Movie Bookends Trivia Quiz

Answer: Man walks away from front door

Starting off the quiz is John Ford's 1956 classic Western "The Searchers", a tale with a theme that can be told solely by the first and last shots. In the opening scene, Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne in one of his best roles) returns from the frontier to the house of his brother and sister-in-law. Edwards doesn't stay at the homestead for long, though, and is drawn back to the wild parts of the West to save his niece, who is abducted by Native Americans. In the iconic final scene, Edwards turns his back and walks out the door, exactly the same way he came in in the opening shot. Ford uses this visual repetition to get across his theme of the untamed frontiersman whose experiences prevent him from enjoying a rustic life.

Though "The Searchers" is one of the first and most influential films to have the final scene mimic the first, plenty of other movies have done it too. "Cape Fear"--the 1991 remake starring Robert de Niro, that is--begins and ends with a blood-red shot of Max Cady's eyes. "Total Recall"--the 1990 non-remake starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, that is--begins and ends with the protagonist on Mars, possibly dreaming. And more recently, David Fincher's 2014 thriller "Gone Girl" begins and ends with the title character looking at the camera, even though her wry smile has a very different meaning by the film's end.

Answer: Gigantic baby in a bubble faces Earth

Perhaps no movie opening is as epic as the timpani crescendo beginning Stanley Kubrick's acclaimed 1968 sci-fi picture "2001: A Space Odyssey". Kubrick borrowed much classical music for the film's score: the music of Aram Khachaturian and Gyorgi Ligeti is included in the score, as is Johann Strauss' famous "Blue Danube" waltz. But it's another musical Strauss, Richard, who contributed the famous bum-BUM-bum-BUM-bum-BUM "Sunrise" theme from his piece "Also sprach Zarathustra" for Kubrick's masterpiece. Famously, or perhaps infamously, the film features no dialogue for nearly the first half hour. After the opening shot of a sunrise, the story traces a group of apes fighting for territory on early pre-historic Earth, which then abruptly transitions to a spaceship in another famous cut from the film.

If the opening to "2001" is acclaimed, its conclusion is equally discussed, though this is largely because Kubrick's exact meaning is continuously debated. The film's protagonist, who has travelled through space and time, appears to have transformed into a giant baby inside a bubble of light, looking at the planet Earth with a kindly expression. The camera pans to reveal the baby's face, including a wide-open eye, while Strauss' music once again plays in the background.

Answer: Building collapses around man and woman holding hands

Now is the time for David Fincher and his 1999 insta-classic "Fight Club", a mystery film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The film's opening credits flash through what appears to be neural connections in a human brain, before the camera zooms out to show that it's actually the brain of the unnamed protagonist. It continues to zoom out as we see the outline of the scalp, drenched in sweat, then the protagonist's face, and then a mysterious figure holding a gun, at which point the Narrator informs the audience "People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden."

The entire rest of the movie is told in flashback, so that, when we reach the climax and the Narrator is again confronted by a gun in his mouth, the scene's entire dynamic has taken on a new shade of insanity. After the gunshot, as the film is winding down, we get an even tastier bit of dialogue, as the Narrator declaims to his girlfriend Marla, "You met me at a very strange time in my life." The soundtrack blares "Where Is My Mind?" by the Pixies as the Narrator and the woman stand, backs to the camera, as explosions rock the city and the skyline crumbles around them.

Answer: Man sits alone in a bowling alley

The film this time is Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood", and in both the first and last scenes, we see Daniel Plainview, the movie's protagonist played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in a point of vulnerability. Another film that is dialogue-less for the first 20 minutes or so, it begins when the protagonist breaks his leg in a tragic mining accident, to the lovely sounds of Nine-Inch Nails' "Corona Radiata". Not to be foiled by such small concerns, he drags himself out of the hole, in agony, and pulls himself to the nearest town to cash in the prospecting claim.

Years later, Plainview has become a fabulously wealthy oilman, lacking none of the ambition of his younger days, but depressed and drunk. After the unlikable protagonist gives a talking-to to his idealistic, preachy counterpart Eli, the film ends on a somber note with Plainview sitting alone, back turned to the camera, in his desecrated private bowling alley, with a corpse lying nearby. His last words to the house caretaker? "I'm finished". An appropriate end to a film whose title, after all, promises blood.

Answer: Two men walk down a foggy landing strip

Few shots in the history of cinema can compete with the classic ending scene of "Casablanca", when our grump-turned-virtuous-protagonist Rick Blaine walks down the landing strip with Renault, the paid-off Vichy police officer. Then, as "La Marseillaise" plays and "The End" credit pops up over a map of Africa, the perfect link back to the film's opening sequence, in which a camera focuses on a map of the globe and a voice-over provides the film's historical background:

"With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so, a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. Here, the fortunate ones, through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca -- and wait -- and wait -- and wait."

