More Movie Bookends Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sled burns in fireplace

Often cited by critics as the greatest film ever made, "Citizen Kane" unsurprisingly begins and ends with two classic shots. Immediately after the title credits, the camera opens directly with a shot of a "NO TRESPASSING" sign, pauses for a moment, then slowly, deliberately, pans up past a chain-link fence, fading in and out, until we get a view of an enormous, menacing estate. This is Xanadu, Charles Foster Kane's imposing castle. Then, disconnected shots fade in and out: zoo monkeys in a cage, a decrepit dock, a medieval bridge, an old golf course, all ominously overshadowed by the estate itself. Director Orson Welles immediately made a name for himself in "Citizen Kane", and one reason was his use of "deep focus"--the ability to keep both the foreground and background in focus in a single shot. It is used to great effect in the opening of "Citizen Kane" to portray the dereliction of a once great estate. The camera progressively winds its way into the castle, finally making it to Kane's bed. And then comes the most famous scene of all: a man mutters "Rosebud", a snow-globe falls off his bed, and nurses rush in to find Kane dead, having just uttered his mysterious final words.

The entirety of "Citizen Kane" focuses on a journalist's quest to determine the meaning behind the mogul's final entreaty, but one piece that the film accomplishes so well is to turn that journey on its head. By the end of the film, audiences have seen Kane's moral turpitude after an up-and-down life, and the meaning of "Rosebud" almost seems unimportant. And that's when Welles flips the switch again. For a movie that spends so long dwelling on the past, the final scene occurs in the present, shortly after Kane's death, when his estate is being liquidated. The journalist has given up. The camera moves deliberately over a host of valuable treasures in the Kane collection, before settling on an old childhood sled, seen in an early sentimental scene when the mogul was just a small boy. The last shot clearly reveals the word "Rosebud" is written on it. The man who had everything was asking for his childhood sled on his deathbed.

Answer: Family climbs over mountain

The opening to 1965's "The Sound of Music" is iconic: Julie Andrews dances around in the meadow, evidently skipping work in the abbey, as she sings the film's title tune. Remarkably for the time, the camera appears to be propelled through the air while Andrews was remaining relatively stationary.

In fact, that's actually exactly what happened. Absent any drones in the '60s, the cameraman actually hung off the side of a helicopter and shot the entire scene in midair. Unsurprisingly, the force of the winds from the helicopter frequently knocked the actress off her feet. Because of bad weather, the entire scene took a week to shoot.

Then, because helicopters are expensive to rent, immediately after the opening shot was good to go, the entire cast went out to film the closing scene, also in the mountains, when the von Trapp family escapes from Nazi-held Austria into neutral Switzerland, to the tune of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain".

Interestingly, neither scene was actually shot in Austria. Instead, scenic mountains in Germany were used as the setting.

Much of the rest of the film was actually shot on location in Salzburg, where tourists can today visit the square where Maria and the children perform "Do-Re-Mi", the church where Maria and the Captain are married in the film, and the Nonnberg Convent, a real monastery where the real-life Maria von Trapp lived.

Answer: Medal ceremony

It seems like an awful cliche now, but the original opening to "Star Wars" in 1977 shocked audiences by starting in media res. Even with the famous opening crawl, set to the franchise's triumphant theme, audiences were barely any wiser to the intricacies of a war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, especially the notion of a Death Star. Finally, once the crawl disappears, the camera is left looking at empty space, before it rotates down and we get our bearings: a red planet with several moons. But rather than go down to the planet's surface, as one might expect, the camera pauses momentarily, and we're rewarded with the view of a spaceship flying out of the front of a frame, and then, a much, much bigger ship firing lasers at it. It's a very unique vantage point. Starting a film with the main players coming from behind the camera reinforces the frantic tempo of the opening scene and makes it feel like the audience has been "dropped" into a story that has been going on for some time. Only after the entire Death Star passes over the camera does the scene "flip" to a more conventional view, where both spaceships move toward the camera instead. To some effect, all of the films in the "Star Wars" universe begin in this way: a brief plot summary, then the audience is immediately suspended in action. But in the view of many critics, the first one does it the best. Lucas was likely influenced by a similar ploy from Kubrick's 1968 epic "2001: A Space Odyssey", which, early in the film, abruptly cuts from a story of some Earth-bound chimpanzees to a spaceship.

