![]() And this brings a whole world of trouble. I consider myself a Dana Andrews fan besides enjoying dark 1940s movies about drifters and femme fatales, so I enjoyed watching Fallen Angel, a very mysterious noir about a down-on-his-luck traveler who winds up at a California diner and falls in love with Stella, the trouble-making waitress there. The best part of this scene is Laura Dern, in her soft sweater and with her half-drunk coke, rebuffing Kyle McLaughlin’s plan to investigate a potential (and bonkers) murder in their small town. But you won’t forget it once you’ve seen it. ![]() It’s wobbly and swirly and changes perspective, color, and angle a LOT. Natural Born Killers is a lot… it’s a lot, but it does have a very memorable scene set in a diner. The scene is really great, but it does feel a bit specific that all the bandits robbing the joint are Black men. When Dirty Harry stops at a diner to get coffee, you know there’s about to be a shootout there (even though he says he’s been doing this exact same thing every day for ten years and I guess no one tried to hold up the joint then). Think of it as the one page insert of Daily Specials in the middle of the menu that is also kind of long for a curated list, but it’s definitely shorter than the regular menu. This list is not as long or exhaustive as it could be-it could be a plastic diner menu of listings, with pages never-endingly-unfolding. Second of all, they have to be the absolute cream of the crop in the “crime/mystery” category. Sadly, there’s no Diner or When Harry Met Sally or Five Easy Pieces or Back to the Future, on here. What are the rules? Well, first of all, all these films have to be crime movies. We’ve ranked the thirty most memorable, most moving diner scenes in crime films. ![]() They are, by nature, places so normal and down-home that nothing exciting ever seems to happen there, except when it does. They can be sites of cheap crimes, hideouts from dangerous characters. How does the diner function in film? Generally? Well, most often, they are sites of crucial conversations: hushed threats, whispered revelations, casual flirtations. They are important to me, they are important to my editor who is allowing me to write this piece, and they are important to movies. Or maybe I’d go to EJ’s Luncheonette on the East Side, where I can get an egg white omelette so full of vegetables on a platter toppling with cubed, fried potatoes and peppers that it’s a wonder I can eat it all every time and still have room for two pieces of toast scraped with butter.Īnyway, diners are important. I’d go to the Soho Diner, which is a little more upscale than the diners I’m reminiscing about here and isn’t even actually a diner probably, but I don’t care because they serve deep fried cheese curds with hot honey, twenty-four hours a day (also, I only realized this after I made this list, but their website also showcases some stills from cinema’s great diner scenes, which is awesome). Have diners have played such a large part in the American imagination in part because of their indelible place in cinema, especially the cinema of past eras? But still, what’s the appeal? Is it something so specific as the mile-long menu or the promise of comfort food, of the safety of breakfast served every hour of the day? I don’t know, but I wish I were in a diner at this moment.
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