I just finished watching an old movie, The Swan, with Grace Kelly, Alec Guinness, and Louis Jourdan.
It had a sad ending, or bitterweet anyway! I fully expected, after the comic elements, that Kelly’s princess would end up running off with Jourdan’s tutor. But he left, with no expected dramatic return, and the princess turned to Guinness’ prince and said “Take me inside Albert” and they walked away togeter.
Huh? Well at least it wasn’t a cliche.
What other movies have ended up without the ending you fully expected?
I think the ending of the original Night of the Living Dead surprised everyone when it first came out.
Though I knew how it ended (having read the short story), I’ll bet people who saw A Boy and His Dog the first time (or read the story the first time) were surprised, too.
Akira Kurosawa’s film, 天国と地獄 (“High and Low” aka “Heaven and Hell”), surprised me at the end but probably mostly due to modern tropes which weren’t existent at the time:
[spoiler]The rich man who was robbed and presented himself on the face of things as an honest hard, working man, was actually an honest, hard working man. The police who went off to try and find the bad guy at the beginning of the film, actually went off, worked hard and did a good job tracking down the bad guy. The person who we thought was probably the bad guy, ended up being the bad guy.
Essentially, the “twist” at the end was that there was no twist at the end. :D[/spoiler] :eek: I know it sounds silly, but it actually surprised me.
Two other surprises from Japan were the ending of Excel Saga, and the ending of 御先祖様万々歳! (Hooray for my ancestors! by Mamoru Oshii). Both a full and very skillfull 180 from the rest of the show.
Will ended up cutting out his heart and replacing Davy Jones - instead of Jack doing it, which is what everyone was expecting - adding a bittersweet note to the end of the saga.
The biggest for me is Gone with the Wind. I sit through 12 hours (at least it seemed like it) of the movie and that was it? OK, OK they gave swelling music and the final fade-out scene, but really…
Harper with Paul Newman. I liked it but it still left me with a “What the hell?” feeling.
The Sailor’s Return I saw it on PBS in the early 1980s, and have not heard much about it since. There are few details on the web. I was expecting some kind of happiness for at least one of the characters at the end of the show, and I got none.
[spoiler]Set in the early 1800s, a white English sailor returns to his small village with his new wife - a Dahomean princess he smuggled back to England disguised as a man. The husband starts the titular pub in his village. Nobody will have anything to do with him or his wife, because she’s - GASP! - black. They have a son, and a few years later a baby who dies. The husband is going broke, and takes his last money to the track. His wins! Happy ending ahead, right? Wrong!! He’s robbed and killed on the way back home. The wife sells the pub and uses the money to try to book passage home for herself and her son, but the captain won’t let a woman on board. She sends her son home by himself - heaven only knows if he got back to Dahomey, or what happened to him there. The penultimate scene shows her sitting between the graves of her husband and child, with no friends or family as potential comfort, and she’s showing all the grief you’d expect and more. The final scene shows her washing dishes in what used to be her pub - then a quick fade into the former princess still washing dishes in her former pub as an elderly woman. Roll credits.
It was the most gratuitous sad ending I’d seen. It was so sad it made me reconsider depression as a hobby. Bastard writer! Worst of all, I’m sure the story was accurate to the times.
[/spoiler]
Not quite the ending of the film, but in Bend it Like Beckham when Jess’s sister’s wedding is (predictably) rescheduled for the same day as the Big Game, I fully expected Jess and her friend Jules to come up with some wacky scheme to sneak Jess away from the wedding reception. (For those who haven’t seen the movie, Jess has been told by her parents that she’s not allowed to play soccer at all anymore.) Instead Jess’s father realizes how unhappy she is and tells her she can leave the reception to play in the game.
