The Long Good Friday.
I’d have to disagree on principle here, and with most Code-era movies. While the ending was unhappy for some characters, it was mandated by the Hays office that every movie had to end so that conventional morality was happy. IOW, if a character was to have a bad end, they had to commit an evil act during the story. If a character was to ride off into the sunset, any ill acts he might have committed had to have been atoned for before the credits rolled. So, even in the movies mentioned, and in, for example, The Postman Always Rings Twice, various characters–even the protagonists–may meet with an unhappy unending, but in doing so they *must *be fulfilling a happy ending in a larger sense, wherein the audience’s conventional morality is justified.
There were, of course, exceptions, but they were extreme rarities; they were the ones that were too subtle to raise the censor’s red flags. Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, for example, ends with an innocent man executed by the state, and the mistake not corrected (probably the only time this ever happened in a Code Era film), and the real killer having only himself to answer to.
I disagree, I think that when they finally get to Florida at the end and Joe throws his cowboy hat into the trash can and walks away, it’s supposed to represent a chance for a new start in a new place away from the squalor of New York. And even though his best friend, Ratso, is dead, it’s clear that he learned a lot from him and that he has a better shot at taking care of himself.
28 weeks later ended pretty badly. About as badly as it gets, actually. I think I’d rather the world end from a massive nuclear holocaust, truth be told.
I like dark or ambiguous endings. A few films not mentioned (as far as I noticed):
On The Beach
Faithless
An Unmarried Woman
Breathless
Purple Rose of Cairo
Danny Darko
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
Requiem for a Dream
How about Jacob’s Ladder? Torture via induced psychosis, ending in pointless waste.
To Live And Die in LA, good guy irretrievably corrupted, cute girl entering heretfore unknown levels of slavery
I haven’t seen it yet, but by all accounts: End of Evangelion.
After that…
Kurosawa’s Ran
The Day After
Threads
Black Hawk Down
Honorable mention:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or, as it’s known to the rest of my family, that “Stupid jerk movie!”
The Hays Code did not mandate happy endings.
As long as “evil” characters got punished, it didn’t matter if the film ended happily. So if you had a movie like Sunset Boulevard, where each of the main characters had done something bad (even if they were generally sympathetic characters) you could have a very unhappy ending indeed.
There was nothing at all happy about the way Sunset Boulevard ended. None of the characters, even the “good” minor characters, had things end well for them.
If you’re saying that “the wicked get punished” equals a happy ending for larger society (or “conventional morality”), then a lot of the grim movies in this thread had such a “happy ending.” But I don’t think that’s what the OP had in mind.
I always felt sorry for the little boy at the end of The Time Bandits.
Ah, I see no one seems to have yet mentioned Miracle Mile. So I will.
Hard to beat global thermonuclear war for a downbeat ending.
Oh, come on. Any move whereGwynneth Paltrow’s head ends up in a boxhas at least some semblance of a happy ending.
What’s with the spoiler? If you haven’t seen a movie released 12 years ago you deserve to have it ruined.
Well, we just finished watching the mini-series “10.5: Acrockofshit*” yesterday, and we were very happy when it ended, so I guess that doesn’t really count, in spite of the rather bleak outlook at the end of it. 
*Official name “10.5: Apocalypse,” but I will probably never call it that again after seeing it.
Considering the movie’s rating, I hardly think it’s fair. How many kids just now 18 saw it when they were 6? I’ve known plenty of people whose parents wouldn’t let them see R-rated movies growing up.
I think this does have a semblance (the merest sliver, if you will) of a hopeful ending, in the coda with the stick insect and the flower.
Grave of the Fireflies, of course
Murphy’s War
Das Boot
I am not sure. It could really be that the girl really does go to Fairyland to become Princess. Hard to tell.
The problem is that the Nationals are portrayed so heavily as Nazi evil thugs, while the Republicans are portrayed as selfless heroes. This bends the film so hard it it hard to see exactly what the Film maker was trying to show- other than than the Nacionales are Eviiiiiiil and the Republicanos are Gooooooood. :rolleyes:
(In actuality both sides did some pretty horrible things and both sides had some good guys. In the end, Franco did restore Democracy, so now with 20/20 hindsight we should look upon the Nationalist as the good guys. But we don’t.)
That’s what I mean–it’s not definite, but there is a suggestion that the fantasy wasn’t all Ofelia’s delusion to escape the real world, and that she did really escape and return to her true father’s kingdom.
Restored democracy? What the fuck are you smoking?
Do you realize that the Popular Front government he sought to overthrow as part of his armed rebellion was a democratically elected minority government?