there was a terrific scene in The Town early on, in which a character's tattoo, it recognized, could result in some deadly repercussions, and the whole scene plays out while the character himself isn't necessarily aware and feels free to turn his neck every which way. the theater was literally gasping, and it really makes me appreciate these very suspenseful slapstick moments.
but I can't remember too many other examples of such moments. I remember the Tom Cruise bungee scene in the first Mission Impossible when he was an inch away from the floor and caught his sweat drop. that was pretty sweet.
does anyone have any good examples? I like these things.
Hm, I like your description of "slapstick suspense." I haven't seen The Town, but what about the scene in Inglourious Basterds in the bar with the cards on their forehead and the German accents? It's hyper suspenseful for a pretty silly reason, but not necessarily a physical one.
right, tarantino's good with intimidating character who'll snap at any moment, should they find something out or merely lose their temper. The scene in The Town definitely has that same element too, but I was just thinking about how versatile the slapstick form can be. In The Celebration, the film uses basically the structure of a farce comedy to tell a very sad story. Ang Lee's done something similar in his family drama Eat Drink Men Women. Or in Schindler's List when a Jew hides in the piano, the nazis walk past, he crawls out safely, but then steps on the keys. That's almost a Marx Brothers gag but the stakes in the sequence were devastating.
But in suspense I find a very fun parallel. I bet Hitchcock has many a scenes that could almost be a comic sequence if the plot that preceded the scene was different. But that's only a guess 'cause I haven't seen too many of his films. It takes a very skilled writer to embed that much emotional investment in something as superficial as a drop of sweat or a turn of the head.
and to further the confusion, I don't mean like a Coen Bros film like Blood Simple where a dude's got his hand nailed to the window (which is more like suspenseful slapstick), if you understand the difference. Coen Bros have a knack for adding laughs or highlighting the ludicrousness in a serious situation, but the scenes I'm interested are more straightforward. in a short, a grave scene that rests its stakes precariously on something very physical and superficial, and probably is outside of the control of the main characters.
There must be countless other examples, and I'd love to seek them out, if anyone's willing to play this game.
I remember one of the first movies I remember seeing that really showed me suspense was Jurassic Park. When they break down right next to the T-Rex pen and it gets out, but the only thing it can see is movement so everyone is staying perfectly still. That whole scene just had my 11 year old ass on the edge of my seat. And then later when they're back in the visitors center and the velociraptors are chasing the kids and they're using reflections to outsmart them.
The "escape from the commune" scene in Children of Men I find to be in equal parts exciting and hilarious. Clive Owen et al are sneaking through parked cars; he's fucking with all of them. Then, the actual getaway car won't start. He has to get out and push. The terrorist from before threatens him with a gun, he is done away with (in the same way as before)...all in only two or three edits.
Bob Balaban's death scene from Lady in the Water? [/discredited]
this is an excellent topic about something that is really hard to define but also very easy to imagine.
i know exactly what you mean but when i start to think of examples i can only think of basically every suspenseful scene ever made. i think the reason that "suspense" is associated with Hitchcock even to ppl who havn't seen many of his films is that all great suspense hangs on a macguffin. whatever the case may be, the audience gets involved by imbuing importance to objects which both the characters and the viewers use as a conduit for emotion.
i wonder if this is what you meant, since the examples that came immediately to mind were in fact ENDINGS made out of suspenseful moments that hinged on the audience/character's investments in macguffins. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is the best thing ritchie did because of that amazing ending (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jfy4eno5PM#t=6m32s).. the moment where the dude has to choose between answering the phone or finishing the disposal generates the same reaction in audiences as the ending of inception. in both these occasions the crowd laughs because the film ends on a winding up of tension that is never released.
i can see right now that the inception case is not at all what you're talking about, there is no slapstick element that would make it funny in a comedic genre. that has to be the litmus test for the situations you're talking about, where if it happened in a marx bros or keaton film it would elicit a laugh. i think the lock stock example stands to this scrutiny.
I've been trying to think of scenes from films that would fit this slapstick suspense but i'm having trouble. could you see something like this in 2012? i could've replaced jon cusack with buster keaton in the scene where LA is crumbling. Sherlock JR in 2012.
hmm. everyone else seems to be having trouble too, eh?
I think there's a joke structure to how these slapstick scenes are set up, where the hero's struggle out of his situation is the payoff (as opposed to the resolution/ punchline). For example, in City Lights when Charlie Chaplin enters the boxing ring. The set up is that Chaplin thought he was entering a fixed match, when he realized he was fighting a bloodthirsty boxer who wants all the prized money to himself. The payoff is Chaplin hiding behind the referee, desperately trying to stay alive. the resolution doesn't much matter, because it's a comedy so the stakes aren't as devastating (I mean, they are, but in a different way...)
I think in a suspense movie or a crime movie or whatever the other darker-themed movies (the good ones anyways) - the plot is usually quite entangled and layered so the suspense usually comes from multiple obstacles all coming at once. But every once a while a writer finds a very simple scenario with two or three very straightforward (but conflicting) motives, and can knock it out like a joke. And I admire such a writer, even if the rest of the script is average. I think it's hard enough to write a funny joke, and it takes a real craftsman to turn the humor into something suspenseful.
