Jimmy Stewart’s little monologue in Harvey that includes the great line, “…because no one brings anything small into a bar.”
In Lost Weeekend, the orderly at the “halfway-hospital, halfway-prison”, has a great spiel where he describes “the DT’s” to Ray Milland. “You know that stuff about pink elephants? That’s the bunk. It’s little animals: tiny turkeys in straw hats, midget monkeys climbing through the keyhole. See that guy over there? With him, it’s beetles. Come the night, he sees beetles crawling all over him…”
And the real payoff of that whole monologue comes later in the movie when Butch asks Fabienne, “Do you have any idea what my father went through to get me that watch? Well, I don’t have time to go into it right now, but a lot.”
Perhaps it’s a cliche at this point, and obviously not written *for *a movie, but is there any pre-battle exhortation since that is not merely a pale imitation of **Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech **?
While not strictly a monologue, Vizzini’s cogitation during the Battle of Wits in The Princess Bride is brilliant.
On the day when I left home to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. “Son,” my daddy says to me, “I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I’m going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
Anton Walbrook’s monologue in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, explaining why he fled Nazi Germany and is seeking asylum in the UK. It’s a good five minutes long, all done in one continuous close up, and it’s absolutely riveting. The film was made in 1943, and Walbrook, who was Austrian, was essentially explaining why he’d been forced to abandon his own country in the face of the Nazi regime. His sense of both betrayal and resignation is palpable, and it’s not an act.
Sam Spade: When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s-it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
“So you think I’m a loser? Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn’t respect me, a whole city that curses the day I was born? Well, that may mean ‘loser’ to you, but let me tell you something: Every morning when I wake up, I know it’s not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again. So I get up, have my watered down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart, get in my car with no upholstery, no gas and six more payments to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you. I’ll never play football like I thought I would, I’ll never know the touch of a beautiful woman, and I’ll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head. But I’m not a loser. ‘Cause despite it all, me and every other guy who’ll never be what he wanted to be are still out there, being what we don’t wanna be, forty hours a week—for life. And the fact that I haven’t put a gun to my mouth, you pudding of a woman, makes me a winner!”
Sage Rat, what you posted was a dialogue, not a monologue.
Mine is also from Withnail & I (I’m not sure the film can really claim credit for Withnail’s Hamlet monologue, though Richard E. Grant’s performance of it was poignant as hell.)
