Off the top of my head, the end of The Great Santini, and the end of She’s Having a Baby make me bawl every time. Seen both of 'em upteen times, know what’s gonna happen, still like Pavlov’s dog with the tears. The end of Empire of the Sun will do this to my SO.
Didn’t even see the re-release of ET, because I cried so hard in the theatre as a kid.
And-oh my God-I saw this movie once-It’s My Party, with Eric Roberts as a guy who’s dying of AIDS, and has a last party with all his friends and his boyfriend. Practically floated out of the theatre. Never cried so hard at a movie in my life. That, I’m scared to see again.
I completely lose it every time I see Philadelphia. And it doesn’t even have to be the whole movie. It’s been on TV a lot lately, and if I catch even 20 minutes of it, I’m a sobbing disaster.
The scene in Cinema Paradiso when all the censored kisses have been lovingly spliced together in one huge, romantic, liberating, schmaltzy orgy – like time has stood still for our hero and the painful, unfulfilled years past melt away for one moment.
Okay. The end of The Miracle Worker, when Helen, blind and deaf and without language since infancy, somehow achieves the conceptual breakthrough necessary to understand that the symbols being pressed into her hand stand for real things, and that everything has a name. Helen Keller is one of my heroes. (And she had a very interesting adult life as a radical; somebody should make a movie about that.)
The Iron Giant. I’m not apologizing for this.
ET – Not! Don’t care for that movie. I kept wanting to shout, “Kill the monster!” just to break the mood.
The Music Man. Hey, come on… we’re all a little gay.
If they made a movie of Robert Silverberg’s story “To See the Invisible Man”, it would make people cry.
I was thinking of starting this thread but with a twist: scenes in movies you know shouldn’t make you cry but make you cry anyway.
For me, without fail, there are two scenes:
In An American Tail (that’s right, There are no Cats in America and all that jazz) when Fivel is about to get reunited with his family (Fivel?..Papa?..Fivel?..Papa?). I lose it every time.
In Forrest Gump when Forrest is speaking to the crowd in D.C. and Jenny sees him and starts running to him through the reflecting pool. The last time I watched this movie, I missed the beginning and had only been watching it for ten minutes before this scene took place. I still cried. Sheesh.
Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List. I always end up sobbing on the floor at the end of Schindler’s List, when he’s about ready to flee, and he starts to wonder if he did enough, if he couldn’t have done more…talk about gut-wrenching.
Do my eyes deceive me? Did I just read through an entire thread about movies that make you cry and see NOT ONE MENTION of Old Yeller??? Duh. Maybe that just goes without saying.
Also Schindler’s List. There are more, but I can’t think of them.
I’ve never seen the movie, but every time I read Where The Red Fern Grows, I…uh…pretend to cry, yeah, so that women will think I’m…um…sensitive. Yeah, that’s it! sniff
This might sound weird, but The Elephant Man gets me every time. I don’t know if it’s his humanity in the face of inhumane nature or what, but I weep throughout this entire movie. And don’t even get me started on the pillow scene at the end.
I cry at one scene in E.T. Not when he dies, though. It’s the scene where the kids have to reveal the alien to their mother. She backs out of the bathroom in horror, making them come with her. ET reaches out and cries. He’s all alone, sick, dying, and now he is being abandoned.
Another was from the corny period flick, Barry Lyndon. The spoiled little boy who has been thrown from a horse lies dying, and as a last wish asks his quarreling parents not to fight anymore. Cuts to the next scene of his funeral procession, with his little coffin being borne on a toy cart he had loved to drive, drawn by two goats(he was still to young for ponies, and had ridden the horse against orders.) I sobbed my eyes out at that one!
There’s one that always gets me, though it probably sounds odd : In Jean de Florette, the rabbits hopping around, in the darkness, and the rain … that’s where I lose it. I’ve seen this movie more than 20 times and it still gets to me.
(The ending of the second one in the series (Manon des Sources) makes the entire first movie just that much more tragically sad – though I haven’t seen it as often, I always remember in my mind which makes it worse when watching either.)
Okay…Sophie’s Choice, Barbara Streisand’s version of A Star Is Born, Savannah Smiles, Forrest Gump, This Property Is Condemned, there’s more…I’ll think of 'em. Great list for a sleepover movie fest!