Interestingly, this shot was one of the last ones in the film done by Industrial Light & Magic, a technical division of Lucasfilm that the director created basically for the sole purpose of having awesome visual special effects in "Star Wars". The star destroyer in the scene was about three feet long, whereas the tiny ship it was chasing was only a few inches. The ILM team, running out of time and money, actually suspended the tiny ship to the large one using a paper clip, then put the camera lens directly under (sometimes even touching) the long ship, to give the impression of perspective.

The closing shot of "Star Wars" admittedly is not that technically exciting. Having destroyed the Death Star with a well-placed laser into the exhaust port, Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, R2D2, C3PO, and company stand on a stage to be awarded medals of valor. So instead, here's some more trivia about the opening! The opening text crawl was actually heavily edited and made more concise by Brian De Palma (director of "Carrie" and "Scarface"), who was close to Lucas since auditions for "Carrie" and "Star Wars" were run simultaneously. A long-held rumor, since debunked by the actresses, holds that Carrie Fisher was actually supposed to have the lead role in "Carrie" and Sissy Spacek was going to be Princess Leia in "Star Wars", but Fisher refused to perform in any nude scenes, so the actresses traded roles. Not true, but fun to imagine.

Answer: A submerged Buddha statue

The opening scene to Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 epic "Apocalypse Now" is filled with irony, foreshadowing, and characterization. It neatly sums up the barbarity and insanity of the Vietnam War in a series of violent, disturbing shots, with the sounds of The Doors' "The End" playing in the background. As the song's instrumental starts up, the shot depicts a jungle in Southeast Asia, a helicopter flies past, and then yellow haze rises from a nearby river. Then, with a tambourine accompanying Jim Morrison singing, "This is the end", the forest explodes in fire. The audience really feels like the apocalypse has come, now, mired in destructive fury.

Next, in a brilliant long dissolve, the smoke clears to show the face of Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen), eyes closed, with a match cut between helicopter blades and the blades of an overhead fan. It's unclear if the destructive scenes are actually happening, or just a figment of Willard's imagination. The parallels to the film's actual themes are immediately apparent, without one word of dialogue. According to an interview, Coppola hadn't originally intended this opening for the film: the explosions were originally thrown-out reels of film intended for discard when the director fished through them, found another reel marked with The Doors' song, and thought it'd be amusing to start his quest with "The End".

The symbolism in "Apocalypse Now" is rich, with some of it adapted from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", the novel on which the movie was adapted, but some of it is unique to Coppola's film. For instance, Conrad used white fog in the novel to symbolize the ignorance of Europeans to the cruelty inflicted on Congolese natives. "Apocalypse Now" uses it the same way, but turns it yellow and places it in the setting of Vietnam. However, the film's final scene, which occurs after Willard has killed the insane, homicidal villain Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), has other symbolism too. Willard's murder of Kurtz is repeatedly cut against the ritual sacrifice of a water buffalo to highlight the violence and the depravity. Willard, who had refused earlier in the film to put on a mask, wears war paint now to shield his conscience. Then, in the final shot, Coppola revisits an image from earlier in the film: a Buddha statue submerged in the river, perhaps highlighting the loss of innocence and peace due to the intervention. Kurtz's last words, again borrowed from Conrad, are repeated: "The horror, the horror." They need little explanation.

Answer: Man smiles in a photo from July 4, 1921

The great thing about the opening to "The Shining" under Stanley Kubrick's direction is that, on paper, there's nothing at all scary about it. The camera tracks a car slowly weaving through the mountains past a lake. The credits quickly scroll upwards as the camera approaches the car, then backs off. Yet there's an eerie sense of foreboding, mostly due to the cacophony of the background score, arranged from a modern setting of Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique". It's perfectly emblematic for the film itself, which is slow-moving and suspenseful without many supernatural scares, and those wide camera shots remind the audience of crucial piece of information: the Torrance family will be very, very alone at the Overlook Hotel.

