I grew up singing and listening to my family sing.  We weren’t show folk or carnies.  My parents were ex-military (they had in fact met and married in the Air Force) and worked for the better part of my formative years as school teachers.  I was the only actor in the family tree but I came from a long line of playful, funsy folk… and we liked our music.  Not one of us could play an instrument or even read music but our home was swimming in long playing records.  My parents even had their Las Vegas wedding ceremony on an LP, and my Mom and her parents both had song booth recordings made years and years earlier.  Even today, the combined familial unit of my folks and my wife’s family will break into spontaneous harmonizing around the table.  (It doesn’t even have to be a dinner table.  Could be an end table.  Could be an occasional table.)  I’m glad my own children get to be around that vibe and there’s lots of singing in our own home, even if fidelity to original lyrics isn’t necessarily a top priority.  All this to say it should come as no surprise that I love movie scenes in which characters sing in the glorious imperfection of their untrained voices. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

1. Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider, JAWS (1975).  In this scene, these three very different men, bringing three very different skill sets and different temperaments to the hunt for a predatory great white shark, bond over booze and an old camp song.  And not a moment too soon, either.

Note:  You’ll see with some of these film clips that clicking on the picture brings up the statement “Embedding disabled by request – Watch on YouTube.”  Clicking on the underlined phrase “Watch on YouTube” will bring up the clip easy-peasy.

2. Charles Durning, TOOTSIE (1982).  I can’t find footage or even an image of this wonderful (albeit) brief scene online but it’s one of my favorites.  Hoffman’s “Dorothy Michaels” visits coworker Jessica Lange’s family, where her father (Charles Durning) entertains his guests at the piano with some old timey songs, among them the Alan E. Brant standard “That’s All.”  You can keep your Michael Bublé – Durning brings it home.

3. Kimberly Scott, Ed Harris and Todd Graff, THE ABYSS (1989).  Before TITANIC (1997) made him king of the world, this was James Cameron’s presumed Waterloo: an expensive, complicated, part-cool, part-stupid confection that a lot of people felt was neither fish nor foul.  And all those opinions are right.  However.  Early in the film, Cameron stages a beautiful and unembroidered human moment between some working class Joes soldiering through the fatigue with a little bit of country soul.  I particularly love how this scene showcases gorgeous Kimberly Scott in all her cowgirl glory.

4.  Gabriella Schmoll, Karl Fisher and ensemble.  In Barbara Albert’s wonderful FREE RADICALS (2003), various characters connected to one another by blood, by association or by circumstance search for patterns and meaning in the face of overwhelming calamity and chaos.  In one scene, members of a church choir decamp to a local pub for some lager and bonhomie.  All of them having come of age in the 60s, they’re pushing retirement age now and find themselves fragile, lonely and fearful of the future.  The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” begins to play on the bar sound system and the gang sings along.

5.  Terence Stamp, POOR COW (1969).  This one’s a bit different, as we only hear Terence Stamp singing the great Donovan ballad but it still works a charm in describing the quiet life (at least in this bit) of a working class British family in the turbulent 1960s.

6. Lorraine de Salle and Zora Kerova, CANNIBAL FEROX (1981).  Late in the film, two women who have been made the prisoners of a tribe of Amazonian flesh eaters bide their limited time in a bamboo cage singing James Kerrigan’s immortal cowboy song “Red River Valley.”  It’s a preposterous moment, so out there and out of nowhere – especially given that the film’s raison d’etre seems to be giving you the dry heaves.  It’s so wrong … and yet it works for me.  Henry Fonda sings the same song in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) but for some crazy reason this is the movie I always think of when I hear that song.

7. George Dzunzda, Meryl Street, Robert DeNiro, John Savage, John Cazale, Rutanya Alda and Chuck Aspegren, THE DEER HUNTER (1978).  This is the absolute final scene of Michael Cimino’s Academy Award-winning film, and it occurs when the characters realize, after everything that has happened, there is absolutely nothing more to say.  I lived an unintentional real life remake of this scene in the terrible days after 9/11, with a small circle of friends gathered around a single guitar in an apartment in Greenwich Village.

8.  Alexia Keogh, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990).  This at times grueling biography of New Zealand novelist/poet Janet Frame concludes on a bittersweet, with the adolescent Janet singing the song “With Every Beat of My Heart.”  Again, it kills me not to have a clip for you because the moment is burned into my brain, as it will be in yours… for a moment… for an hour…

9.  Paul Henried versus Conrad Veidt, CASABLANCA (1942).  Okay, this scene just kicks ass.  A bunch of Nazi thugs begin singing one of their nationalist murder songs (I actually don’t know what the song is – it could be about a young boy’s love for his mother but it just sounds so bossy and Nazi-like) in Rick’s Cafe Americain until freedom fighter Paul Henreid steps in and strikes up “La Marseillaise,” France’s stirring national anthem.  In only a few bars, the tide turns against the villains as the locals and assorted expatriates rise up in common cause against the bastard Reich.  The killer is the close-up of Madeleine Lebeau, playing a good time girl who has been cozying up to Jerry for creature comforts and shiny things, her face now awash in tears of unstanchable shame.  I’m welling up just thinking about this scene and I hate the French!

1o.  John Travolta, A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG (2004).  I love the 18th Century ballad “Barbara Allen” and get a little thrill when it pops up in a movie, as it has done in such films as A CHRISTMAS CAROL (aka SCROOGE, 1951), in THE BUCCANEER (1958), THE PIANO (1993) and BEST IN SHOW (2000).  Porky Pig even sang it in the 1958 Warner Brothers cartoon ROBIN HOOD DAFFY.  I can’t say John Travolta’s version is the best in filmdom but I love the set-up: the broken down trailer, the broken down characters, a space big enough to accommodate them all and a tune they don’t mind hearing.

11.  Ned Beatty, HEAR MY SONG (1991).  Okay, so this selection is a bit of a cheat because that’s not really Ned Beatty singing and his character isn’t an amateur.  The film is an entertaining bit of blarney about a down-on-his-luck music hall promoter (Adrian Dunbar) who has the brilliant, mad idea to draw audiences to his dilapidated venue by sneaking back into Ireland the celebrated tenor Josef Locke.  Locke had been a big audience draw during the postwar years but his sizable earnings made him a target of the Inland Revenue and he took it on the lam for decades.  That is, of course, Locke’s voice coming out of Ned Beatty but I love the moment of spontaneous singing and the magic that can occur in a snap among people with love and a song in their hearts.