What is the Most Famous Movie Scene?

[Derrick]

LOL, you are joking right?

Jaws is known the world over, from Bali to Bombay.

Oliver???????

No. I'm not having a laugh I love Jaws too but Oliver! won the Oscar for best film in 1969 and has many memorable scenes usually around the fantastic show numbers such as;

• Food Glorious Food and Oliver asking for more.
• Harry Secombe peddling Oliver around the streets, Boy For Sale bit, speaks volumes about the times and how human life is valued in money terms.
• Got to Pick a Pocket or Two where Fagin teaches Oliver the trade so to speak.
• Fagin's boys show of love for Nancy in the I'd Do Anything section.
• Ron Moody sending the boys off to steal during the Be Back Soon song.
• Who Will Buy? is just simply, truly wonderfully produced.
• Shani Wallis singing As Long As He Needs Me about Bill Sikes is most poignant.

The highlight though IMHO is Ron Moody performing Reviewing The Situation which shows the wretched Fagin looking for a way out of his life of crime and hoping to keep his stash intact.

Oliver! is one of the greatest films ever made...and a British one to boot....full stop.

Derrick

[Tom_Wescott]

Oliver has not been seen by many people under age 30. Scenes from Jaws are certainly more well-known as it's a more popular film. However, the MOST famous scene has to be from Wizard of Oz, since that's the ONLY film seen by every person age 5 to 75.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Derrick]

Oliver has not been seen by many people under age 30. Scenes from Jaws are certainly more well-known as it's a more popular film. However, the MOST famous scene has to be from Wizard of Oz, since that's the ONLY film seen by every person age 5 to 75.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

So you know for certain that every person from 5 to 30 has seen the Wizard Of Oz?

I very much doubt it Tom. A lot of persons under the age of 30 don't even know where eggs come from for goodness sake! Most say Tesco!

Derrick

[Derrick]

Janet Leigh taking that shower in Psycho!

It may be the most shown scene from Psycho but I think that the most scary scene is when the sheriff climbs the stairs in the Bates house and Norman runs across the landing and attacks him dressed as his mother. Scared the ******* **** out of me when I was a kid! That's Hitchcock at his best.

Talking of scary ****...Salems Lot had its moments too.

Derrick

[Natalie Severn]

True Derrick.That other scene was equally terrifying !

Tom,
In the UK Oliver is shown nearly every year!

[The Grave Maurice]

My youngest child, who is still under 20, loves Oliver!.

As an aside, although Oliver! was a hit in London, David Merrick seemed worried about its acceptance in New York so he tried it out all over North America before opening on Broadway. It played on the US west coast and then in Detroit while they tinkered with it and finally made its way to Toronto where I saw it. Some of the Toronto theatre critics weren't kind. One of them said that songs like "Food, Glorious Food" were more like chants than songs. I thought the critics were nuts.

I can still hear Georgia Brown singing "As Long As He Needs Me" in the second act while standing on a sort of wooden walkway. Her performance stopped the show. The ovation lasted several minutes.

[Robert]

The Irish version of "Oliver" flopped. A cry of "encore" was greeted by the cast with "What???Ask for more???" and a deathly hush ensued.

[mariab]

Tom Wescott wrote:
However, the MOST famous scene has to be from Wizard of Oz, since that's the ONLY film seen by every person age 5 to 75.
Hmmm, maybe in the States. Sorry to disappoint, but I've never seen The Wizard of Oz. I read the childrens' book as a kid, I digged the beginning with the tornado part, but the rest bored me to death. I can recognize Judy Garland singing “Over the rainbow“ and that's about it. “The yellow brick road“ is a Quantico training-trail reference to me.

Derrick wrote:
from Psycho I think that the most scary scene is when the sheriff climbs the stairs in the Bates house and Norman runs across the landing and attacks him dressed as his mother. Scared the ******* **** out of me when I was a kid! That's Hitchcock at his best.
That scene is pretty creepy, but to me it comes off as a bit of hilarious too.
I think that Hitchcock is more sophisticated in Vertigo than in Psycho, but then, it's almost a different genre.
I'm trying to find a movie scene which scared the sh*t out of me, but coming out empty handed. Possibly some scenes in Don't look now. I was pretty disgusted (but not scared) in the opening scene of The eyes of Laura Mars when the old lady gets stabbed in the eye and they show the results in great detail. And I recall that as a tween, after having just watched Fatal attraction, I was brushing my teeth and looking behind my back if Glenn Close wasn't resurfacing from the bathtub with a knife, but this was more like a joke, again.
The first time I saw Jaws, as a kid in an open summer movie theater by the beach, I remember shivering during the entire movie, but maybe it was from the cold. After the movie we went swimming in the dark. It's a rite of passage among tweens in Greece (at least it used to be), to watch Jaws and then go swim, and the boys dive and pull at the girls' legs and stuff. Actually most of the girls dive too and pull the boys underwater for some innocent frolicking.

