THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
Let's say the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch runs through the moment when they escape their first gun battle of the movie. During the credits, the Bunch rides into town in stolen uniforms, passing teetotalers and children who have tossed scorpions in among angry ants. The enormous and lethal scorpions being brought down by millions of ants? That's less a metaphor than foreshadowing. The Bunch heads into a bank, where they quickly begin to execute their plan to rob it. And the first line from The Bunch's leader, Pike, is "if they move, kill 'em."
Soon the Bunch becomes aware that they're trapped, with gunmen hired by the railroad lining the rooftops across the street. They decide to use the passing parade of teetotalers to create confusion while they make their getaway. In the ensuing shootout, lots of innocent people die. And that's how we meet our anti-heroes, crooks lined up against the even-more-crooked railroad, bad men in bad times. The shootout is both exciting and horrific, both meant to titillate and disgust the viewer, much like the film as a whole. Sam Peckinpah knew that audiences have bloodlust, because having bloodlust is just part of being human. And he reveled in that bloodlust because he also knew that it never leads anywhere good. You want violence?, he seems to ask, well, what do you think of the leading man's horse trampling a woman? How about a man being shot full of holes in front of a couple of kids? Violence only begets violence in Peckinpah's eye. And there's no escape from it. In this movie, released at the height of the Vietnam War, Peckinpah is asking: is this the world that you want? Is your only choice whether to be a scorpion or an ant? (HC)
BLOW OUT (1981)
Throughout the 1970s, Brian DePalma positioned himself as Hollywood’s latest “Master of the Macabre”, a self-appointed heir to the mantle of Hitchcock. And in this vein, the first few minutes of Blow Out feel like a logical progression of his career -- a DePalma-esque pastiche of a fly-by-night coed slasher picture, complete with a subjective camera straight out of Halloween. What’s sort of surprising is how right DePalma gets the feel of these movies, from the clumsy camera movements (no confident Steadicam in this scene) to the oppressive cut-rate synth score and sound effects, to the nameless actresses cast entirely for their taut physiques. Gradually it dawns on the audience that this scene is a joke, and a damn good one too. But DePalma saves his best joke for last, as the killer infiltrates the shower room, draws his knife and pulls back the curtain to reveal a blonde who turns to the camera and… well, “screams” isn’t quite the word for it. “What cat did you have to strangle to get that?” asks the mixer to the sound guy, played by John Travolta. DePalma has always been fascinated with the nuts and bolts of making cinema, and he’s never been shy about sharing them with the audience, with Blow Out being perhaps the best example of this tendency. But even more important is the way DePalma uses the opening scene to set up the film’s finale, in which Travolta finally gets the right scream, albeit in the worst way imaginable. The way DePalma sets up this goal for his protagonist and then lets him back into accomplishing it would be clever and funny if it wasn’t so unbearably sad. (PC)
GOODFELLAS (1990)
Like most great directors, Martin Scorsese knows the value of starting a movie off right, in order to reel the audience into the story he’s telling. But while most of his films have pretty killer openings, nothing he’s done before or since has topped the first few minutes of GoodFellas. Instead of starting at the beginning of the story -- the early years of his protagonist Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) -- he begins in media res, with Henry and his crew, Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), driving down the highway in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there’s a knocking sound coming from behind them, and they eventually discover that it’s the bloodied body in the trunk, not quite as dead as they’d thought it was. As hooks go, this one’s a doozy -- who are these guys, and who’s the ill-fated man in the trunk? But look also at how Scorsese uses the situation to efficiently establish the three men’s personalities -- Jimmy the cool customer, Tommy the violent hothead, and Henry the follower, standing back and taking it all in. A more conventional film might have begun with the glamorous trappings of the gangster lifestyle, but Scorsese begins with the violence and doubles back to the fun stuff, so that while we watch Henry and pals living the high life, we’ve already seen them doing the dirty deeds it took to get them there. And it’s telling that when Henry’s voiceover starts up, stating that “as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a gangster” before Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” kicks in, the image we see onscreen is Henry’s weary face, numbed to the brutal spectacle taking place before his eyes. (PC)
DEAD MAN (1995)
In less than 8 minutes, Jim Jarmusch has Johnny Depp's William Blake leave the relative comfort of late-19th century civilization and travel by train backwards into savagery. The landscape outside grows more and more brutal, as do his fellow passengers. When Crispin Glover's train fireman comes to undercut his assumptions (i.e., spout weirdness at him, this being Crispin Glover), Blake gets his first glimpse of just how far outside of his world he has traveled. Glover says that he "wouldn't trust no words on no paper" and Blake should realize right there how fucked he is. He doesn't, though. He really has no choice but to follow through, even if that mean staring down Robert Mitchum and his gun. Even as he speaks to Glover, his fellow passengers, hunters and trappers by their garb, leap up and start firing out of the train at buffalo, denying their meat to the Native Americans, and dealing death without meaning to the majestic animals. Life and death don't carry the same weight out here, a lesson Blake will not learn until too late. (HC)
JACKIE BROWN (1997)
Was it Oscar Wilde who said "talent borrows, genius steals"? No one knows this better than Quentin Tarantino. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman stands motionless on an LAX conveyor belt while "Sound of Silence" plays in the background. In Jackie Brown, Pam Grier starts out on a conveyor belt at the more low rent Long Beach airport. Queue Bobby Womack's "110th Street." We see her in her bright blue airhostess uniform, nicely matching the mosaic background. Cut to x-ray images showing the insides of a few — is that a gun, or am I imagining things? A security guard's metal detector floats over some woman's white-pantsed crotch. Meanwhile Jackie glides through security with her bag and uniform, walks then picks up and runs, making it to her job at the gate just in time to greet passengers with a friendly airhostess smile. What more do you need to let you know you're in for sex, drugs, and desperation to get out of a dead-end job, just barely under the surface in sunny California? (SCS)
And finally...
JAWS (1975) & STAR WARS (1977)
A naked woman disappears in the water at night, devoured by a terrifying unseen monster, effectively terrifying generations of beach enthusiasts within minutes...a massive starship soars over my pubescent head, which very nearly explodes in sheer, geeky excitement...I don't really have much new to say about either film or their iconic, totally kick-ass opening sequences...but, damn, we couldn't really end our list of all-time great beginnings without them, now could we? (AO)
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four
Contributors: Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Andrew Osborne