, cutting them out and putting in a blue background. We then suspended the bomb on wires and superimposed it, and the Russian missile site was, in fact, a painting, eight feet by five feet, by Alan Maley.
It was very difficult to make the B52 because it was all so secret - we had no collaboration from the US. We got most of our information from aviation magazines like Flight and Jane. It was amazing how much detail we found. The most amusing moment was when US air force personnel, who had been invited to the studio, went white. The code device was apparently very close to something that really had been secretly developed.

Stanley warned me to memorise my sources of information for the set in case we were taken in when we went to the US. Remember that this was just after the Cuban missile crisis and the McCarthy witchhunts weren't that long ago. Stanley was extremely paranoid. He was convinced that nuclear war could break out any second. He used to spend, literally, hours thinking about where the safest place would be if there was a nuclear war, and after calculating radiation fallout patterns and the like, he concluded that it was County Cork in the Republic of Ireland.'

Pablo Ferro, titles editor
'Sellers was going to play Major "King" Kong too, but he hurt his leg. Stanley had worked with Slim Pickens before, on the film One Eyed Jacks, and thought he'd be great. However, as it was filmed in Britain, the producers wanted a British actor. Stanley told them that if they could find someone who was as tall as Slim, looked like him and could talk like him, he would take him. Of course, there was no such thing.

The bomb-dropping scene was a very simple optical trick. I think the idea for it came with Slim - he used to be a rodeo clown, the guy who acts as a diversion when the riders fall off. Veevers did a great job and even put in some cloud, which was very subtle.'

Michael Foot, former Leader of the Labour Party; at the time an anti-nuclear campaigner
'Jill Craigie [Foot's late wife] and I met Stanley Kubrick before he made the film. Jill, who really knew about film, talked with Stanley. She was always a Kubrick fan, or even pupil, and later received a nice letter from him. I also think he might have learnt something from her. She used to say that very few practitioners of the medium were good enough: Chaplin was one, and Kubrick another.

We were thrilled when Strangelove came out - Stanley always brought a touch of genius. It was the most effective film about the Bomb, although there were several others out at that time. That closing scene was very fine - the whole spirit matched the nuclear peril so well. It derided superpower politics and was a protest against every kind of insanity. The genius of Dr Strangelove is that it attacked the wall of secrecy around man's most terrible invention.'

(Jane Campion, Aus, 1993)

The voice of Ada, Holly Hunter's character, only appears as a voiceover on this film. Therefore her music acts as vocal substitute, and needed to be more expressive than a conventional soundtrack. Although the film was set in colonial New Zealand, Ada hails from Scotland. Soundtrack composer Michael Nyman, who was the first person to work alongside director Campion on the film, looked to 19th-century Scottish folk and popular songs for inspiration. Fortunately, Hunter had learnt piano as a child but initially found playing again a 'formidable, frightening task'. Ultimately, 'I had to play so often and so much that in the end I could'. Nyman observed Hunter's hands during rehearsal and composed pieces to correspond with her style. During the scene itself, Harvey Keitel watches with bemusement and admiration as Hunter loses herself in musical rapture and her daughter, played by Anna Paquin, dances wildly. The seeds of his infatuation are sown.

(Giuseppe Tornatore, It/Fr 1988)

Cinema Paradiso was destined to be on this list. There have been plenty of memorable films about making movies but nothing that captures their magical effect on audiences like this one. The film is not shy of clichés or artless plot devices, but the overall package is so enjoyable it's easy to forget the emotional manipulation. The story involves a young boy Salvatore (Marco Leonardi) in an Italian village who enjoys a close friendship with the cinema projectionist (Philippe Noiret). The boy later becomes a distinguished director and his bitter-sweet reminiscences form the crux of the film. Much mileage is taken from the anger expressed by the fanatic cinema audiences of his youth deprived of love scenes by the censorious local priest. The film ends on a poignant note as middle-aged Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) watches a collection of edited kissing scenes he salvaged from the projectionist's floor and presumably cherished for a number of reasons.
Ironically, the film initially left Italian audiences cold. Later, half an hour was cut and the film went on to win the Special Jury Prize at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.