But really, the end of "The Shining" does it even better. After the terror at the Overlook, culminating in Jack's descent into insanity and attempt to murder his wife and son, the audience may be thoroughly confused between what actually happened, and what was a figment of the imagination. After a dramatic climax, the screen goes black, and all of a sudden we hear placid piano music, the song "Midnight, the Stars and You". The camera reveals that we're back in the Overlook Hotel. Then slowly, deliberately, it zooms in to a picture on the far wall. We don't know what we're supposed to see, but it's certainly going to be scary, despite the upbeat music. Kubrick takes his time, slowly getting closer and closer until we realize that the point of focus is Jack Torrance himself, in the frame of a picture that he couldn't possibly have occupied because he wasn't alive in 1921. Cutting to credits, the audience is none the wiser about what really happens in the Overlook Hotel, but our sense of dread and terror and confusion peaks again.

Answer: Crowd lays stones on grave in Israel

Steven Spielberg used color very sparingly in "Schindler's List", but both the opening and closing scenes have some. The opening scene shows a pair of hands lighting candles for a traditional Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath) service. As the candles burn down, the color fades, and in a memorable bit of editing, the smoke is matched against the exhaust of a steam engine in Nazi Germany.

The film remains in black-and-white (with one notable exception) until the very, very end, a touching scene. Oskar Schindler, who had realized the regime's horrors and saved hundreds of Jews, is buried in the Garden of the Righteous Among Nations in Israel. The Schindler Jews walk down a hillside to strains of "Yerushalaim Shel Zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold") as the color returns, revealing a brilliant blue sky. Then, a procession walks by Schindler's actual grave, and, according to Jewish custom, places rocks on the grave in pairs, including the film's actors and the survivors that they portray. Liam Neeson, who played Oskar Schindler in the movie, goes last and drops a flower on the gravestone.

There is one more flash of color in the middle of "Schindler's List": a mysterious young girl wearing a red coat is shown among the oppressed Jews early in the film, and later, her body, recognizable by the patch of red, is identifiable in a pile of corpses. This simple but brilliant piece of editing reminds audiences of the humanity and individuality of each person killed during the Holocaust.

Answer: Monkey holds up newborn prince

My personal favorite opening scene of all time (and I'm not alone, either) belongs to "The Lion King", an animated film that has a technically-perfect four-minute wordless opening that beautifully sets up setting and theme. A sunrise on the African savanna is supported by a song sung first in Zulu, and then English, about the Circle of Life, as rhinos, flamingos, and gazelles hearken to an assembly at Pride Rock. The animation is just stunning, but the song itself also sums up the film's themes very effectively. No man/lion is an island, and it will be remiss of Simba to run away and avoid his destiny after Mufasa is killed. Perhaps monkeys and zebras cheering a newborn lion isn't the most ecologically-accurate depiction of life on the African plains, but it sure looks great. Amazingly, "Circle of Life" didn't win the Oscar for Best Song in 1994, since it was against stiff competition from two other Elton John/Tim Rice collaborations for the film, "Hakuna Matata" and eventual winner "Can You Feel the Love Tonight".

The end of "The Lion King" is directly set up as a visual mimic of the opener. This time, Simba is the king, with Rafiki the monkey holding up Simba's son atop Pride Rock, which has been cleansed by the rain and re-united following a dreadful rule by Scar and the hyenas.

Remarkably, despite the incredible animation sequences in "The Lion King", most of Disney's best animators weren't on the project. Instead, they were working on "Pocahontas", released a year later, which Disney execs thought had a better chance of winning over fans.

Answer: Plastic bag "dances" in the wind

"American Beauty" is the film, this time, and unlike many of the other films in this quiz, it doesn't start off with a scene that's visually striking or interestingly edited. Nope, Sam Mendes' 1999 hit starts off with a shoddily-crafted film-within-a-film of Jane Burnham, lying in bed, complaining about her "lame-o" father, finally concluding, "Someone really should just put him out of his misery." The unseen boy shooting the film asks Jane, "Do you want me to kill him for you?" She replies, "Yeah. Would you?" Title card. Then follows a more conventional opening: a camera descends down over a suburban town, with some upbeat music, and narration by Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) to the effect of, "My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This is my life. I'm 42 years old. In less than a year, I'll be dead."

