Was just thinking about a few: Vincent Price, Oliver Reed and John Candy. Watching all of them makes me sad, for reasons not in the film.
How 'bout you? I don’t mean to confine scenes to films where the actor actually died during filming. That scene where John Belushi visits the graves of all the other SNL original cast members would be pretty poignant, if I could find it. Or maybe not involving dying at all, but just an element of star-crossed-ness, e.g., maybe some scenes between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
I’m sure I’m not the only person whose eyes teared and heart swelled when Heath Ledger’s name appeared on the screen in “The Dark Knight”. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Ledger, though I did enjoy his work and I’m not really into the genre, just one of many who saw the film strictly because of his role. And though he did a fine job, the performance itself didn’t really touch me. But the sight of his name in white letters against the dark screen and the audience busting out in applause really got to me.
The montage at the end of the excellent HBO docu-drama And The Band Played On… about the researchers who “discovered” AIDS shows photo and video of famous people who died or were otherwise affected by AIDS. In the middle of the montage is Princess Diana in an orphanage in Africa, surrounded by emaciated toddlers and children. Every time I see it, I get profoundly sad. Of all the people in this montage, most of whom were dead when it was created, she wasn’t supposed to be one of them. I don’t particularly care about royalty, but this one picture just hits home about what a caring person she was, and now she’s gone.
The end of the Firefly episode “The Message”. It wasn’t the last episode aired, but it was the last filmed. It was a sad scene anyway (a funeral), but knowing that made it even more poignant.
In the documentary Gigantic, about They Might Be Giants, there’s a scene of them playing a great acoustic version of “New York City,” in a Manhattan record store. It’s just before midnight, when they’re new CD will be released. There’s nothing particularly special about the scene, until you notice the date: September 10th, 2001. They don’t talk about it at all (except for in the commentary), the only mention of the date is the subtitle at the bottom of the screen.
The makeshift “happy family” scene from Rebel Without a Cause showing James Dean, Natalie Wood & Sal Mineo huddling together is especially poignant considering the tragic ways all three actors died.
I became a huge fan of Freddie Mercury in the last few years, and when he shows up on screen, I lose it. I’m usually in tears throughout the whole sequence.
Though in this case it’s hardly accidental. Man on Wire (which is from 2008) is clearly to a large extent about 9/11, even though the event is never explicitly discussed in the course of the film. (Which, come to think of it, is a pretty unusual narrative device. Does any other movie have an elephant in the room of comparable size?)
I thought the scene where real life father and daughter Angelina Jolie and John Voight play family in Tomb Raider was poignant given their occasional estrangement.