My Favorite Scene In All The Movies

Today's question is directed at all of my fellow old-movie buffs out there:

Do you have a scene from the movies that you love so much you just wish you could somehow have been in it?

I'm going to take a shot here at guessing what are probably the highest-rated movie scenes of all time. My guess would be that the list begins with something like this:

1. The final scene of Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, "Here's looking at you, kid," just before she gets on the plane with Paul Henreid and leaves Bogey forever.

2. The scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

3. The scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman and Robert Redford are stranded on a cliff about 150 feet above a river, with a posse closing in on them and no way of escape, and they get into an argument about whether or not they should jump into the river. After they go back and forth about it, Redford finally bursts out with "I can't swim!" Whereupon Newman goes into a laughing fit and replies, "What are you, crazy? The FALL'll probably kill you!" And over they go.

Let's analyze each of these.

Casablanca is probably the "date flick" all of all time. Made in 1942, it's one of those movies that finds a perfect "blend," and I don't mean only in the flawless casting. The character Rick Blaine in this movie, played by Humphrey Bogart, is every heterosexual woman's dream man, by which I mean he is 50 percent macho tough guy and 50 percent sensitive, hurt creature who needs healing. Rick anticipates that treacly Alan Alda "sensitive guy" persona by 30 years, but manages not to be so queasily ... sensitive.

For the three people out there who don't know the plot, most of it is back-story. As the film opens, World War II is underway, and Rick is running a cafe in Casablanca, in German-occupied French Morocco. It's the most popular evening spot in a town filled with war-displaced refugees from Europe, trying to get to America. One night Ilse, played by Ingrid Bergman, walks in with her husband Victor Lazslo, played by Paul Henreid.

Bogey then utters my favorite line in all the movies: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

It turns out that Bogey and Bergman had been lovers in Paris, just as the war was starting. But she was harboring a secret, that she was already married to Henreid, a famous resistance-fighter against the Nazis who was reputed to have perished in a concentration camp. Only he hadn't. It turned out that he was alive and had been brought, wounded and sick, back to Paris. Discovering that her husband was not dead after all, Ilse had abandoned Rick without explaining anything, just as they were to leave Paris together. We find out later that she thought she was protecting him, knowing that if he knew the truth, he would refuse to leave and the Germans would surely apprehend him, since he had been active before the war in the anti-fascist cause.

Bogey's character, Rick, has been sitting in Casablanca licking his wounds ever since. Ilse broke Rick's heart, and he's bitter and angry. Then she shows up in his cafe. As the movie spins out, Bogey gradually learns the truth about Ilse and his anger and bitterness turns to deep, intense conflict. He still loves her, and she, as it turns out, still loves him as well. But now he has to decide which is more important, his love for Ilse or Lazslo's need for her in the face of the tremendous anti-Nazi resistance movement of which he's part.

It's the perfect private-desire-versus-public-duty conflict. Rick eventually surprises Ilse (and possibly himself) by deciding to do the unselfish thing and send Ilse away with her husband to America, despite his love for her, to continue fighting the good fight. And everyone knows how the film ends: Bogey and Claude Rains, the corrupt French police official who has been his friend throughout the film, walk off into the fog together as the "Marseillaise" swells on the soundtrack.

Great stuff. No wonder that last scene inspired Woody Allen to write his own tribute to the film in Play it Again, Sam.

When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner in 1989, is the ultimate postfeminist romantic comedy, by which I mean its plot revolves around a guy (Billy Crystal) who is very arrogant about his sexual potency, and who gets his comeuppance in the form of Meg Ryan, with whom he develops a prickly friendship over the decades that doesn't turn into romance until the very end of the film. When this film first came out it was, and on DVD still is, what my friend Kathleen Parker would call "a huge bonding agent" for women. In one scene after another Billy Crystal gets that comeuppance that must tickle women so: Meg Ryan puts him down with snappy comebacks, and then his wife dumps him, and there's that scene every woman loves, in which Meg Ryan gives him the humiliation of all time by showing him, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, how easy it is for a woman to fake an orgasm. She does so, loudly, at the table, drawing everyone's attention, giving millions of women out there in movie-land the satisfaction of imagining Billy Crystal's dick shrinking to the size of a bloodworm.

Of course the scene does have a funny punchline, as everyone knows. When Meg is through bucking and moaning and panting in her chair, an old lady in a neighboring booth (who I understand was Rob Reiner's real-life mother) points to her and says, "I'll have what she's having." This is all good old Jewish-American gagwriting of course, but it's a classic, if somewhat mean-spirited moment. And to Marilu Henner, whom I saw chortling over this scene in a TV Land special, and all her feminist pals out there who relish this scene because it humiliates men, I invite you all to go fake orgasms with each other. I'll watch the World Series, thank you.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (1969) is a classic of another kind, the "buddy" genre. A lot of critics disliked it for the same reason they disliked Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier: it takes a couple of criminals and makes them likable. This was part of that whole 1960s "anti-establishment" thing: Hollywood decided to chuck out the hero-vs.-villain paradigm and pitch "moral relativity," which promptly led to something called an "anti-hero," as exemplified by the character Jack Nicholson played in Five Easy Pieces (1970). What makes the formula entertaining, and the scene on the cliff so unforgettable, is the way Newman and Redford managed to interact in this western as a vaudeville team. Newman got the laughs; Redford was the straight man. He played the Sundance Kid as a macho dimwit who had that one talent going for him: he was a lightning-fast, deadly shot with a gun. Beyond that he's essentially clueless, and one gets the impression that if the character played by Katharine Ross weren't already his girlfriend, he might have trouble with women once they'd gotten past his good looks because there isn't much beyond his good looks except his prowess with a six-shooter. He follows Butch like the dumb cat follows the smart cat in a cartoon. ("When are we gonna catch the mouse, George?") When they get cornered on that cliff, the repartee starts going back and forth machine-gun quick. Butch isn't that much smarter than Sundance, but he's more glib ("You just keep thinkin' Butch, what's what you're good at!" "Man, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals!" -- This after Butch has just hatched a scheme for the two of them to go off and rob banks in Bolivia, a country whose location he isn't even sure about.) Of course the "punchline" of this scene is not so much Butch's ridicule of Sundance's fear of drowning, when they're facing much worse danger on the way down, but Sundance's eloquent response: "Oh, oh, oh, SSHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!" As he launches himself off the cliff and into the river below.

