(Michael Curtiz, 1942)
“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Said by liberal nightclub owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) to collaborationist police chief Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) as they quit vanquished Morocco to join the Free French army in West Africa. In a script as quotable as Hamlet, this witty, sophisticated last line captures the pervasive tone of the movie’s patriotic response to the conflicting wartime demands of love and duty. The film lists three screenwriters, but this final scene was written and directed by its hands-on producer Hal B Wallis on an empty, fog-filled set Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
(Victor Fleming, 1939)
“I’ll go home and I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!” This is the optimistic reaction of the determined southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) when a terminally exasperated Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) walks out on her with the parting shot “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Virtually the same as the last words of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller, but the novel doesn’t have a glorious Technicolor sunset, William Cameron Menzies as production designer, or Max Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme” Photograph: Public Domain
(Billy Wilder, 1959)
“Well, nobody’s perfect!” Spoken by the cheerful, much married millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E Brown) as he steers his motorboat away from a Miami pier. It’s his response when the new love of his life, Daphne (Jack Lemmon in drag), who’s been playing in an all-girls band, doffs her wig and says: “I’m a man!” Wilder was the master of final pay-offs, and the last lines of, for example, Sunset Boulevard (“All right Mr De Mille, I’m ready for my close-up”) and The Apartment (“Shut up and deal”), are classics Photograph: Allstar
(Ernest Schoedsack, 1933)
“Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” This was the epitaph on the giant ape Kong, shot dead by fighter planes after carrying Fay Wray to the top of the Empire State Building. It’s spoken by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), the ruthless film-maker who captured Kong on Skull Island. The 1976 remake, in which Kong is harassed by helicopters atop the World Trade Centre, has no such ending. Peter Jackson’s 2005 version sticks closer to the original, is set during the Depression and features Denham’s last line Photograph: Everett Collection /Rex Features
(Lewis Milestone, 1931)
“The son of a bitch stole my watch!” This is the final line of the great 1928 newspaper comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, delivered by the cynical yellow-press editor Walter Burns over the telephone as a message to the police, his ultimate dirty trick to prevent ace reporter Hildy Johnson escaping from his services. In the 1931 film version, Burns (Adolphe Menjou) “accidentally” touches a typewriter key on the word “bitch” to placate the censors. In Billy Wilder’s 1974 film with Walter Matthau as Burns, the line is restored to its full glory Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)
“Mother of mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” These are the last words of the dying gangster in the Warner Bros film that made a star of Edward G Robinson. In his classic 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”, Robert Warshow writes of Rico speaking of himself in the third person “because what has been brought low is not the undifferentiated man, but the individual with a name, the gangster, the success”. And he mentions that “TS Eliot has pointed out that a number of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves dramatically” Photograph: Public Domain
(Bryan Singer, 1995)
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And like that – poof – he’s gone!” Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for his original screenplay of this brilliantly plotted thriller, gave the line to the film’s singularly unreliable narrator, Verbal Kint (a role for which Kevin Spacey won an Oscar), while explaining the demonic super criminal Keyser Söze to a police interrogator. It’s repeated as a devastating flashback at the end. The title of The Usual Suspects comes from Captain Renault’s cynical refrain, “Round up the usual suspects,” in Casablanca Photograph: Rex Features
(Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
“Mein Führer, I can walk!” Kubrick and his co-screenwriter Terry Southern created Dr Strangelove, the German-born wheelchair-bound US presidential adviser, a combination of Fritz Lang’s mad scientist Rotwang from Metropolis, Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War, Henry Kissinger, and Ian Fleming’s Dr No. But it was Peter Sellers who, in addition to playing two other roles, put the character of Strangelove together. He improvised much of his dialogue, including this comically shocking final line that suggests an ultimate triumph of the will Photograph: PA
(Roman Polanski, 1974)
“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” One of the most lapidary of concluding sentences, this consoling remark directed by a professional associate at bereft Los Angeles private eye JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), is a key line in the movie that revived the film noir and launched neo-noir. It derives from screenwriter Robert Towne’s historical research into pre-war southern California and from Jake Gittes’s experiences as a policeman in the Chinese ghetto before he became a private detective. Chinatown is a metaphor for the indecipherability of 1930s Los Angeles and its labyrinthine corruption Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
(John Huston, 1941)
“The stuff that dreams are made of.” It’s the answer private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) provides when a San Francisco cop (Ward Bond) holds up the fake version of the priceless Maltese Falcon and asks: “It’s heavy, what is it?” Hammett’s novel ends less dramatically. This parting line in his directorial debut, a slight misquotation of Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest, is a comment anticipating the elusive grails that lie beyond the reach of so many Huston characters – for example in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Man Who Would Be King Photograph: Public Domain
