Endgame... Once Upon a Time in the West.
Your modern film-maker has many tricks up his book to keep the fickle audience interested: cutting-edge CGI, smart title design, a knowing cameo, even - if things are getting really desperate - Jean-Claude Van Damme showing off his best dancing. Sometimes, though, it's best to keep it simple, up the stakes and stun the impatient viewer with a flashback: one of the oldest tricks in the book (first used in 1908 short The Yiddisher Boy, fact-heads). If the ensemble is looked bored, the pace is dragging, a hefty hit of pure plot juice might be just what your film needs.
1) Vietnam nostalgia, scrapping girl guides, Saturday Night Fever spoofs, Cossack dancing: the Naked Gun team make their flashback window count in Airplane!
2) Analepsis (that's flashback to you and me) is leaking out of the floors and walls at Manderley in Hitchcock's Rebecca - a bit irritating if you're just trying to live there.
3) Sergio Leone used flashback in the same muscular way he did everything else, but it's devastating in Once Upon a Time in the West: dangled in front of you throughout the entire film on that harmonica riff, Leone finally lets you have it near the end.
4) Labelled the perfect movie frequently enough to make you think it might be true, Rashomon is constructed on flashbacks of the same incident from multiple protagonists, each with a worse memory than Ozzy Osbourne playing Kim's Game.
5) For people who've transcended human norms, superheroes seem to struggle to break free of the past more than most - bring on those flashbacks. Here's the moment for Bruce Wayne's therapist in Tim Burton's Batman. And in the formative Spider-Man flashback (not quite in the past tense, here, admittedly), Peter Parker gets one last lesson from Uncle Ben.
Many thanks to those of you who responded to last week's blog about your favourite "feelbad" movies. Here are some of your more depressing choices:
1) The ending of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is possibly one of the most depressing sequences of all time, but almost as upsetting is Ellen Burstyn's almost-Oscar-winning monologue.
2) Dead Man's Shoes offers a pretty bleak vision of life in a midlands graveyard, amongst the biggest bunch of scummers around. Fortunately Paddy Considine's tough-as-all-hell vengeful spirit offers some much-welcomed entertainment, if not relief.
3) Little in the way of a happy ending to Mathieu Kassovitz's tale of hoodlums in the slums of Paris, La Haine.
4) Apocalypse Now's journey into madness leaves the viewer almost as distressed as Colonel Kurtz after the incident with the innoculated babies' arms.
5) Deliverance contains enough death and destruction to last a lifetime, but there's also the rather wonderful duelling banjos scene, the song from which won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance.
