With his panhandle accent and odd matter-of-fact emphasis, I can never unhear this line. Sometimes it comes to me like how I imagine schizophrenia must be. I’ll just be driving and think, “Philippe Moyez killed a goat.” I should really just set it as my text message notification and be done with it.
Everybody knows the popular movie quotes, Star Wars, et al. But what are the lesser known off beat lines that stick in your head, not so much because of the content of the quote, but owing to the delivery?
Not a movie, but a T.V. show. I frequently remember a particular version of the line, “I see no evidence of intent.” I was fairly certain that it was from an episode of Law & Order, but couldn’t place the actor or the specific episode. Just last week, I finally happened to see that episode again, and made a note of the title, “Justice”, so that I’ll have it handy the next time I’m thinking, “I see no evidence of intent”!
Honestly I don’t like the term “line readings”. Sounds very routine and mechanical and it makes me remember that it’s just an actor saying some things he memorized.
“What’s this? Spaghetti?” Paul Winchell as the detergent commercial director on The Brady Bunch disparaging Alice’s baloney curls. How’s that for a line sticking with you forever?
In the excellent movie Snatch, after Turkish (played by Jason Statham) asks a particularly vicious gangster (played by Alan Ford) if he wants sugar in his coffee:
“Find me a dead cat” – Sean Connery in The [First] Great Train Robbery. It helps that it follows Donald Sutherland’s rant as shown in the clip, but Connery’s delivery sells it.
There are lots of these in My Cousin Vinnie, but my favorite is the prosecutor, Mr. Trotter, in the spiel where he refers to the crime as “high anus”.
Judge Haller’s under the breath utterances (“I don’ like yo’r attitude”) were dead-on accurate to a lot of educated southern men from that generation (including my father), and of course pretty much anything that came out of Marisa “Totally Deserved that Oscar and Anybody Who Says Otherwise is Wrong” Tomei’s mouth was brilliant, even when it was something as mundane as “A deer?”
It’s slightly modified mostly because I misremembered it until I looked it up a few years back, but I like it this way and it still means the same thing. It doesn’t mean anything to me, I just like the subtle logic in it.
“You don’t win a war by dying for your country…you win a war by making the other guy die for his country”