I was reading a David Mamet book, and he talked about a scene in the Diary of Ann Frank (I know, another nazi film), where the family was silent during a nazi raid, when their kitten came over on a counter, was about to knock over a milk bottle, but ended up getting its head stuck in the bottle instead. The family's having a heart attack, while the kitty struggled to get the milk bottle free, and somehow did it silently, subverting the nazis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p3KY4CfmE8
that's a jackie chan scene, from one of his "serious films" - that begins midway through a fight - he wrestles a gun out of the bad guy's hand by forcing it in a pot of burning hot soup. that's the set up. then later bad guys come in with guns, Jackie runs, then remembers there's a gun in the burning pot. So he needs to fish it out and fire it before the bad guys get to him. it's a very traditional set up/ pay off. but effective.
this is a good example if you can follow me, in a Boogie Nights-esque scene from a Korean action film:
there was also a Korean film called A Bittersweet Life, in which the wounded hero barely survives a beating and is seeking revenge on his previous associates. He goes to a drunk Russian wannabe gun dealer for firearms, but does it through a hookup from his previous job. The gun dealer drunkenly teaches him how to assemble and dissemble a glock while the lackey check up on the good guy's background. The good guy keeps on fucking up, the drunken guy keeps laughing as he again and again assembles the glock with quickness and ease. Then the lackey hangs up the phone, dropping his smile. Both the hero and the drunken dealer immediately realize the background check is a bust, and begin FRANTICALLY assembling their respective guns...
Again, there's a set up - the good guy sucks at putting a glock together, and the punchline is he has to beat the drunken gunsmith in order to shoot his way out of the deal.
speaking of which. that firecracker scene from boogie nights was a good mix of slapstick absurdity and suspense...a little more complicated than a slapstick sequence though.
What about that Jamie Lee Curtis striptease in True Lies? I seem to recall that she even falls down at the end of the dance, which is still pretty suspenseful because she's in front of the villain. I think I nailed one right there.
That might be more of what Pete called suspenseful slapstick.
When I think of what Pete means by slapstick suspense, I think of scenes that aren't funny at all (which the True Lies dance is), but where the suspense hangs on a goofy, absurd, highly physical moment. It has the same set up as a joke, and the same kind of physically clever thinking, but it's not ha ha funny--it's suspenseful.
Where it differs from other suspense scenes is, say, in that classic example that Hitchcock gave where the audience knows that there's a bomb under the chair but the person sitting on the chair doesn't, this relies on a piece of knowledge that the audience has, rather than a highly physical moment in a scene.
Pete's examples are all moments that could be really funny in a comedy, but they're not funny in the films that he's citing from: the cat with its head in the milk bottle in Anne Frank, the Jackie Chan gun moment, the scene in The Town. They might produce a bit of nervous laughter, but it's not really a haha moment because the stakes are high and the movie is generally dramatic, so in that context, you can't just laugh as if this were nothing.
This is, at least, my understanding of what Pete's talking about.
I like this thread.
I think that most good suspenseful scenes could be re-figured as comedy. This is mostly because irony is so easily applied to both suspense and comedy.
Buffalo Bill is watching Starling fumble around in the dark... slide whistle.
Speaking of Jodie Foster, the scene where she's trying to get the cell phone and knocks over the lamp in Panic Room... wah wah
MATT said it better than I could've. Thanks matt.
this is suspenseful slapstick:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79i84xYelZI
Charlie Chaplin trying to not piss off a real lion. The real lion could realistically eat him, or so we believe, and that's what Chaplin's banking on, to make us laugh.
another example (And I'm soooo running so low on them) can be that scene in Minority Report, when Tom Cruises's eyeballs roll down the hallway and he has to blindly fetch them or something, before they roll into the storm drain.
I think I have a good example! Where Doc is hanging from the clock tower at the end of the Back to the Future. That scene is not funny intentionally, but that is a direct homage to Harold Lloyd in "Safety Last," where it was intentionally funny. (ok that's also weird that both the actors' last name is Lloyd, but anyway...)
Granted, that is not a highly dramatic film, nor is that the most comical thing ever, but that is scene built for suspense, and Doc hanging there intensifies the circumstances.
I feel like there should be great examples in The Departed or The Talented Mr. Ripley, but I can't seem to think of any. But Pete, your example from Mission: Impossible actually applies to that entire sequence, everything from the laxative pen, to the guy having to take a shit, to the rat in the air vent and the guy sneezing. That is all complete slapstick applied to a suspense sequence. It makes sense, too, because that whole universe is a bit hammy, in a good way if you ask me.
I just saw Polanski's FRANTIC and there's a lot of this slapstick suspense going on, to the point I just started laughing. It might even be a bizarre comedy of sorts and that works better than to think of it only as a thriller. Harrison Ford is great and the one big slapstick sequence has him trying to escape through a parisian roof, and it's hilarious.
How about the "cleaning up" scene from De Palma's Sisters?
Not sure if it counts, but i'm pretty sure the final 30 minutes of Pour Elle is ALL slapstick suspense.
SPOILER FOR A SCENE EARLY IN THE FILM "Mother", which is on netflix watch instantly, and you really need to watch that fucking movie.
early in the film, there's a scene in which Mother hides in the closet of her son's best friend, whom she suspects to have been the true murderer of the crime her son's been accused of committing.
The boy returns home with a young girlfriend. They hook up, the mother kneels in the closet, watching it all, the two of them pass out. The mother quietly sneaks out of the closet with a blunt murder instrument that she's found in his closet. But then she realizes that her feet have been numb after kneeling for so long, so she must navigate his tiny dirty apartment as the two of them are dead asleep. She tries her best to control her short, dead legs, walking over this comicbook and that soda cup, almost reaching the door-
when she knocks over a cup of water, the waterspill slowly spreads on the floor - inching towards the dude's fingers. The mother tries her best to sneak out of the door before that happens--
the movie has certain bits of self-awareness built in, so that scene may arguably be a little funny, but still, it uses slapstick devices build a very tense moment.
In The Fighter after Dicky jumped out a window for the billionth time, I immediately thought of this thread. Fuckabees had a bunch of these moments too IIRC, but that's more of a comedy. Three Kings too.