"Casablanca"'s final scene includes several of the film's most quotable lines ("Here's looking at you kid"; "We'll always have Paris"; "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."; "Round up the usual suspects"), but best of all is Bogart's ironic appeal to Renault in the last line of the movie, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Answer: Man talks to mirror in dressing room

In 1980, Martin Scorsese directed what's often considered the greatest sports movie of all time, and one of the greatest movies of all time, period: "Raging Bull". Based on the memoirs of Jake LaMotta, the black-and-white film's opening credits have protagonist Robert De Niro shadowboxing to the happy Intermezzo tune from Pietro Mascagni's "Cavalleria rusticana". The first real shot of the movie, though, is perfectly uncharacteristic for a boxer: an older, washed-up LaMotta practices a comedy routine in front of a mirror (perhaps echoing another De Niro/Scorsese collaboration from 1976's "Taxi Driver").

Another movie told entirely in flashback, "Raging Bull" winds up right back where it started, with De Niro talking to a mirror, giving his best rendition of the "I coulda been a contender" speech. He remarks, "Some people aren't that lucky. Like the one that Marlon Brando played in 'On the Waterfront'. An up-and-comer who's now a down-and-outer." Then, after giving a thoroughly unemotional read-through of the lines, the former up-and-comer who's now a down-and-outer adjusts his tie and shadows a few punches at the mirror before leaving to go on stage.

Answer: A spinning top wobbles

Christopher Nolan's acclaimed 2010 thriller "Inception" is bookended by two symbolic images. In the first, the protagonist Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) washes up on a beach where waves lap against some rocks. He sees his children playing in the sand, calls to them, but they run away. Then, Cobb gets seized by a Japanese businessman, taken to a castle, and reveals that the whole thing was a dream (and actually, a dream-within-a-dream), in the first confounding trick of the film.

Nearly two-and-a-half hours later, the audience thoroughly confused by what's a dream and what's real, we think that Cobb's finally made it out. His work as a dream-thief, which has prevented him from seeing the faces of his children, is over; he has cleared up his subconscious from memories of his dead wife. But to be sure, Cobb spins a top, a pendant that spins indefinitely in the dream world but topples over in the real world. He goes out to play with his kids, not waiting to see the result of the spin, and Nolan doesn't let us know either, cutting away with the camera just as the top appears to be slowing down. Just like the beginning of the film, the audience leaves the theater not knowing if what they saw was "real" or imagined.

Answer: Car pulled out of swamp

Alfred Hitchcock was the king of dramatic opening and closing scenes. "Rear Window" opens with a minutes-long exposition shot showing the entire neighborhood block from the vantage point of the protagonist. "North by Northwest" ends with a scandalous cut implying romance on a train. "To Catch a Thief" begins with a comical scene of a woman shrieking about her missing jewels. And "Vertigo", of course, has two great bookending scenes: the start, when Detective Scotty loses his partner during a rooftop chase, and the end, when the Mission San Juan Bautista bell tower rings.

But it's "Psycho" that's described here: first, with the scene in a hotel room, where Marion Crane carries on an affair with her boyfriend Sam, and conspires to embezzle money from her employer. Then, the final shot, where police uncover the final mystery, when her car is dredged up out of the swamp near the Bates motel. For fear of spoiling plot, I won't go into too much detail about The Really Famous Scene in "Psycho", but its antepenultimate shot really does it for me too. Norman Bates, sitting quietly in a holding cell, glances at a fly climbing up his hand, while his mother proclaims in a voice-over, "They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly." So creepy.

Answer: Man swings chainsaw overhead

We all know the cliches: someone always dies in the first scene of a horror movie, like when Ghostface stabs Drew Barrymore, and the last scene is always a jump scare, when Jason leaps out of the lake or Freddy traps everybody in the car. But the original 1974 "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" does it differently. Under Tobe Hooper's direction, we get, first, a scrolling warning about the film's contents, and then, a mangled collection of images of human body parts cut against total blackness, with the sound of a chainsaw in the background. No plot points, and no scares, but a dramatic way to set the mood.

Then, at the film's conclusion, Hooper does the same thing. In a genre where the heroine never survives the final jump scare, the protagonist really does make it out alive. While she shrieks incoherently in the truck, though, the final shot focuses on our deranged cannibal Leatherface in the sunset, swinging his chainsaw wildly through the air, as if reminding audiences that he's still out there.

Answer: Woman glances up out a window

For good reason, Alejandro Inarritu won the 2014 Oscar for Best Direction for that year's Best Picture, "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)". Since the film's titled for flying creatures, both the first and last scenes capture it beautifully. In the opener, we see two juxtaposed opposites: first, a meteor hurdling through the sky, and next, a washed-up superhero actor who can barely levitate inches off the table in his briefs. The music abruptly stops at that cut, the only true cut in the film, which then proceeds via fluid camerawork into and out of rooms as though the entire movie was shot in one take.

But the film's conclusion is all the sweeter for the contrast. Riggan, the eponymous Birdman played by Michael Keaton, has jumped out a window in the hospital when his daughter Emma steps out. She comes back into the frame, sees the empty bed, and rushes to the window. Glancing down, she makes no sound, but a smile widens and she gazes up into the sky. Has Riggan succeeded in his dreams of flying through the air? Is she looking into heaven since the man lies sprawled-out dead on the pavement? Inarritu doesn't answer these questions--but either way, it's a complex and beautiful contrast that thematically recalls the film's opening.