I’ll explain tomorrow why I was so late posting this, but today — what makes you cry? Tess Monaghan admits, reluctantly, that she cries at the moment in STRICTLY BALLROOM when the sound system is cut, and the father has to start clapping the paso dobles. (Hell, I’m crying just typing that line.)
The puckering strings of my heart aren’t pulled tight, to paraphrase the great Lenora Mattingly Weber, but I cry at some mighty odd things in movies. I tear up when Andie MacDowell walks into the ballroom in GROUNDHOG’S DAY and we see that it’s Bill Murray at the piano. (He became a BETTER MAN! He started off just wanting to pretend to be the man she would love, and then he went whole hog and actually became that guy! Dang.) I get a little weepy during the famous through-the-skylight shot of CITIZEN KANE.
And here’s a moment from THE GODFATHER that no one else ever seems to mention — the way Tom Hagen’s eyes skitter away from Tessio’s.
So, things that bring surprising tears. Not the obvious tearjerker moments, but the moments that make you fog up unexpectedly, sort of like Tom Hanks and Victor Garber describing THE DIRTY DOZEN. Or Noel Coward walking down the staircase in the original ITALIAN JOB. Damn, I have to go get a tissue.
The scene in Remains of the Day when Emma Thompson is teasing Tony Hopkins about the sappy book he’s reading. A much more obvious tearjerker moment comes later when they part, but the restrained agony in Hopkins’s face and voice and mannerisms during the book scene just slays me.
It’s like the scene in Sleepless in Seattle when the two women talk about crying during the refrigerator commercial.
I cry during Miracle when the USA hockey team beats the USSR (yeah like I don’t know they win!) or in Mystery Alaska when the New York Rangers salute the Mystery team by banging their sticks on the ice.
Ummmm yes I am a hockey geek – why do you ask?
We have the same taste in movies! I love that scene with the dad clapping.
In THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER, when he rides the horse over the steep mountain slope and you know he’s just past the point of no return between being a boy and being a man.
When Brando tells Eva Marie Saint to stay with the body of Rod Steiger because he shouldn’t be alone in On The Waterfront, still one of the great American movies and the only good thing to come out of the blacklist era.
Walter Huston’s death bed scene in Yankee Doodle Dandy
When the Wicked Witch of the West flips the hour glass and storms out of the dungeon, leaving Ms Gale in tears, and thinking ruefully about what Auntie Em must be thinking; always got me when I was a kid, and still gets me