I have two favorites.
1. Robert Shaw as “Quint” in Jaws. The following is a mix from the book and the final script. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the Ivy League researcher shows off a ten-inch scar on his arm that he says he got fending off a Tiger shark off Florida. Quint quietly listens, sitting bent over with his elbows set on his knees and staring down into his glass of rum. When the kid is finished, Quint just glares up at him coldly.
Hooper (Points at Quint’s arm): What about that scar on your arm?
Quint (Detatched, looks down at the scar): Had a tattoo there.
Hooper (Jocular): Change your mind about somebody?
Quint (Shakes his head): It said ‘USS Indianapolis’. (barely audible)
Hooper (Surprised, a bit awestruck): Jesus. You were on her? June ‘45?
Quint (Looks from the scar on his arm back up to Hooper, glaring again. Slowly, a dark smile creeps across his face. Growls): You wanna see a scar?
Long pause. Things just got serious.
Quint (drains his glass, nudges it across the table toward Hooper): Don’t be stingy with the grog, boy.
In the book, Quint opens his shirt show large shark bites and suture scars all over his upper body, stands and does a slow pirouette while letting out a low cackle, then describes the shark frenzy after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It helps to be really drinking straight rum while you do this. If you get into this as deeply as you need to do it right, you’ll appreciate the anesthetic effects a sip of rum now and then will give you. Just watch how Shaw does it. How he stares down the other guy in these pregnant little pauses then literally spits out this story in disgust as he describes the helplessness of the men in the dark waters being picked off by sharks all night long—and the irony that help would never come because the Indy was unable to send an SOS due to top secret her mission (true story).
Quint (sits back down, glares and grins at Hooper while rubbing his hand along the scars on his mutilated torso):
“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin’ back, from the island of Tinian to Laytee, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know… was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week.
“Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin’. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it’s… kinda like ol’ squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark would go away.
“Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got…lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.
“Y’know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don’t know how many sharks,maybe a thousand! I don’t know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’ chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended.
“Well… he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He’s a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again.
“So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
2. This one is much more subtle. It’s Edmund’s monologue from Act IV in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Long Day’s Journey is a drama in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O’Neill in 1941–42 but only published in 1956. The play is widely considered to be his masterwork and magnum opus. O’Neill posthumously received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work. Long Day’s Journey into Night is often regarded to be one of the finest American plays of the 20th century.
Summary:
The action covers a single day from around 8:30 a.m. to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones—the semi-autobiographical representations of O’Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.
One part of the play concerns addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. In the play the characters conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse, and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and sincere attempts at affection, encouragement, and consolation.
The famous monologue is delivered by Edmond, the 23 year old son of James Tyrone and Mary Tyrone. Edmond has spent several years traveling abroad on a merchant ship. He has just come back home and has just found out he has contracted tuberculosis. His father is a retired actor and appears to be very stingy, preferring to spend his money in real estate rather than help his son regain his health. Mary Tyrone has also a medical problem as is addicted to morphine. His older brother, Jamie, is an actor like his father but not as successful.
Of course, you need to read the play to do this right. And you have to have an Irish whiskey straight up in a rocks glass to help make it real. Edmund has just heard his father express feelings and doubts he never thought the old man had. The old man had never been this candid before. It’s a tough moment and it’s Edmund’s turn to talk truthfully in return. This is new territory for him and the old man.
Edmund pours himself three fingers from the bottle of Bushmill’s and stares down at it not knowing how to begin.
Edmund: “You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea.
“Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the trades. The old hooker driving 14 knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me. Every mast with sail white in the moonlight – towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it – and for a second I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved into the sea, became white sails and flying spray – became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to Life itself! To God if you want to put it that way.
“Then another time, on the American line, when I was lookout in the crow’s nest on the dawn watch. A calm sea that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drousy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together.
“Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on the beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, stumbling on toward no where, for no good reason!”
Edmund pauses here. He’s been exhibiting a false bravado and waxing a bit poetic, things he knows his father can see through, and is a little embarrassed. He stares down at his glass for a long time. Why can’t he just come clean and give out one, true, heartfelt thought?
It’s here that the actor playing Edmund must decide which way to go with this. Is Edmund a free spirit or a tragic one? Here’s the tragic version:
Edmund: (His hand begins to tremble, his face darkens with anger. He has to steady himself with one hand on the back of a wingback chair, while the glass nearly breaks in the tight grip of the other. He lets out a kind of choking gasp like he has suddenly let out something that had been pent up inside him for decades; spittle flies, tears flood into his eyes, his voice shakes, but he speaks determinedly—determined to get this out, to finish it. His eyes may or may not rivet accusingly upon his father as he says the following:)
“It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.”
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