Greatest Movie Quotes: 47- 46

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Continuing the countdown of the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie lines. Because the list is from 2005, there are a lot of movie lines missing. These will be reviewed at the end of this continuing series. 

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47. 

Line: 

“Shane, Shane. Come back.” 

Film: 

Shane 

Year: 

1953 

Spoken by: 

Brandon deWilde 

Character: 

Joey Starrett 

Link to the line: 

Gunfighter Shane (Aland Ladd) aids Joe Starrett and other homesteaders by taking on the local cattle baron, who wants to drive them out, and his hired guns. In the final battle, Shane kills the bad guys but is himself shot. In the closing scene, Shane rides off to the call of Joe Starrett’s son, Joey, who has come to idealise him, calling out to him to come back. 

Trivia: 

The film was completed in 1951 but George Stevens' editing process was so rigorous that it wasn't released until 1953. In the meantime, High Noon, another cowie, was released in 1952 and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four (Actor, Editing, Music-Score, and Music-Song). Shane won an Oscar for best cinematography (colour), missing out on the other nominated categories: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Brandon deWilde, Jack Palance), Best Director, Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay. 

In the scene when Shane first enters the bar, he answers a question from Chris with "you speakin' to me" to which he gets a reply from Chris "I don't see nobody else standin' there" - very much an influence for dialogue used by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976). 

From the Internet Movie Database: 

Does Shane die at the end? 

The film leaves that question unanswered, although viewers can be found to support either side of the argument. Those who conclude that Shane dies argue that the last scene in which he rides through a cemetery is an indication that he is dying or is already dead. They point out that he is slumping slightly with his arm to his side and that, in the novel, the gunshot was to his abdomen. They reason that he goes off to die as one last favor to the Starretts. Shane admires and likes Joe but is in love with Marian. He leaves so that they do not know for sure that he has died; he knows that the guilt Joe and Marian would feel at his death would poison their marriage. Those who conclude that Shane is not dying counter that the cemetery is simply on the way back to the mountains and that he is leaning forward because he is going uphill, as horseback riders tend to do. Although he was shot, they argue, it appears to be a superficial wound to his upper arm. The wound isn't bleeding profusely, Shane isn't acting like the wound is serious, he could mount and ride his horse, and he is holding up the reins. Others circumvent the argument entirely by pointing out that it matters little whether or not Shane dies from his wound. The movie itself is an allegory saying that the gunfighter, like the free range cattle rancher, are dying breeds. The West is being settled, civilized and developed. It's giving way to a new era where the rugged individual was being replaced by families... where peace would prevail and gunfighters no longer had a place. 

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46. 

Line: 

“Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.” 

Film: 

Now, Voyager 

Year: 

1942 

Spoken by: 

Charlotte Vale 

Character: 

Bette Davis 

Link to the line: 

Charlotte Vale is an unattractive, overweight, repressed spinster whose life is brutally dominated by her tyrannical mother. She blossoms under therapy and becomes an elegant, independent woman who falls in love with a married man, Jerry. His wife refuses to grant him a divorce and Charlotte ends up caring for Jerry’s troubled daughter on the understanding that her relationship with Jerry remains platonic. When Jerry asks Charlotte if she is happy, she looks at what she has to be thankful for and utters the above line. 

Trivia: 

The Walt Whitman poem that Bette Davis reads (just before leaving Cascades) is "The Untold Want" from Songs of Parting (just 2 lines): 

"The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted, 

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find." 

Paul Henreid's act of lighting two cigarettes at once caught the public's imagination and he couldn't go anywhere without being accosted by women begging him to light cigarettes for them. 

Today Now, Voyager is regarded as a poignant depiction of mental illness and overcoming, of a woman who transforms her life and takes control with the aid of psychiatry and her own will power, a subject matter and treatment advanced for its time.