Celluloid shockers
Ervell E. Menezes

Film scenes, which are ahead of their times, bring out the exhilaration of the moving image and continue to thrill audiences

Jessica Michelle Chastain in military thriller Zero Dark Thirty

When Maya (Jessica Chastain) in Zero Dark Thirty comes off with that shocker, it took one down memory lane to recall other such lines that did the same. But first things first, it’s during the hunt for Osama bin Laden and when asked by the CIA chief "who’s that woman?" innocuously pointing to her, she retorts "Well I’m the mother f..ker who found him." It was a virtual bolt from the blue.

Like in Zabriskie Point that Michelangelo Antonioni classic when the kids ask luscious heroine Daria Halprin "can we have a piece of arse," she questions them "would you know what to do with it." You wonder whether you heard it right. Can’t trust your own ears!

In a similar vein, one loves sequences which are new, ahead of their times and ones that have been copied because of their inventiveness by other films, Hollywood or Bollywood. One such is in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman and Robert Redford begin howling before jumping off the ravine into the river deep down below. Terrific.

That Redford later turned director with amazing success (his debut with Ordinary People won him an Oscar) is now history as is his annual Sundance Festival, which is the epitome of America’s parallel cinema. His Horse Whisperer is another rare classic.

Butch Cassidy has another fetching scene in which Paul Newman takes Katherine Ross on the bar of his bicycle singing lustily "raindrops are falling on my head." Sumptuous. Two delightful sequences in the same film which speaks volumes for director George Roy Hill who followed it up with that glorious winner The Sting that walked away with seven Oscars.

But back to those shockers, and it takes me back to my college days when seeing Jean Annouih’s Becket and Peter O’Toole calling his wife Catherine of Aragon a "Spanish cow" and describing her as "a withered flower in the pages of a hymn book, which duty forced me to wander into." Such powerful rhetoric in those distant 1960s.

Or Cardinal Woolsey (Anthony Quayle) in Ann of a Thousand Days referring to Genevieve Bujold and saying "the seat of power doesn’t lie between a woman’s legs." But they did as Henry VIII showed by dramatically changing history. It is lines like these that bring out that wonder and exhilaration of the moving image and may it continue to thrill audiences forever more.

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