Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai
Sadly, I can’t find a video of this speech.
Gives me chills everytime…
Not so sure if this qualifies as a speech or a monologue but On S’embrasse? by Pierre Olivier Mornas comes to my mind.
Many great picks—the Lugosi/Landau bits are wonderful—as are “The Browning Version” and Alec Baldwin—and much else everyone has mentioned. It’s good to be reminded of the literary/dramatic elements of film.
As mentioned before, the monologue at the start of Patton.
One of my favorite films of all time is Fight Club. There are a lot of good lines. Here’s one speech: “Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men that ever lived. And I see all this potential. Godamnit, an entire generation waiting tables, filling gas. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has it’s taste in cars and clothes working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history man. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised to believe that we’d be millionaires and movie stars and rock gods, but we won’t and we’re slowly realizing that fact and we’re very, very pissed off.”
This one here… just beautiful. One of my favorite films of the last decade.
How about a little tidbit from “Misery.”
No clip available, so the words.
Crazy nurse Annie has one of her few balanced (and sad) moments in the film. The rain is pouring, Paul is watching her as she looks out the window:
“The rain….sometimes it gives me the blues.
When you first came here, I only loved the writer part of Paul Sheldon.
Now I know I love the rest of him too.
I know you don’t love me; don’t say you do.
You are a beautiful, brilliant, famous man of the world; I’m not……a movie star type.
You’ll never know the fear of losing someone like you, if you are someone like me."
That ending line really has some heft to it; especially coming out of a tight, well-made commercial horror movie which trades on her volcanic swings.
Peter Lorre at the end of M.
One of my favorites.
This is the best right here. Makes me cry every time.
And here’s the second best.
Volker Spengler’s tragic monologue from Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons. The speech itself is sometime perverse; sometimes amusing… the accompanying images are violent and confrontational.
DO NOT WATCH if you’re sensitive to scenes of animals being slaughtered.
Sister Gudrun’s heartbreaking monologue from the same film…
Shakespeare & Branagh
Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987)
The old woman explaining Martyrdom in the film “Martyrs” is brilliantly weird.
Also, I’ll just say that COFFEE IS FOR CLOSERS ONLY!
The immortal bard still takes some beating
ok, not really a speech, but down with the house of Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha anyway
Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
love that ^ also the ending speech of hannah and her sisters
Mickey Sachs: One day about a month ago I really hit bottom. You know, I just felt that in a godless universe, I didn’t want to go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle… (coughing) …which I loaded, believe it or not, and pressed it to my forehead. And I remember thinking, at the time, I’m gonna kill myself. Then I thought …what if I’m wrong? What if there is a God? I mean, after all, nobody really knows that.
But then I thought, no. You know, maybe is not good enough. I want certainty or nothing. And I remember very clearly the clock was ticking, and I was sitting there frozen, with the gun to my head, debating whether to shoot. All of a sudden, the gun went off. I had been so tense, my finger had squeezed the trigger inadvertently, but I was perspiring so much, the gun had slid off my forehead and missed me.
And suddenly, neighbors were, were, pounding on the door, and-and I don’t know, the whole scene was just pandemonium. (stuttering) And, uh, you know, and I-I-I-I-I ran to the door. I-I-I-I didn’t know what to say. You know, I was, I was embarrassed and confused, and my-my-my mind was r-r-racing a mile a minute… …and I-I jus knew one thing. I…I-I-I-I had to get out of that house. I had to just get out in the fresh air and-and clear my head. And I remember very clearly. I walked the streets. I walked and I walked. I-I didn’t know what was going through my mind. It all seemed so violent and un-unreal to me. And I wandered for a long time on the Upper West Side, you know, an-and it must have been hours! You know, my, my feet hurt. My head was, was pounding, and, and I had to sit down. I went into a movie house. I-I didn’t know what was playing or anything. I just, I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and, and be logical, and, and put the world back into rational perspective. And I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down (sighing) and, you know, the movie was a-a-a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, an-and I always u-uh, loved it. And, you know, I’m, I’m watching these people up on the screen, and I started getting hooked on…on the film, you know?
And I started to feel how can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, l-look at all the people up there on the screen. You know, they’re real funny, and, and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God, and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? You know, what the hell, it-i-it’s not all a drag. And I’m thinking to myself, geez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And…you know… …after, who knows? I mean, you know, maybe there is something. Nobody really knows. I know, I know “maybe” is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that’s the best we have. And…then, I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.
In an otherwise forgettable film, Victor Ward (played by Kip Pardue) has that pretty amazing monologue/montage near the end of the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction.
Ah yes, Paris Texas, that scene is sublime!
as a Fred Astaire fan this one by beautiful Cyd Charisse always gets me.
@Solar Anus
Good call on that one.
Claus Harding
This is the “high water mark” monologue from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
A touching introspective moment in a wild and crazy film, and a nice piece of writing by Hunter S. Thompson.
It runs about 2 minutes; you can just stop it there before the add-ons start up.