Damn, pretty high on the list too.
A scene that’s always stayed pretty searing for me is the scene in Gallipoli where Mel Gibson’s character is racing back through the trenches to deliver the order to cancel the attack where his friend will be going over the top in another futile effort against the Turks.
I saw this when I was eight or so when HBO had a free weekend, my parents were out to dinner and my babysitting older sister had left me alone to watch TV while she was up in her room doing older sister stuff. I see it was only rated PG at the time, I’m sure it would have been at least PG-13 nowadays, maybe R for the naked swimming and very realistic battle scenes.
The penultimate scene in **Sometimes A Great Notion **(1970). Paul Newman’s brother, played by Michael Sarazin, has been trapped by a tree which has fallen across his legs pinning him to the ground just as the river reaches flood state and overflows its banks. The two of them realize there is no way to get the tree off Sarazin before the rising river drowns him. They trade quips as the water gets higher and higher until Newman watches his brother drown. Heart-wrenching!
The Green Mile, when they get the settings for the electric chair wrong, on purpose IFRC.
I was going to say the same thing.
There’s a scene where one of the gang boys (a non-actor actor) gets taken home by a female reporter… so she can fuck him. They are off camera for a moment going into a bathroom for a shower and you hear the boy say something like “I’ve never had a hot shower before.”… it wasn’t a line. The boy thought the camera had stopped rolling.
In Eye for An Eye starring Sally Field and Kiefer Sutherland, Sutherland’s character brutally rapes and murders a young girl on-screen. It was an otherwise forgettable movie, but that scene was like a punch in the gut.
But is the killing blow actually shown? Did I see an edited version?
The murder of the femaile Dutch assassin in Munich. It’s just a slow, face-to-face killing where she slowly starts to choke on her own blood before she’s finished off. A very unglamorous look at murder and death.
The scene in The Downfall (Der Untergang) in which Magda Göbbels enters the bedroom in the bunker where her six children lie in a drugged sleep, after she had given them all a sedative in an earlier scene. One by one, starting with her youngest daughter, she puts a poison capsule in their mouths, pushes the jaw up so you can hear the crunch, and pulls the blanket over their heads, uncovering their bare feet.
This is history, I knew what had happened, I knew what was going to be shown, but my heart was slamming against my chest the whole scene long. Masterful acting, and O God, I’m going upstairs right now to give my sleeping kids a kiss.
Good call. Which reminds me… I forget if the scene is in the movie of On the Beach, but I definitely remember it from the book: the young couple poison their infant child before taking poison themselves, knowing that otherwise they’ll all inevitably die of radiation poisoning. Under the circumstances, it’s a horrible form of kindness.
IIRC, the blow was not actually shown.
It was heard, though.
mmm
You’re the first person I know, outside of my class (it was for a Brazilian film class), that has seen this movie. Not even my Brazilian friends have seen it.
IIRC, one of the child non-actors (the star) died quite young (killed), after the relative success of the movie, and being unable to find other legitimate jobs (instead of street life). OTOH, one of the older child actors did have moderate success and was at least able to leave the slum.
“We Were Soldiers” with Mel Gibson. When the soldier’s skin slides off his legs after the napalm attack.
On a more humorous note, I watched the notorious “Cannibal Holocaust”. What icked me out the most? The rapes? No. The impaling? No. The abortion? No. The spiky thing? No.
It was the old lady preparing food by chewing it and spitting it out into a bowl.
Gah. Hideous.
I have another one: the opening scene in Jaws. That haunted me, because it was very believable.
Yah. Also a fantastic character beat, as you can see just how far behind the protagonists have left their humanity. Contrast it with the first killing by the protagonists, in which their victim very nearly talks them out of it.
Come to think of it, pretty much every bit of violence in that film is harrowing stuff. Great movie, hard to watch.
The scene in ‘Silence of the Lambs’, when Hannibal Lecter is about to be served his meal of lambchops.
No, it’s definitely shown. The camera cuts away a split-second after the impact, but it’s still there. It wasn’t the act itself that really got me, though. It was the sound of the poor guy delicately putting his teeth on the curb.
I’m claustrophobic, so The Vanishing is harrowing to me, as is the ending of Miracle Mile and quite a bit of Jurassic Park.
Actually, my claustrophobia is so bad that I had to change the channel last week during Modern Family when the two guys were in the little girl’s playhouse.
How about the car/bumper scene in The Hitcher?
Chris Rock’s death scene in Nurse Betty.
The opening scene in the kitchen in The Believers
The “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” number in Cabaret.