Damsel in distress getting killed

[Meltdown]

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Blow Out yet.

The relevant scene:

Finally, Jack attempts to gather irrefutable proof of the assassination attempt, wiring Sally with a hidden microphone and sending her off to meet a purported media contact. Shadowing her from a distance, he is alarmed to see that his supposed contact is Burke, not the reporter. Sally is the last loose end for Burke to eliminate, and her death will be attributed to the “Strangler.” Immediately realizing that she is in danger, Jack attempts to warn her, but Sally and Burke slip out of range and into a large Liberty Day crowd. Jack makes a mad dash across Philadelphia, attempting to head them off and rescue Sally. He crashes his Jeep, though and is knocked out. By the time Jack awakens, Burke has taken Sally to a rooftop where he attacks her. Still listening in on his earpiece, Jack spots them. He hears Sally screaming as he rushes to save her, but he is too late. He arrives just after Burke has strangled her to death and is marking her body with the Strangler’s signature bell pattern. Jack takes Burke by surprise and kills him, then, devastated and on his knees, takes Sally’s lifeless body in his arms.

[Win_Place_Show]

@Meltdown

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Blow Out yet.

Damn you! I sat reading through this whole thread, waiting.. waiting.. and was ready to fire that one up. Great call, and what a great, underrated movie!

[Morbo]

Just thought of another one: Tyne Daly in The Enforcer.

[philamax]

In the Vincent Price/Peter Cushing movie Madhouse (1974), publicity agent Julia uncovers a murderous scheme, is confronted by the disguised killed, and runs screaming for help. She outraces the murderer to the apparent safety of an elevator, but just as she relaxes, the killer has pried open the doors. Price then discovers her body in his dressing room with a knife through its neck.

[That_Don_Guy]

In the 1987 CBS Beauty and the Beast TV series, wasn’t the main female character “in distress” when she was killed at the start of the last season? (At the end of the episode, Beast “senses” that his son is alive and, with new female lead in tow, tries to find him.)

[Superdude]

Since this thread has been revived, I’d like to mention the chacter of Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes in “Batman Begins,” and Maggie Gyllenhaal after that) is killed during “The Dark Knight.”

[RivkahChaya]

@Omi_no_Kami

It isn’t a movie, but the common example that comes to mind hails from an issue of The Amazing Spiderman.

Spiderman’s then-girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, gets kidnapped by the Green Goblin and brought to a tower on the Brooklyn Bridge. When Spiderman arrives Green Goblin chucks her over the edge. Spiderman shoots a web-thingy towards Gwen and manages to grab her by the leg… at which point the sudden deceleration snaps her neck.

She had to die: her name didn’t alliterate.
Seriously, as long as this zombie is already walking, what about Freya (Margaret Sullavan) in the film version of The Mortal Storm? She is shot trying to escape the Nazis through a mountain pass on skis, with the man who has already “saved” her once from Nazi ideology, and the Nazi she was previously engaged to. They are literally a few feet from freedom, when she dies in his arms, and the escape was his plan. He’s played by James Stewart. The movie has 100% on rotten tomatoes.

The book, BTW, is really different. She’s not so much of a damsel in distress; she’s in charge of her own fate, and her father, instead of being arrested for being a dissident, is arrested for being Jewish. And she doesn’t die at the end.

[peccavi]

The last episode of the French/UK series The Tunnel fits the OP’s requirements to a “tee”.

The series is basically a procedural focused on the mismatched partnership of a British policeman, Jack, and a French policewoman, Elise. Each season has a mystery involving kidnappings, murder and general serial bad-guy antics, culminating each season with the identification and capture of the bad guy (it is apparently based, just like the American series, on the Scandinavian series, The Bridge).

Anyway, this season in the behind-the-scenes segments, they kept talking about this third season as the “the final season”. My thought was “yeah, final unless someone decides they can make money wit another season”.

However, in the final episode of the season, the bad guy has put Jack into the classic hero’s position in this kind of tale. The bad guy has captured Elise, kidnapped a dozen or so innocent citizens and summoned Jack (“come alone or thy all die”) to a lonely seaside location where he has rigged a van containing his innocent captives to slowly fill with noxious gas and has rigged an explosive collar on Elise, who is standing between Jack and the van. The killer leaves a cell phone (detonator) for Jack and calls him, telling him that he needs to make a choice. He can save the people in the van (just opening the doors will do the trick) and the bad guy will detonate the bomb on Elise. Or he can detonate the bomb himself, and the bad guy will stop the gas. The bomb, of course, is rigged to go off if anyone tries to take the collar off of Elise.

So, knowing the way these things go, the audience is trying to figure out how Jack will save both Elise and the captives. Jam the cell phone? Spot the bad guy where he is hiding and call in an airstrike? We’ve all seen these scenes too many times not to know that in the end, Jack and Elise stroll off through the flashing emergency lights of the late-arriving cavalry.

So, the standoff is drawing out, Jack is talking to the bad guy and Else, Elise is telling Jack to detonate the bomb and save the hostages, the camera is cutting between the standoff and the people in the van slowly succumbing to the gas, and we are waiting for the (good or bad) deus ex machina.

Then,

Elise, who has been yelling at Jack to trigger the detonator, reaches up to the collar and starts twisting the box that has wires coming out of it. BOOM! No more Elise, just a dark spot on the road…

So yes, I guess they could definitively say this was the last season.