But my favorite scene in all of the movies is the "Doc, we gotta make some scotch" scene from Joshua's Logan's Mister Roberts (1955.) Mr. Roberts is just about my favorite film anyway; when my wife Valerie and I were engaged and I came to Washington for a visit, she took me out for a big treat: a revival at the Kennedy Center of Thomas Heggen's 1948 Broadway play on which the movie was based.

This scene is a perfectly wonderful example of mini-ensemble acting. Henry Fonda, William Powell and the very young Jack Lemmon are here, interacting as three officers on a rusty Navy cargo ship doing its dull, boring job in a safe area of the South Pacific during the waning days of World War II. Henry Fonda is Mr. Roberts, an idealistic young man who quit medical school to join the Navy and participate in the great crusade against fascism, only to find himself stuck on a sorry old bucket, The U.S.S. Reluctant, hauling toothpaste and toilet paper around in non-combat areas, and bullied by a tyrannical captain played by James Cagney on top of that. William Powell is the ship's doctor, an older and wiser source of dry wit and wisdom, and Jack Lemmon is Ensign Frank Thurlow Pulver, a shiftless, lazy and above all lecherous young man who's trying to get through the war without leaving his bunk.

In this scene, Henry's Fonda's character has decided he's going to try and get liberty for the crew. "You gotta get these men a liberty, Mr. Roberts! They're goin' asiatic!" cries an exasperated chief played by Ward Bond after breaking up a nasty fight. The problem of course is the captain. The mean old bastard won't let the crew have a liberty because...well, just because he's a mean old bastard.

Roberts decides to do an end-run around the captain. When he learns that the port director of the island where they've been rotting in the sunny harbor for God-knows-how-long used to be a big scotch drinker before the war, Roberts takes a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that he's been hoarding in a shoebox to celebrate the day he gets off that rustbucket of a cargo ship, and gives it to the port director, "compliments of the captain," in order to get the port director to send the Reluctant to Elysium island, which is known as a great liberty port.

Pulver, meanwhile, has learned that a planeload of nurses just arrived the night before at the island's hospital. With that for incentive, he pries himself out of his bunk and goes ashore on an errand to pick up aspirin for Doc as an excuse to check out the chicks. He hits on one of them and lures her out to the ship with the promise of some of Doug Roberts' scotch, only to return and find out that Roberts has already used the bottle of whiskey for another purpose. The following dialogue ensues:

Pulver: You didn't give that shoebox to that
port director?


Roberts: I did, compliments of the Captain.



Doc: You've been hoarding a quart of scotch
in a shoebox?



Roberts: I was gonna break it out
the day l get off this ship. Resurrection day!



Pulver: You wasted that bottle of scotch
On a……on a man?



Roberts: Will you name me another sex
within 5000 miles? What's eating you anyway, Frank?



Doc: Well, look at the fancy pillows! Somebody expecting company?


Roberts: Good Lord! '' Toujours l'amour.'' ''Souvenir of San Diego.''
''Oh, you kid! '' ''Tonight or never.' ''Compliments of
the American Harvester Company.'' ''We plow deep while others sleep.'' Doc, that new hospital hasn't got nurses, has it?



Doc: It didn't have yesterday.



Pulver: It has today.



Roberts: How did you find out that they were there?



Pulver: It just came to me all of a sudden. I was lying on my bunk here
this morning, thinking. And there wasn't a breath of air. All of a sudden a funny thing happened. A little breeze came up. I took a big deep breath and said to myself: ''Pulver boy, there's women on that island!

Roberts: Doc, you know a thing like that could make
a bird dog real self-conscious.


Pulver: They flew in last night. Knockouts! And one big blonde especially. Of course, she went for me right away. Naturally.So I started to turn on the old personality,and I said: ''Will nothing make you come out to the ship with me?'
And she said, ''Yes, there is one thing and one thing only: ''A good stiff drink of scotch! ''


Roberts: I'm sorry, Frank. l'm really sorry. Your first assignment in a year.

Roberts and Doc proceed to try and make amends with Pulver, and aid him in his romantic pursuit, by making a bottle of fake "scotch." Rummaging around for whatever they can find, they come up with clear grain alcohol, to which they add Coca-Cola for color, iodine for flavor and hair tonic for aging. Then they taste it. Pulling a horrible face, Roberts says, "You know, Doc? It does taste a little like scotch."

I won't spoil the ending. Get the DVD. Enjoy.