When I was a little kid, movies ended with the words END or THE END on the screen.
I’m pretty sure that practice is essentially dead today, though I think I’ve seen it used a few times in recent years to convey irony or to evoke the historical essense of those old flicks. But lets forget those times it’s been used as a device. What was the last major, non-kid movie to end with a serious THE END up there on the silver screen?
I have a feeling like Japan has had several animated films that end with (in Japanese) “The End”, though I would need to watch them to verify. And that would be continuing on to the present.
Stanley Kubrick did it, and his last movie was Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. IMDb says that later in his career, he put “The End” after the credits and not right at the end of the action, so I’m not sure if that puts his last movies outside the scope of your question.
Was the use of THE END ever serious? I assumed it was always meant to be tongue in cheek.
No. I’d wager that most movies ever made used “The End” or “FIN” or something similar to mean exactly what they said. (That’s if you buy my assumption, pulled out of my own ass, that more movies were made before say 1960 or so, when that seems to have fallen out of favor, than have been made since.)
If not most, then surely a good solid chunk.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King did it, without irony. It was a nice touch.
Yes. Japanese live action movies tend to do the same thing.
You’re correct. At least until the 60s, it simply meant the movie was over.
After all the fades to black(and white), they had to tell us it was the end.
Excepting in movies like The Blob (1958), where they messed with the ending: ‘The End?’
Or they animate crossing out “End” and scrolling “Beginning” in sappy rom-coms.
I think “The Wedding Planner” used The End and meant it.
Moulin Rouge used it quite well, we see the writer completing the story of the moulin rouge on his trusty typewriter. As we see the typed letters appear, he ends his story with the single sentance “The end.”
I believed Back to the Future Part III when it said “The End.” It ended really cheesy, which was okay because we (should) know that the trilogy is over. The second movie even prefaced the third, by saying “To be concluded…”
I wonder if it had to do with the fact that when movies were being distributed to movie houses in the 30’s and 40’s, lots of them were serials. My dad remembers going to the movies ever Saturday afternoon, to see the next installment of some cliffhanger that was playing. The End would have been a good way to say the serial was ended and not to be continued.
Intermissions were also common so “The End” would be used to let the audience know the main feature was over instead of paused for intermission. The 1965 movie The Great Race has a credit sequence similar to ones used in the early 20th Century–which is also the period of the movie–and makes use of both “Intermission” (it is nearly 3 hours long) and “The End” cards.