Great movie scenes discussed in local bistro....

By Jim Heffernan

Imagine this scene…

A bunch of us working men (well, we were working men, but now are pretty-much retired) get together from time to time (like every day) at a local tavern whose name shall go unmentioned so as not to get anybody into trouble with their wife or significant other.

Anyways, there’s your Vikings fans and your Packers fans and Ford F150 pickup fans and Dodge Ram fans and we usually talk pretty much about them things, sometimes about the political scene because there’s Obama fans and Palin fans and Ron Paul fans and ceiling fans – ha, ha, little joke there.

There’s Budweiser fans and Grain Belt fans and fans of just about every brew they can draw or pour at this neighborhood bistro, known for being a “sports” bar. Me? Miller Light all the way. Who needs all them extra calories in their beer belly. The way I look at it, God said in the beginning of the Good Book, “Let there be Light,” but it took Miller Brewing several millenniums to bring it off.

The other night we got to talking about movies we’d seen over the years and arguing about who are the best kissers among the big stars of yesteryear. At least I got to talking about that stuff. Most of us ain’t seen a movie for years, but way back when when we were in our dating days our girlfriends dragged us off to them, so we seen plenty of “love” scenes in anticipation of similar behavior on the way home, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, I told the other guys I was watching this movie, “A Place In the Sun,” on the old movie channel the other night wherein Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift participate in what I vote for as the hottest kissing scene in movie history.  History is right – the movie is almost 60 years old.

Before I was reminded of that scene, I told the other guys over our beers, I always thought the best kissing scene was Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in “Gone With the Wind” when he leaves her by the roadside and tells her he’s going to go join up with the South, the sun setting in the west.

Then there was Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief,” fireworks going off in the background like it was the Fourth of July only it was the French Riviera, so it couldn’t a been. Very steamy. Right up there with the others.

But nothing compares to Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe on the piano bench in “The Seven Year Itch,” when Tom interrupts his frenetic playing and takes Marilyn into his arms and kisses her, very quickly and very, very hard (to quote him, kind of), before they fall off the piano bench.

That was my lineup. The others might have different ideas, I was thinking. I’d recited my favorites staring at the Hamm’s beer clock behind the bar and when I looked around the other guys had flew the coup.

Cripes, we can’t talk Vikings and Packers all the doggone time. I was so disgusted I told the barkeep to draw me one more for the road “and put egg in it.”  Unfortunately, she was asleep.