Read an Excerpt
FOREWORD
One of the things I love about movies is that nearly everyone in them can be counted on to say the right thing at the right time. Not once in my life do I recall anybody saying the right thing—the exact right thing—to me at the right time, or me saying it to anyone (though many’s the time I thought of it later). It only happens in the movies.
The golden age of movie dialogue was the 1930s; performers in that decade were almost always saying terrific things to each other. (The rest of the time they were saying “Gee, you’re swell.”) It’s kind of eerie to realize that these memorable lines were delivered before most of us were born—and that virtually all of the men and women who appeared in movies of the early ‘30s are now dead. Yet—thanks to repertory cinemas, television, videocassette transferal, and the film preservation crusade—these people are still alive to us. I was about to call them ghosts, but as they will continue to speak these same lines—the lines they first spoke before we were born—after we’re gone, maybe it’s we who are the ghosts.
What follows are 200 of the most eloquent, witty, moving, clever, silly, poetic, and outrageous things uttered on the screen since the advent of the talking picture. As you read these lines—which I have arranged in what I hope is a sequentially meaningful way—see if you can identify their contexts (revealed in the back of the book, beginning on this page).
Without further ado then, allow me to conclude this introduction by invoking what is believed to be the most oft-spoken movie line of all time: “Let’s get out of here.”
D. T.
I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.
Man, she looked as if she’d just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.
I know I must look funny to you but maybe if you went to Mandrake Falls you’d look just as funny to us—only nobody’d laugh at you and make you feel ridiculous, ’cause that wouldn’t be good manners.
I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.
That’s one of the tragedies of this life—that the men who are most in need of a beating-up are always enormous.
If I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you.
Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!
If I had choice of weapons with you, sir, I’d choose grammar.
Now, I am in no position to mention their names by name but I can tell you this—they are the kind of types that have been known to act very hotheaded in their day and age.
