I am a Film Noir freak (own over a hundred) and am sitting here watching* The Mask of Dimitrios. *
Near the end, during a fight sequence involving guns, shooting, punches being thrown and people dying, Sydney Greenstreet is shot by an antagonist. Peter Lorre looks upon in horror and and says, “He was my friend! Well, he wasn’t my friend but he was a nice guy…”
I could not stop laughing and I can’t believe that was the script writer’s intention.
It was apparently intended to be a serious warning about the potential dangers of Mos Eisley Spaceport, but Obi-Wan’s line “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” cracked up every audience I witnessed.
In the movie Raw Deal, Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about a crime that some bad guy had committed, and delivers this line:
“The guy kidnapped an 11-year-old girl. He molested, murdered and mutilated her.”
Not a particularly funny line on paper, but when you hear it in Arnold’s finest Austrian accent, it’s one of the funniest things you’ll ever hear on screen.
Oh, don’t get me started on that movie! From memory, so they may be inaccurate:
“Beat her!”
“You told Harpo to beat me!”
“You sho is ugly!”
“Isa married now!”
“I gotta go to schooool”
“Celeee” (in the African accent. As a child, we thought it was hilarious to hear an African try to speak English. We were idiots)
“Harpo, who dis??”
“Alll my life I had to FIGHT!”
“Nothing but death can keep me from it!!!”
“Until you do right by me, everything you touch is gonna crumble!”
I realize that some of those may have been intentionally funny, but I think most of them were supposed to be touching. We were just stupid kids though, and we laughed our heads off. (Funnily enough, I had read the book prior, and didn’t find much funny about it.)
“We don’t need no steenking badges!” In Treasure of the Sierra Madre I think it was meant to be menacing, but has become a common comedic catch phrase.
That exchange in The Day the Earth Stood Still where 2 doctors are looking over Klaatu’s x-rays and comenting on how high life expectancy is on his planet and how much more advances their medical science must be. Both doctors are smoking cigarettes the entire time.
from “Star Crash.” Prior to that we had known nothing of the Imperial battleships’ capabilities in this respect. Certainly solved the problem of being trapped deep inside a planet that will explode in three seconds, though.