Huh. I absolutely adore Mad Max 4 and think it was a top 5 movie of the decade, but I don’t think the first 10 minutes have its best stuff. I’m thinking about the extended sequence where the pole-riding-swinging guys come out and all the action around the sequence. I did not see it in the theater, but I can almost imagine the crowds cheering at some of that stuff.
The opening is him getting captured and trying to escape and ending up on the front of a car. It’s good, but not the best scene.
Arlington Road. A pretty good thriller with a great cast. The beginning is fantastic. I remember seeing this in the cinema and the opening screen in the link above just blowing me away.
The Circle of Life sequence of The Lion King (original version). The quick cut to the title card was like a mic drop (brush drop?) to any non-Disney animators.
Today they’d use state of the art CGI, rendering twice as many planes with mind-boggling precision, and it’d look like absolute shit.
I don’t think it’s the best scene, but I really do love the opening expository section of Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone (1961)
And, similarly, the first four minutes of Watership Down (1978), done in a very different style from the rest of the film
I don’t know if it was necessarily the best scene, but Harold and Maude begins in a way that shocks then confuses you, which is pretty much saying, “OK, let’s show you something about this movie that you are about to see.”
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: after a couple minutes of exposition, we are treated to this bit of ass-kicking Captain America ass-kicking:
You might enjoy the takeoff scene from The Dam Busters (1955). It’s not in the first 10 min, so slightly off topic.
Great Expectations, B&W, 1946.
I won’t bother to link to it here, because you aren’t watching in a theater, but if after watching it in a theater, you remember one thing about that film, it’s the opening sequence.
Two Academy awards (Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography), nominated for three others (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay), and it’s in the BFI top 100 list, so the rest of the film wasn’t bad either.
Interesting. If I did a “The Final Shot of the Film is the Best One”…I’d mention The Player.
Way of the Gun has maybe my favorite opening scene ever.
Similarly, I would not call it the ‘best scene’ as if the rest of the film were down from there, but Le Samourai has a great opening in which a lot is said but not a word is spoken.
Sure, but if you mention “the ass-kicking scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” folks will reply, “hell, yeah, the elevator fight was great.”
The first Battle of the Five Points that opens Gangs of New York is my favorite scene in a movie full of memorable scenes.
Sets a spooky tone for sure, at least for me. The “talking” bull…"Hello, young thief" with the angry grunt after Pip “apologizes” to it still kinda creeps me out even now, although that particular scene is more than 10 minutes in.
Concur.
This is really good one. I could be convinced that this wasn’t the best scene, but it’s a great opening regardless.
Stretch that to 11 minutes and I would nominate Werkmeister Harmonies. From Roger Ebert’s Great Movies essay:
"And what is time anyway but our agreement to divide one rotation of the earth around the sun into units? Could there be hours, minutes, seconds, on a planet without our year? Why would one earth second need to exist except as part of one earth year? Perhaps such questions lead us into the extraordinary, funny, ingenious 11-minute shot at the start of the picture.
"It is the dead of winter, almost closing time in a shabby pub. An eclipse of the sun is due, and Janos (Lars Rudolph), the local paper carrier, takes it upon himself to explain what will happen in the heavens. He pushes the furniture to the walls, and enlists a drunk to stand in the center of the floor and flutter his hands, like the sun’s rays. Then he gets another pal to be the earth, and walk in circles around the sun. And then a third is the moon, walking in his own circles around the earth. All of these circles stagger around, the drunks rotating, and then the moon comes between the sun and the earth, and there is an eclipse: ‘The sky darkens, then goes all dark,’ Janos says. ‘The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds … the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then … complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us?’
“Janos continues, and the others listen in befuddlement, because in their village at this hour there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.”
It did make a great ending, what with the Brian Doyle Murray-sounding blackmailer, and capping with the cheezy “Traffic was a bitch” line, but just for sheer cinematic audacity, not much compares to its beginning.
The classic opening tracking shot and ensuing TENSE scene in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is another fave. Can’t see how David Lynch couldn’t be influenced for “Eraserhead” by it.
I could go either way as to “best” - the library scene comes later, as does the main Peter Falk scene - but the opening 10 minutes of Wings of Desire was great cinema all by itself - if it were a short film, it would be an award-winning one.