As Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson trade insults, here’s a look at some of the best – and most wounding – barbs in film.
Full Metal Jacket (1987) Amazon Rent/Buy
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the master of full-on, spittle-flecked abuse, eventually gets his comeuppance for belittling conscripted recruits in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam war classic. A prime example of Hartman’s cruelty is when he addresses Vincent D’Onofrio’s hapless Pyle: ‘Were you born a fat, slimy, scumbag puke piece o’ shit, Private Pyle, or did you have to work on it?’ R. Lee Ermey, who played Hartman, had previously been a US Marine drill instructor in Vietnam and – with Kubrick’s enthusiastic urging – ad-libbed much of his dialogue in the film.
Midnight Run (1988) Amazon Rent/Buy
Martin Brest’s comedy-thriller buddy movie is celebrated for the mud-slinging between ex-cop Jack Walsh and mob accountant Jonathan ‘The Duke’ Mardukas and for the screen chemistry between leads Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin.
Walsh, now a bounty hunger, is hired to find ‘The Duke’, who has stolen $15 million from a mobster, given it to the poor, and gone into hiding. In the course of trying to get back to LA, Walsh begins to bond with Mardukas, despite the accountant driving him mad. Throughout the film, the pair trade broadsides, including my favourite:
Mardukas: ‘…I can’t fly. I also suffer from acrophobia and claustrophobia.’ Walsh: ‘I’ll tell you what: if you don’t cooperate, you’re gonna suffer from fistophobia.’
Ridicule (1996) YouTube – French version only (no English subtitles)
Patrice Leconte’s excellent period drama, set in the decadent court of the doomed Louis XIV, is proof that insults don’t have to be laden with off-colour language.
Minor aristo Baron Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling) is bent on helping the poor in his district with a drainage scheme. He arrives in Versailles to petition the monarch (Urbain Cancelier) for aid. However, he discovers that the king, above all, lives to be entertained, and so he must develop a rapier wit to win the court’s favour and get his money.
Malavoy’s best lines? ‘Personally, I no longer consort with whores – they’re as depraved as society ladies’ and (on the death of a rival): ‘Well, I’d rather have buried him alive… but God is our master.’
Scarface (1983) Netflix, Lionsgate, Amazon Rent/Buy
Al Pacino’s coarse Cuban mobster Tony Montana spends the first part of the movie trying to woo his boss’s wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer). Elvira spurns his initial approaches with the putdown: ‘Even if I were blind, desperate, starved and begging for it on a desert island, you’d be the last thing I’d ever fuck.’ Turns out that’s not quite true – after Montana kills her husband Frank (Robert Loggia) and ‘inherits’ the millionaire drug lord’s operation, Elvira marries him.
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)
Monty Woolley stars as supercilious radio personality and critic Sheridan Whiteside, who inflicts himself on the well-to-do Stanley family over Christmas as revenge for slipping on the steps of their home.
The barbs come thick and fast as Whiteside has the time of his life interfering with the Stanleys’ lives, inviting a prison fan club to their home, and finding out secrets which will come in useful to him when they try to evict him.
Whiteside’s scathing asides are too numerous to catalogue, but this line to his nurse (Mary Wickes) has proved a perennial favourite with viewers: ‘My great aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102 and when she’d been dead three days, she looked better than you do now!’
The Women (1939) Amazon Rent/Buy
Along with The Man Who Came to Dinner, another early masterclass in the art of the insult. In George Cukor’s all-female comedy, the lives and loves of a band of Manhattan women and their servants – played by an all-star cast including Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and Joan Fontaine – come under the microscope.
The film is generously stuffed with memorable (and some surprisingly) modern burns, including one from Russell’s Sylvia Fowler: ‘You remember the awful things they said about what’s-her-name before she jumped out the window? There. You see? I can’t even remember her name so who cares?’
There’s also Crawford’s exit line to the group: ‘By the way, there’s a name for you ladies, but it isn’t used in high society outside of a kennel.’
There Will be Blood (2007) Paramount+, Amazon Rent/Buy
Daniel Day-Lewis has a way with a well-delivered jibe, as evidenced in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! He plays ruthless oilman Daniel Plainview who confronts grifting preacher Eli (Paul Dano) in the following unvarnished terms: ‘You’re just the afterbirth, Eli, slithered out on your mother’s filth. They should have put you in glass jar on a mantelpiece.’ Not a fan, in other words.
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