“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

by David Benjamin

“I want you all to get up out of your chairs, I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’” —Howard Beale (Peter Finch), Network, 1976

MADISON, Wis.—Everybody recognizes a “classic” film, don’t we? There’s a whole cable channel devoted to classics, organizing movie cruises and selling merchandise. But none of the hosts on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has ever, to my knowledge, articulated exactly what makes a movie “classic.”

Offhand, I can identify a few criteria. A classic film should be both beloved by audiences and praised by critics. But the latter rule is riddled with exceptions. There are film nerds who list as “classic” such critical bombs as Ed Wood’s abomination, Plan 9 from Outer Space, as well as such unwatchable flicks as Roger Corman’s original version of The Little Shop of Horrors, George Romero’s seminal zombie movie, The Night of the Living Dead and a flood of misogynist gross-out films that followed in the wake of John Landis’ “classic,” Animal House.

Certainly, there are scenes, original to their auteurs and unique (until imitated to death) that qualify a film as a classic. The filmgoer need only see that screeching cockatoo, for barely one second, to recognize a segue in Citizen Kane. Janet Leigh in the shower is the indelible signature of Psycho. Five grainy seconds of a black ’68 Mustang GT flying off a San Francisco hill betrays the driver as Steve McQueen in Bullitt. And anyone who has seen Charlie Chaplin with the flower and the blind girl at the end of City Lights feels all over again the emotional power of that perfectly crafted moment.

Moreso than the memorable scene—perhaps the most definitive quality of a classic movie—is a script that leaves behind a line or two that stick in the viewer’s mind and recall those scenes vividly. Roy Scheider’s line, in Jaws, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” has become a metaphor that people apply to challenges in life that have nothing to do with sharks and beaches.

Anyone who’s been to the movies in the last fifty years can instantly name the movie—and the speaker—containing these immortal lines:

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

“Go ahead, make my day.”

“There’s no crying in baseball!”

“Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

“You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause.”

“Ya got trouble, my friend. Right here, I say, trouble right here in River City.”

“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.”

“”I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect.”

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

Casablanca, scripted by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, is probably the most quote-rich classic of all time, so oft-cited that it has spawned history’s most persistent misquote, “Play it again, Sam.” By now, of course, any self-respecting cineaste will point out, pedantically, that Rick’s actual line was. “You played it for her, you can play it for me!”

Among immortal lines, Casablanca has also gifted the movie buff with:

“We’ll always have Paris.”

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

“I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

And, of course, there is, in Casablanca, the best closing line in the history of Hollywood: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

In compiling this catalog of memorable scenes and lines, I’m inclined to wonder if the era of the classic film has passed. As the industry shifts from the main-street movie house and shopping-mall metroplex to TV- and device-based streaming, is it possible for people in all walks, in all generations, to have common cultural touchstones like Bette Davis, finishing her martini and pausing on the staircase to announce, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”?

As of today, the audience for Gone with the Wind, released in 1939, is around 200 million. It’s still growing. A film streamed today might accumulate as many as 25 million “views” worldwide over a six-week period before losing its cachet and facing deletion from the online menu. The latest Netflix No. 1, an anime called KPop Demon Hunters, seems unlikely to leave behind an indelible cultural signature like, say, Michael J. Fox playing “Johnny B. Goode” and saying, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

In a way, the migration of movies from the big screen to home screens and iPhone apps returns film to its roots, when movies had no pretensions to art and were almost purely a medium of pop entertainment screened in theaters (nickelodeons) where regular folks paid five cents admissions. Indeed, when my moviegoing days began, forty years after D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, I could get into a double feature at the Erwin for a quarter.

The watershed for film as “art” might well have been Citizen Kane, a movie that introduced a narrative depth and a range of technique rarely seen before in cinema. Pauline Kael, one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished film critics, wrote a huge book just about Citizen Kane. Within the decade of the release of Orson Welles’ tour de force, James Agee, a writer of florid non-fiction, was singularly responsible for establishing film criticism as a literary genre. Soon after, the movie studios welcomed an influx of auteurs, highfalutin filmmakers whose mission was to uplift movies from the amusement of the masses to the fastidious approval of the critical cognoscenti. One of the manifestations of this departure from the plebeian was the birth of the film festival. The grand-daddy of them all is, of course, the celebrity mecca and beachside titty show in Cannes.

A quick survey of Palme d’Or (grand prize) winners at Cannes indicates how far the makers of “art movies” steadily diverged from the Hollywood imperative of selling tickets and amusing the riffraff. In 76 years of Cannes, since Carol Reed won the Palme d’Or for The Third Man in 1949, I can count only twelve movies that ever scored ticket sales substantial enough to qualify as “classics.” The best of these were William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1957), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966), Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) and Costa Gavras’ Missing (1982). The last Cannes-winning “hit” was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). Although the majority of Cannes winners are heaped with esoteric praise, I can’t identify a Palme d”Or winner in the last thirty years that qualifies as a Friday-night date movie. These acclaimed festival films are classics only in the regard of a cloistered club of cinema snobs. There isn’t a regular film buff on earth who can wax nostalgic while reciting his or her favorite line from Abdellatif Kechiche’s masterpiece, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), or Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022).

I’m left wondering whether today’s fragmented viewership watching flicks on smartphones or bingeing a Saturday-night quintuple-feature on Hulu or HBO Max will become the next wave of movie intellectuals, disdainful of lowbrow popcorn-and-circus and communing among themselves in an argot exclusive to their tribe.

I wonder also if the rest of us, left out of this cult, will feel much pain. We’ll only have Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, Singin’ in the Rain and Duck Soup—not to mention Ben Mankiewicz on TCM—to mitigate our exile.