The double-whammy of these two scenes--first, Jane's apparent vehement hatred for her father, and then compounded by Lester's own apparent cool nonchalance about his life--effectively sets up the film's sarcastic but faintly optimistic mood. The intent is similar to another film classic, "Sunset Boulevard", in which a dead man narrates the events that caused his downfall. By taking the camera down over a city, Mendes seems to suggest that we're focusing on one sympathetic man who's a microcosm of society as a whole.

At the film's conclusion, with the camera fixated on a bloodied Lester dead in his kitchen, Spacey's voiceover returns, remarking, "I'd always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever, like an ocean of time." Then follows a procession of unrelated nostalgic images from Lester's past, cut against the rest of the family's reaction to the gunshot. The mystery of who shot Lester is kept hidden for some time, but amid the optimistic music, it's almost easy to forget. And immediately after we learn who did it, the final scene is put on screen: a plastic bag, dancing unencumbered in the wind, an image from earlier in the film, and suddenly the beauty of the bag's random movements becomes apparent. Lester confesses, "It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world." Finally, the camera returns to the same overhead shot of the city from the film's first scene, but now pulls back, perhaps suggesting that Lester's tragedy applies equally to all.

Answer: Stick-fairy inspects flower on magic tree

The only foreign-language film in this quiz, "Pan's Labyrinth" is included here because of the surreal, fantastical images that director Guillermo del Toro created not just for the opening and closing scenes, but which also permeate the rest of the film. The opening is shocking, though. After a card explaining that the film takes place in Spain in 1944, where the Fascists are trying to stamp out rebels, the film starts with a decidedly violent scene, where the heroine Ofelia is panting heavily and is badly bloodied on her hand and face, as though she had been attacked. The camera zooms in on her open eye, as the blood miraculously disappears off her face, making it appear as though the film is progressing backwards in time. A voice-over comes on, but doesn't explain how the girl was injured; instead, the narrator talks through a fairy tale about a princess of the underworld who is turned into a human and unable to return home. The striking fantastical imagery of the underground palace immediately contrasts with the bloody violence above ground.

"Pan's Labyrinth" won three Oscars, for Cinematography, Makeup, and Art Direction, largely due to the juxtaposition of realism and fantasy in many scenes. One example of this is at the film's conclusion, when Ofelia is shot by her cruel stepfather, spilling her own innocent blood on a magical altar. The scene is the same as the opening shot, but from a different angle, and explains the mysterious bloody nose: Ofelia has apparently been apotheosized into a throne room and her wounds heal, having transformed into the fairy tale princess. The narrator explains that Moanna is gone from the material world, except for those who know "where to look", concurrently with a white flower opening its petal, watched by a stick-fairy. Del Toro makes it deliberately ambiguous whether the fantastical elements of the film are real or if they only happen in the girl's imagination, but the last shot of the film certainly suggests the magic was real.

Answer: Rapt audience tries to sell a pen

Martin Scorsese's 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street" may have been pilloried by some critics upon release for being over-long, for condoning the use of illegal drugs, and for a dreadful excess of explicit language, but the opening and closing scenes serve as perfect exposition for the film's themes. We start with a somber commercial for Stratton Oakmont, the firm where Jordan Belfort exercised his financial scam, and you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching an actual television ad: a lion walks through a serene white collar office. Then, expectations fade to reality, and we see what actually goes on at Stratton: a dwarf is covered in Velcro, then thrown at a target in a shockingly inhumane game of darts. The camera stops, and in a voice-over, Belfort (played with good humor by Leonardo DiCaprio) reminds the audience, "The year I turned 26 as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made 49 million dollars"--a fact which angers him since it's just three shy of a million a week. Dark, patronizing, amoral humor--a perfect setup for the movie at hand.

The ending of "The Wolf of Wall Street" is great too, for exactly the same reason. After he's taken down by Feds and spends time in prison, we expect to see a penitent Belfort, perhaps not eager to make the same mistakes of the past. But instead, Scorsese recalls an earlier scene where Belfort teaches his cronies how to make a sales call, and has DiCaprio mock some incompetent hopefuls listening to his marketing course. There is no repentance. Belfort might not be making 49 million a year anymore, but he's in exactly the same place as where the film started, which is why it's such a great combination.

Another movie with a similar almost-catharsis-but-not in its last scene is another Kubrick masterpiece, "A Clockwork Orange", which also has a visually-amazing opening scene that is unsuitable for discussion on a kid-friendly site.