[Derrick]

That scene is pretty creepy, but to me it comes off as a bit of hilarious too.
I think that Hitchcock is more sophisticated in Vertigo than in Psycho, but then, it's almost a different genre.
I'm trying to find a movie scene which scared the sh*t out of me, but coming out empty handed.

I agree, Vertigo and Rear Window are first class. Psycho is perhaps a bit dated now. One of my favourites of Hitchcock is Frenzy. You know who did it early on but that just ratchets up the tension.

The eyeball slicing scene from Un Chien Andalou is probably more gut churning than scary.
When I was a kid I always used to hide behind the sofa when Talos comes to life in Jason and the Argonauts. Still love that film and have now gotten over my Talos fears!!

Derrick

[sleekviper]

The character of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was highly thought to be the niece of the author. She died at a young age, and the wife of Baum, the author, took it extremely badly for a long period of time. In tribute, she was born again in the tales. Dorothy Gage is buried in Bloomington, Illinois.

[mariab]

To Sleekviper:
Wow, fascinating, about Dorothy having been inspired by the author's niece. I'm afraid I'm mixing up pieces and parts from The Wizard of Oz with Alice in Wonderland. As a kid for some reason I didn't appreciate either of them, and found them very similar, but I was totally nuts for everything by Jules Verne and some of Shakespeare's. As a kid my favorites were Richard III and As you like it, but today I don't enjoy As you like it so much anymore. I think it's more of an exercice in form than content. Still, as an exercise in form it's completely ingenious.

To Derrick:
I just looked up Frenzy and apparently it's the movie adaptation from a thriller novel called Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square of which I didn't know about, but I'm almost shocked that it's quoted in (my favorite show) BtVS by the character Spike (in the episode Becoming, Part I). All ways lead to Buffy?

Derrick wrote:
The eyeball slicing scene from Un Chien Andalou is probably more gut churning than scary.
I love Bunuel, but I haven't yet managed to see his early ones, like Un chien Andalou. I'm fairly OK with broken bones, blood and body parts flying around (also in reality, not just in movies), but I fully agree that eye slicing is gross. On the other side, possibly because I wear contact lenses, I find eyeball extracting hilarious (as in the scene with Arnie Schwartzenegger in Terminator I), because sometimes at the end of an active day a contact lens wearer feels like doing exactly that, as in, taking their eyeballs off. Also contact lenses wearers are fully comfortable with keeping their fingers inside of their eyes like for hours, which other people might find gross and upsetting.
This also reminds me of an eye hematoma injury I once got as a teen (accidentally hit in the face by some guy during a ball game) where the doctors said that if it doesn't go away, they'd have to give me a cortizone shot inside the eye. I begged them to wait for another week, and it went away by itself, to my huge relief.

Derrick wrote:
When I was a kid I always used to hide behind the sofa when Talos comes to life in Jason and the Argonauts. Still love that film and have now gotten over my Talos fears!!
I might have seen that movie as a little kid, as well as Ulysses with Kirk Douglas. I'm so sorry to not recall any Talos... Was he a giant cyclop or something?

[sleekviper]

Hello Maria, Baum wrote it in the style of Alice, it would sell. He also didn't want people to think it would be in the class of Brothers Grimm.

[mariab]

Sleekviper wrote:
Baum wrote it in the style of Alice, it would sell
So that's about it, ain't it? Always follow the scent to the dough , it's the (sad) history of the world...

[Joseph]

So many truly unforgettable scenes in William Wyler's "Ben-Hur" (1959).


None more so than the scene where Ben-Hur is on a chain-gang, thirsting for water and falls to the ground. He cries out..."God...help me" A few seconds later someone comes to his rescue, kneels down and refreshes and caresses his face with water and then gives him some to drink from a cup. The Roman soldier nearby (who had forbidden anyone to give Ben-Hur water) witnesses this and (whip in hand) shouts over "You...I said no water for him."
The Roman soldier then comes face to face with this Person and is left speechless. It somehow dawns on him that he is powerless in the presence of this man. God's son, Jesus, (whom we only see from the rear) has come to the aid of Ben-Hur.

It becomes even more poignant and moving towards the end of the movie when the roles are reversed........