I thought this might be fun.

By "most daring" I don't mean daring to break social taboos of the time, political daring, or anything else external to the film. I mean pure cinematic daring — something audacious and breathtaking in the art and craft of film itself.

I’ll start with an two that came to mind earlier tonight and prompted me to start this thread. They happen to be from the same film — Carol Reed’s The Third Man. (Nothing original about my choices; film buffs have talked about these scenes for decades. With good reason.)

1)
Harry Lime’s entrance. A wonderfully filmed scene — it would be great at any moment. But it’s the positioning in the movie that makes it special. From the very beginning of the film, Harry has been the main character — yet he doesn’t appear until at least an hour into the movie.




2)
The final scene, for two reasons. First, the composition of the shot is so simple — we’re looking directly down the long, tree-lined cemetery road. It recedes into the distance in an almost classical perspective. Anna is centrally framed, walking directly toward the camera. Holly waits for her. And she walks, and walks, and walks…. The unusual length of time focused on such simplicity was unprecedented, and creates a unique flavor of uneasy expectation, utterly different from generic suspense.

Second, contrary to tradition and to our expectations about endings of movies, Holly Martins does not get the girl.

Great choices. When Anna just keeps on wallking, not even acknowledging Martins' presence, it's like a kick in the stomache. Especially given the moral amibguity of both of their situations there. I'm not even hoping that Martins gets the girl. I'm just hoping for some resolution of that ambiguity, Anna saying something like "I know you did what you had to do, but in my heart I can't forgive you." But we get nothing.

For my part, the first scene that comes to my mind is from No Country for Old Men, what ends up happening to Llewelyn Moss. The way that scene is handled confounds your expectations so much, it almost makes you angry. But I think the Coens just took that from Cormac McCarthy's book (I haven't read it yet.)

I really wish Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune had've been made. The whole endeavor was daring. The movie about the movie which was never made is well worth a watch if you're interested in the behind the scenes of the creative process.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/jodorowskys_dune/

I( feel the same about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote which, I just learned when grabbing this link, is back in pre-production, scheduled for release in 2016.

As for daring scenes, the closing sequence of The Wicker Man wins for me (the original, not the fucking shambles with Nicholas Cage).

I prefer the scene in The Wicker Man where he resists temptation (which ultimately leads to his doom).

Damn near all of Sergio's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but particularly the final showdown between Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint, in the cemetery. The scene lasts almost 6 minutes, without a word of dialog.

laklak wrote:Damn near all of Sergio's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but particularly the final showdown between Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint, in the cemetery. The scene lasts almost 6 minutes, without a word of dialog.

Don't tell me anything! I'm watching that this week! (I've somehow managed to make it to age 50 without having seen it.)

Leone has a thing he does, where you will be watching what you think is a long shot, and then suddenly a person or object will come into the frame in extreme close up. It's very startling and disorienting, like a cut without a cut.

Sergio Leone's opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West was going to be epic, but the studio wouldn't get him the actors he wanted. Was basically gonna have the 3 biggest Western stars of the time killed in the opening scene.

Anyway, my nomination would be all of Dogville. There's nobody working today that has the balls of Lars von Trier when it comes to experimental film making. Literally all of his films do something to push the boundaries of the art, but Dogville is probably the ultimate example. And stupidly, after a while, you get so engrossed in the story, that you completely forget about the lack of a set. It reminds me of something that Stewart Lee said about Tiny Ninja Theatre. It's funny for about 5 minutes, but then you get into the story and completely forget that you're watching Tiny Ninja Juliet, because the writing is so great. And in Dogville, the nature of the story definitely lends itself to this setless production, where you can see what's happening in all of the houses at all times.

Shrunk wrote:
Don't tell me anything! I'm watching that this week! (I've somehow managed to make it to age 50 without having seen it.)

We expect a review!

Leone is a big part of any introductory film class, and Clint certainly should be, both as an actor and director. Between the two of them they defined the spaghetti western, and Clint reinvigorated the American horse opera. I think Unforgiven is a masterpiece.

Great theme for a thread!

There were some daring scenes in many of Hollywood's Pre-Code movies.

The crime movie The Public Enemy is famous for the scene in which James Cagney petulantly pushes a half grapefruit into the face of Mae Clark...

The Rains Came (1939)

Daring in the sense that it made very ambitious use of hand-drawn (!) mattes in order to create some spectacular special effects.

Direct links to the relevant scenes...
here, here and here.

Mike_L wrote:Great theme for a thread!

There were some daring scenes in many of Hollywood's Pre-Code movies.

The crime movie The Public Enemy is famous for the scene in which James Cagney petulantly pushes a half grapefruit into the face of Mae Clark...

Can't believe I failed to remember the walk to the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces. Now that was daring.

Aha! Here it is...!


__________________________________

There's also the execution scene from Prancer in the Park ...er... Dancer in the Dark...

(not very good video quality)

I'm With Stupid wrote:Sergio Leone's opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West was going to be epic, but the studio wouldn't get him the actors he wanted. Was basically gonna have the 3 biggest Western stars of the time killed in the opening scene.

Several of the scenes that he actually did film are pretty awesome. Such as the scene in which Henry Fonda and his gangster cronies emerge from the bush and the little boy, having heard the shots, runs out of the house and faces them.

laklak wrote:Damn near all of Sergio's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but particularly the final showdown between Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint, in the cemetery. The scene lasts almost 6 minutes, without a word of dialog.

Got me into Clint's western's in a big way when I watched that late one night on TV as a young lad. Blew me away. Couldn't get enough of them from then on.

I'm not up to you folks level as a film aficionado, sorry. The one film that comes to mind which took me aback long ago, was the 1972 version of Sleuth. It took me quite a while to realize how many actors were in it, and I was delighted by the recognition that the director or whomever opted to tell the story thus.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_(1939_film)

I haven't seen this movie but perhaps the entire reel is a candidate, there are no males in the show at all, it is said that even the animals filmed are female.

igorfrankensteen wrote:I'm not up to you folks level as a film aficionado, sorry. The one film that comes to mind which took me aback long ago, was the 1972 version of Sleuth. It took me quite a while to realize how many actors were in it, and I was delighted by the recognition that the director or whomever opted to tell the story thus.

Oh, yes, that's a great one! I remember the same feeling. Hard to pick out one scene — there are so many, and the whole film was pretty daring.

The_Piper wrote:

igorfrankensteen wrote:I'm not up to you folks level as a film aficionado, sorry. The one film that comes to mind which took me aback long ago, was the 1972 version of Sleuth. It took me quite a while to realize how many actors were in it, and I was delighted by the recognition that the director or whomever opted to tell the story thus.

I've only seen one movie mentioned in the thread, and I don't even know by what measure makes those scenes daring. (good bad ugly)
in other words, this whole thread - woosh

Well, there are so many great films out there — I'm hoping part of the fun of this thread will be to get tips on ones I haven't seen yet — of which there are plenty. The only ones in this thread so far that I've seen are Sleuth and the one I started with (The Third Man). The others are now on my list.

You bring up a good point about knowing what makes these scenes daring. I can't enforce rules for the thread, but I'm hoping people will post a bit of explanation, so it doesn't become another sort of general thread of favorite movies or scenes from movies. (Fun though those threads are.)

Here's a subtle one, from All the President's Men. I can't embed the video, but you can watch it here, along with a really good explanation of why it's as cool as the film guys say it is. (Much better explanation than I could manage.)

A still from the scene: