Not to be necessarily morbid, but I’m thinking we all must have movie death scenes that have stuck in our minds.  Sure, maybe I am a little morbid sometimes, and boy,  darn if I don’t have a special affection for movies with memorable deaths in them.  Maybe memorable isn’t precisely the right word.  How about weird, more like?  And not in a humorous way; I like the ones where it’s tragic and unexpected and probably accidental and maybe a tad gruesome, too.  Honestly, I think it started way back when I saw some movie in first grade or something where somebody — a kid? – had been tied to a pole by a body of water and the water was rising and they were going to slowly drown.  I have not been able to figure out what that was that we saw that day, but the image has stayed with me — had they tied the kid to the pole during some kind of cowboys and indian game? –  and I know this is my aging memory getting the better of me, though I never did actually know the name of the thing.  The effect of this movie, or whatever it was, plus when I was I think in 2nd grade, a girl in my class fell off a cliff at Laguna Beach one weekend and died, and we were told about it…well…the sudden and unusual nature of death has always seemed sort of normal and expected to me.  Yikes.  I was probably scarred for life pretty early, but I know I’m not the only one.  In looking into these three movies that I’m going to deal with, there are lots of comments online about how these death scenes have fascinated people.  A lot of us out there are mesmerized by them, for good or for ill.

I’m only going to talk about three of mine, all of which fit my tragic-unexpected-accidental-gruesome criteria.  As you’ll see from them, they’re all sort of all-American demises, born and bred in the U.S.A., down to the last breath.  (Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I’m watching another great screen death on TCM, Bette Davis’ in Dark Victory, not accidental or gruesome but very effective.)  First off, there’s one in a not particularly well-known fairly recent — well, 1991 — movie, director Robert Mulligan’s lyrical coming-of-age tale Man in the Moon, starring Reese Witherspoon in her motion picture debut.  It’s a girly tale for sure, with Emily Warfield and Witherspoon as sisters vying for the affection of handsome young buck Court, played by Jason London.  It’s got a great adult cast, too — Sam Waterston and Tess Harper are the girls’ parents, and Gail Strickland is Court’s single mom.  

Set in 1957 rural Louisianna, Man in the Moon has the requisite swimming holes and porch kisses and all that other stuff, plus a horrifying scene of death.  If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know who gets it, stop reading NOW!  The sisters are pining for Court, who naturally is tending toward the older sister, to Reese’s dismay.  But back to the awful part.  The strapping young man does farmwork, and one day he’s on the tractor, and he falls off…and it runs him over.  Badly.  Fatally.   His mother sees the tractor running without a driver, and runs out to the pasture, and finds his broken and probably bisected body and takes her son into her arms, wailing.  Reese starts to run to them, but the mother screams for her to stay away.   It’s shocking, horrifying, it’s not that you see very much but it’s what you imagine happened to that poor young man.   I couldn’t find the scene exactly, but I did find an “Ode to the End of Man in the Moon“, plus the trailer.

My next memorable death is from another girly coming-of-age film.  Now, normally (except for the previous example) I wouldn’t go for this kind of movie, but I have to admit that My Girl, directed by Howard Zieff, and also from 1991, has a decent core that makes it quite watchable, plus nice Dan Ackroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis performances.  It also takes place in a mortuary — the father is a mortician, and they live there — which makes death an integral part of the movie’s fabric.  The appealing young Vada (Anna Chlumsky) is just beginning to grow into a young woman, and her best friend is a delicate, bespectacled and equally appealing Thomas J., played by Macaulay Culkin, a year after his smash hit Home Alone.  Despite that film’s crazy success, with Culkin’s mugging face all over America for a while there, he gives a sweet performance and you really hate to see him — SPOILER HERE!  — get stung to death by bees! 

There’s a foreshadowing when Thomas and Vada get into a bee hive and have to dive into a lake to escape the swarm, but later, when he’s alone in the woods, he comes upon the downed hive, is attacked by a couple of bees, flails around and loses his glasses, can’t see to escape from the bees and it goes downhill from there.  We don’t actually see most of the attack, but learn of it when a police officer comes to the mortician’s house to tell him, and Ackroyd, as Vada’s father, must tell her that her best friend has died from the stings.  Thomas is a sweet kid, he doesn’t deserve such an attack, it’s a terrible accident and he’s a complete victim, and it’s pretty horrible.  Just the idea of a fatal bee attack is the stuff of nightmares for many of us, and for somebody who’s allergic — as was young Thomas — it’s curtains.  Here’s the trailer for the My Girl, and then the section of the movie where Thomas gets it — it’s about 7:00 in.

Now, my last one is from a relatively unsung but amazing film, 1971′s Sometimes a Great Notion, adapted from a Ken Kesey novel, and directed by Paul Newman.  The story of an Oregon family of lumberjacks, it’s full of outdoorsy action, plenty of masculine angst, and terrific performances from Newman, Henry Fonda as his father, Lee Remick as Newman’s wife, and Richard Jaeckel and Michael Sarrazin as Newman’s brothers.  We know it’s dangerous work — Fonda gets smashed by a tree — but by far one of the most agonizing, emotionally and physically, deaths ever put on film is that of Richard Jaeckel who — SPOILER HERE! — gets pinned to a huge tree that’s in the river, and he’s wedged in beneath it and can’t move.  The water is rising, and Newman takes his chainsaw to the log to try to free his brother, but it shifts it, actually making it worse.  Then the saw stops working, and though the situation looks utterly desperate, the brothers’ dialogue is affectionate, casual, humorous, until the water rises to a point where there is no hope.  Jaeckel received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion, and you can understand why.   The scene is devastating, and once viewed, cannot be forgotten.  Ever.   I was able to find that particular scene, which has obviously affected many people who have remembered it even after seeing it long ago, and then you can get a taste for the rest of the movie from a group of selected scenes. 

What are your most affecting movie death moments?  It’ll do us all good to share them.  (FilmSite.Org has a huge chronological list of Best Film Deaths — might want to jog your memory with a look.  And don’t forget about the Cinemorgue.)