[AlsoNamedBort]

@Omi_no_Kami

It isn’t a movie, but the common example that comes to mind hails from an issue of The Amazing Spiderman.

Spiderman’s then-girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, gets kidnapped by the Green Goblin and brought to a tower on the Brooklyn Bridge. When Spiderman arrives Green Goblin chucks her over the edge. Spiderman shoots a web-thingy towards Gwen and manages to grab her by the leg… at which point the sudden deceleration snaps her neck.

This thread is now old enough that this did happen in a movie.

[FriarTed]

@RivkahChaya

Seriously, as long as this zombie is already walking, what about Freya (Margaret Sullavan) in the film version of The Mortal Storm? She is shot trying to escape the Nazis through a mountain pass on skis, with the man who has already “saved” her once from Nazi ideology, and the Nazi she was previously engaged to. They are literally a few feet from freedom, when she dies in his arms, and the escape was his plan. He’s played by James Stewart. The movie has 100% on rotten tomatoes.

The book, BTW, is really different. She’s not so much of a damsel in distress; she’s in charge of her own fate, and her father, instead of being arrested for being a dissident, is arrested for being Jewish. And she doesn’t die at the end.

I love that movie- it’s chock full of actors in unexpected roles- Maria Ouspenskya - the WolfMan’s Old Gypsy Lady, as Jimmy Stewart’s mother? The Wizard of Oz Frank Morgan as his professor & young Marcus Welby MD Robert Young as his best friend turned Nazi.

[Don_Draper]

This scenario occurred at least once on Doctor Who, during the mid-80s “Trial of a Time Lord.” The Doctor has been acting decidedly evil, even handing over his companion Peri at the time to some mad scientists to be used as an unwilling test subject for some brain transfer experiment. Of course, it’s all a ruse by the Doctor in a long con to expose and defeat the bad guys. Peri however WAS about to be used in some terrible experiment that would end in her death. The Doctor rushes off to save her before being literally frozen in his tracks and whisked away by the Time Lords who then put him on trial for “crimes against the universe.” Meanwhile, with no one to rescue her, Peri is subjected to the brain transfer, which effectively kills her. A side character is then manipulated by the Time Lords into killing her body (now controlled by another intelligence) as well.

The plot twist was so universally loathed by everyone that the producers of the series very quickly - and awkwardly - retconned it. At the end of the season-long story, one of the Time Lords tells the Doctor “Oh by the way, Peri isn’t really dead.” And that’s that; no other explanation.

[NDP]

@FriarTed

I love that movie- it’s chock full of actors in unexpected roles- Maria Ouspenskya - the WolfMan’s Old Gypsy Lady, as Jimmy Stewart’s mother? The Wizard of Oz Frank Morgan as his professor & young Marcus Welby MD Robert Young as his best friend turned Nazi.

I haven’t seen that movie in awhile but I think Young’s character is the one who fires the fatal shot that kills Sullivan. He was a real rat bastard in that film.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

FWIW, a subset of this–in which the damsel is killed as motivation for the manly protagonist–has a name. “Women in refrigerators” isn’t a particularly clever bit of writing, and it’s gotten to the point where I roll my eyes when authors resort to it.

Unless, of course, it’s Cathrynne Valente’s brilliant Refrigerator Monologues.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@tim314

I came in here to post that one! I think this is also what inspired the scene from the first Spiderman movie, but unlike Gwen Stacy, Mary-Jane survives. Kind of ironic, since I’m pretty sure the comic writers killed Gwen to make more room for the Spidey-MJ relationship.

For me, the awesome thing about that comic is that they actually get the physics right. It’s true what they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Or rather, it’s the suddenness of the stop at the end. I can’t count the number of comics where someone falls from a great height only to be caught by the hero an inch before they hit the ground. Just once I would like to hear Superman say “Yeah, I could catch that falling baby, but there isn’t room left to decelerate him before impact.” Splat!

I am fairly sure that superman did, in fact, have to decry the physics of a situation preventing him from an easy rescue in the post-Crisis error and later. He generally finds a way around it, because of the in Norma’s/ridiculous extent & number of his powers. I can think of a story in which an older superman remembers that, when he first started out, he did not know how to safely stop a car about to crash without injuring it’s occupants but can now do so.

As for the question posed in the OP: I seem to think that Daredevil’s girlfriend Karen Paige died because DD simply didn’t have time to get to her before Bullseye murdered her. Similar thing with Electra.

[drad_dog]

@tim314

I came in here to post that one! I think this is also what inspired the scene from the first Spiderman movie, but unlike Gwen Stacy, Mary-Jane survives. Kind of ironic, since I’m pretty sure the comic writers killed Gwen to make more room for the Spidey-MJ relationship.

For me, the awesome thing about that comic is that they actually get the physics right. It’s true what they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Or rather, it’s the suddenness of the stop at the end. I can’t count the number of comics where someone falls from a great height only to be caught by the hero an inch before they hit the ground. Just once I would like to hear Superman say “Yeah, I could catch that falling baby, but there isn’t room left to decelerate him before impact.” Splat!

I had forgotten the cause of death for Gwen. That adherence to physics was after a decade of completely physics free Amazing Spider Man stunts. Not to mention the rest of the marvel universe and let’s not leave out DC, Charlton and Harvey.

[Ashtura]

Deadpool II, although

Deadpool undos his girlfriends death with time travel

In the James Bond movie Skyfall

Sévérine gets killed right in front of Bond