Movies that initiated some device/cliche/gimmick/line of dialogue

Cafe Society
1

I’d like this thread to serve two purposes:

  1. Identify best guesses as to when some specific “idea” was first used in a movie
  2. Provide earlier instances than the one(s) already cited.

So if you can point to a movie that has the first use of something you see often nowadays, that would be a (1). Then if you can point to an earlier movie that used that same thing, that would be a (2).

What gave me this notion was in seeing something recently where a team was losing badly and the coach/manager got the guys together and suggested they maim or cripple the star on the other team. Can’t recell the movie at this moment but it reminded me of a similar instance in the Charles Bronson/James Coburn movie Hard Times where the guy managing the fighter that Bronson faced had him use brass knuckles to take Bronson out. The guy refused and Bronson won, but the device has to be much older than that movie. Much older.

Can you think of the first movie where you saw this sort of gimmick?

What’s something along similar lines that you wonder about?

2

MAS*H had something similar five years earlier – the injected the player with something to put him to sleep during the football game finale.

3

Well, this thread doesn’t seem to be doing much. Maybe my title and/or OP aren’t clear on what I was hoping to get at here.

Here’s another example:

In my moviegoing experience, the first movie to show blood in a fist fight was Shane. Can you name an earlier example?

Along similar lines, when’s the first time you see blood in a gunshot wound? I can point to the shotgun scene in Bullitt as an example, but I know there must be earlier instances.

Speaking of Bullitt the scene where we see his Mustang in the rearview mirror of the Charger is presaged by a mirror view in The Best Years Of Our Lives (which I just saw for the first time last month) which helped to move along some of the techniques introduced in Citizen Kane with the “deep focus” methods pioneered by Toland.

4

MASH has already been mentioned and I never got an answer the last time I asked this question so:

Did the line “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” originate on the first Colonel Flagg episode of MASH or was it already a cliche?

5

Just guessing here: already a cliche. I suspect one of those ubiquitous spy thrillers of the 40’s-60’s might be an original source, one where the line isn’t after a laugh. Can’t begin to think of a real example, though. It does remind me of a sketch Rowan and Martin did, not on Laugh-In, where they’re two spies who meet under a lamppost on a dock in the fog. One says, “Repeat after me…” and goes into this long string of details the other is supposed to remember. Less than a full beat behind him, the other starts repeating what has just been said. It’s not quite in unison, which would be easy enough to do, but just enough off that you just marvel at how they could pull such a thing off. One of the funniest bits I ever saw.

6

I’m 99% certain that The Fly (the 1986 J. Goldblum/G. Davis version) was the first instance of “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

7

Similarly, did the “in <setting>, no one can <observe> you <verb>.” cliche start with the advertising for Alien?

8

Can you think of a movie before Goldfinger where they had a functioning GPS device? That may be the first laser demonstrated as such instead of some sort of “death ray.”