25 GREAT MOVIE MOMENTS

(with apologies to FILM COMMENT's "Moments out of Time" feature)

NOTE: Not the 25 Great Movie Moments - just a selection off the top of my head, so don't bother protesting about what should have been included. However - if you want to make yourself useful - feel free to rent these movies on video and let me know of any inaccuracies (some of these "moments" are taken from memory, as I can't get hold of the films themselves). You'd be doing me a favour ; more importantly - if you haven't already seen these 25 bits of celluloid brilliance - you'd be doing yourself a favour. Trust me.

The sound of a phone ringing. In an opium den, Noodles (Robert de Niro) stumbles awake. The phone keeps ringing. Expert hands massage him back into slumber. The phone keeps ringing. Flashback to a rainswept night, Noodles looking on as the cops recover the charred bodies of his fellow gangsters. The phone keeps ringing. Flashback to an end-of-Prohibition party, the other gangsters still alive, champagne flowing. The phone - infuriatingly - keeps ringing. Noodles hesitates, then picks up the phone. The phone keeps ringing. He's not answering a call, he's making one - the call to the cops, betraying his friends, that'll haunt him for the rest of his life. The inexorable pain of guilty memories, made audible ; Once Upon a Time in America...

Middle-aged kiss in Seconds: the pasty over-exposed faces, the perfunctory smack of lips, the terrible way these jowly sagging bodies cling to each other against the chill of encroaching Death...

"Oh yeah? Well I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here!" - Annie Hall...

Cradled awkwardly by the young bride, the newly-adopted baby - adopted reluctantly, for the extra money and because the nuns insisted - cranes his head back slowly, solemnly to examine her then buries his face in her shoulder, then back again and into her again - "So this is my new Mom...yeah, I guess she's okay"; and they accept each other. An ineffably lovely moment in The Tree of Wooden Clogs...

A coffee cup falls, shatters; fragments start to come together : The Usual Suspects...

In the same motion (but in different scenes) a little girl throws a ball and her father throws a box of matches, her imminent death presaging his : best of a thousand jumpcuts in Don't Look Now...

Keith Carradine and Lesley Ann Warren talk around their feelings for each other ; he scares her a little ; "I think...I can make it alone now," she says, starts to walk past him - and, with a suddenness that's pure poetry, their lips meet as an a cappella choir softly intervenes : "Choose Me, baby"...

In his interview at the juvenile centre, the imperishable say-what expression - shock and mischief combined - on Antoine Doinel's face as the innocuous questions about childish misdeeds are succeeded by "Have you ever slept with a girl?" - The 400 Blows...

Medium Cool: filming at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, director Haskell Wexler is warned - "Watch out Haskell, it's real!" - by an offscreen someone as a National Guardsman fires a canister of teargas. Life imitating art but also, as the film cuts away, a nagging suspicion that the line could have been added later, for dramatic effect (is there such a thing as fake teargas?) ; you can't trust these movie people...

"A always! B be! C closing!" : the implacable aggression of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross...

Definition of the word "cool" : languid James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven, sitting in the shade leaning against a fence, lifts up his hat a little to squash a would-be challenger : "You lost"...

"Boy, I hope you ain't just telling us what we want to hear." - "No sir, no way!" - " 'Cause what we want to hear is the truth." - "Well sir, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear." - "Boy...didn't we just tell you not to do that?" - Nicolas Cage meets the Parole Board, Raising Arizona...

Hot light, baking asphalt, an old car amid gas-pumps and a sign for "EATS" - sights and textures outside a truckstop where the Joads will buy 10 cents-worth of bread and a flinty waitress will surprise herself with an act of kindness ("Them's two for a penny") : the miraculous muscular beauty of Gregg Toland's images, The Grapes of Wrath...

Raymond Burr notices Grace Kelly signalling, thinks for a moment, puts two and two together - then looks straight at the camera! Oh shit - now we're gonna get it...Rear Window...

Double exposure : her husband in the hospital, Belle de Jour gazes out from her balcony - and sly Bunuel superimposes a shot of the woods where her sexual fantasies are set. Fair warning, folks : from this point on, everything you see is both real and not...

"Carl LaFong. Capital L, small a, capital F, small o, small n, small g. LaFong. Carl LaFong." Why do you hate people so much, Mr. Fields? It's a Gift...

Great Beginnings #1 : Ruby-red lips. A dab of lipstick, a glance in the mirror. The aquiline form of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker stalks the little room, pounding the bed in frustration, goes to the window where Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow is loitering beside the old jalopy : "Hey, boy! What you doin' with my mama's car?"

Great Beginnings #2 : Best-ever synthesis of hot visuals and cool music, The Shining (runner-up : Chungking Express)...

Great Beginnings #3 : Stalled cars in a silent tunnel. Gas spreads inside the car : the sound of your anguished breathing and the frantic squeak of bare hands up and down the window. Nameless people in other cars watch silently, impassively as you suffocate. The stuff of nightmare in 8 1/2...

Great Beginnings #4 : "Whar's that Joe Buck?" Puttin' on his cowboy duds. "Whar's that Joe Buck?" Turnin' to catch his reflection in the mirror. "Whar's that Joe Buck?" Goin' to New York, be a Midnight Cowboy. Everybody's talkin' at me...

Unforgettable Endings #1 : Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), the man who was too rational to believe in hats, tips his fedora to a snappier angle, acknowledging all the crazy stuff that's happened and - not so incidentally - aligning himself with a whole mythology of style from films noir and old gangster flicks, entering the irrational world of movies and finding that perfect Bogartian pose of cynicism-with-heart that's his redemption. Miller's Crossing...

Unforgettable Endings #2 : Asleep on the chair with the dumb Doberman at his feet, a vague kind of smile playing on his lips : the smallest, tenderest of mercies for Paul Newman's Sully in Nobody's Fool...

Unforgettable Endings #3 : The pain, shock, bewilderment on the boy's face, looking up at his father then unblinkingly ahead, stumbling slightly, trying to make sense of a world upside-down. Heartbreaking ; Bicycle Thieves...

Unforgettable Endings #4 : Margaret Sullavan's surprise, her shiny eyes as she finally understands : "You? 'Dear Friend'?..." James Stewart's grave expression as he asks, "Are you disappointed?" The genius - the genius - of changing the tone at the last moment. The absurd unexpected shot as he lifts up his trouser legs to prove he isn't bowlegged. The moment's pause, then the rapture as she throws her arms around him. The most perfect ending to any romantic comedy. The Shop Around the Corner...

Unforgettable Endings #5 : In The Night of the Hunter, Lillian Gish's paean to the resilience of little children : "The wind blows and the rains are cold...Yet they abide..."

Unforgettable Endings #6 : "Heavy," grunts bearish, good-hearted cop Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) as he lifts the lump of crudely-shaped black metal ; "What is it?" Bogie's eyes are perhaps a little sadder, his heart a little heavier, thinking of Mary Astor's lovely face in the shadow of iron bars as he dons his hat and takes The Maltese Falcon : "Oh," he says, walking past the cop and down the stairs (and, incidentally, furnishing the tag-line for a home-made Website 56 years later), "the stuff that dreams are made of..."

P.S. OK, so it's actually 26 Great Movie Moments. So which one would you take out?