- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 6 2000 18.37 GMT
Let's face it: English is the language of the movies. It was so even before the pictures began to talk, as D. W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation (1915) established the pattern for epics. Remember Cecil B. DeMille's saying about God being the Great Producer in Heaven? That meant, of course, a God speaking the Gospel in the King's or Queen's English. And, later on, in Californian or Brooklynese.
That said, you've missed some great moments from non-Anglophone masterpieces. Think simply of Japan. How about something from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) or Ran (1985), Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), or Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953); more recently, you might have mentioned something from Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine, Hana-Bi etc).
Think Mexico and you might think actor Gold Hat Alfonso Bedoya telling Bogart: 'I know whoo ju are' in the Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. But how about, instead, exiled Spaniard Luis Buñuel assembling a razor blade, some needle and thread and putting them in the hands of the madly jealous bourgeois husband (Arturo de Cordova) as he prepares to carry out an improptu infibulation of his wife (Delia Garces) in Buñuel's Mexican-made El (1952).
Turn to France, and where's the boarding house pillow battle from Jean Vigo's Zéro De Conduite (1933)? Or any of several scenes from Marcel Carné's Les Enfants Du Paradis (1945)? Jean-Louis Barrault miming the pickpocket that he has seen picking the fat man's watch to exonerate Arletty, for instance. From the German cinema, you might have chosen Fritz Lang's masterpiece M (1951), and the moment when child murderer Peter Lorre discovers a big M drawn in chalk on his back.
Indian cinema first made a mainstream impact in the west with Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955). This and Ray's subsequent films, Aparajito and Apur Sansar became known as The Apu Trilogy. From this, Apu's reading of the poem of his life stands out. As for Italy, I would choose the white peacock landing on the square as a winged snowball in Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973).
It always helped, of course, for the non-Anglos to change the language in which they worked. A lesson Fritz Lang learned very well. My favourite 'outsider-turns-insider moment' is from Lang's Scarlet Street, the director now working in Hollywood and helping to shape film noir. The moment is when Edward G. Robinson's obsessive cashier/Sunday painter paints prostitute Joan Bennett's toes - a scene lifted toe by toe in Kubrick's Lolita, where Humbert Humbert is definitely not a Sunday painter!
