It didn't take long for Apocalypse Now to add a whole bunch of one‑liners to the movie quote lexicon. Even before the mixed critical reception had coalesced into an iron-clad verdict, phrases from the screenplay by Francis Coppola, John Milius and Michael Herr (with a little help from Joseph Conrad) were already reverberating above and beyond their context in the film: "Saigon. Shit.","Terminate … with extreme prejudice", "Charlie don't surf!", "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", "Never get out of the boat", "The horror, the horror". And so on.
Screenplays are more than just dialogue, of course, yet a well-turned phrase can go a long way towards cementing a movie's cult status. Watching Casablanca nowadays is to experience a little thrill of recognition at every other line, and only partly because, "Play it, Sam" or, "Round up the usual suspects" have been adapted as titles for other movies. Ideally, a good quote is not only specific to its dramatic context, but has universal application. "We'll always have Paris" and "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" are the gifts that keep on giving.
You could say the same about The Wizard of Oz, or Some Like It Hot, or Sunset Boulevard – they're treasure troves for quote collectors. But Apocalypse Now, for me, marks the point at which film quotes became self‑conscious and lost their innocence, divorcing themselves from their dramatic source to become part of the currency of film buffery, a badge of cinematic taste enabling the quoters to trade references with like-minded pilgrims while baffling the uninitiated.
There's a minor character in Diner who does nothing but quote dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success – and not just JJ Hunsecker's catchphrase, "Match me, Sidney." But that always struck me as an idea more in tune with the film‑geek spirit of the 1980s, when the film was made, rather than 1959, when it was set. Because, surely not coincidentally, Apocalypse Now's release in 1979 coincided with the video recorder reaching the mass market, which for the first time enabled fans to hunt for verbal truffles, watch their favourite scenes repeatedly and commit scads of dialogue to memory without having to sit in a cinema.
The 1980s also saw a trend towards the vernacular, spearheaded by Bill Lancaster's dialogue for The Thing, in which characters reacted not with philosophical musings about hills of beans or, "We'll always have Antarctica", but by uttering the sort of banalities you or I might say if we'd just glimpsed a head sprouting spider legs and scuttling across the floor: "You've got to be fucking kidding." It seemed fresh and witty in 1982, but that was before a zillion other sci-fi, horror and action movies got in on the act. There are only so many ways you can say (to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator), "Fuck you, asshole".
We're lucky if a new movie can rustle up a single memorable one-liner, such as There Will Be Blood's "I drink your milkshake" (which though a colourful metaphor for capitalism seems out of character for Daniel Plainview, who never struck me as a milkshake-drinker) or the deceptively mild "That is all" from The Devil Wears Prada. But can you think of any films from the noughties that are as chock-full of quotable dialogue as Casablanca or The Shining? You're more likely to stumble across bon mots "borrowed" from other films, such as The Wizard of Oz. If I hear "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more" one more time (Avatar and Sex and the City 2 are just two of the recent offenders), I'll scream.
And, regardless of these films' other merits, I can't see buffs quoting the dialogue from The King's Speech or The Social Network in 30 years' time. Indeed, after perusing a list of this year's titles, the only phrase from any of them that has actually stuck in my brain is Rango's: "I found a human spinal chord in my fecal matter once." Which may not match "We'll always have Paris" for universal applicability, but I'm going to try and shoehorn it into my cocktail party chit-chat anyway.
