Gone with the Wind, When Harry Met Sally, Vertigo: The best kisses as portrayed in movies and TV

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in a scene from the film Gone with the Wind.

What are the parameters when considering the best movie kiss? The implications of movie kisses are all dependent on what’s happening in the film - a kiss can be an expression of joy, of desire, it can be a tool to manipulate, it can be a farewell, it can be a mark of death. A kiss is one of our most fundamental ways of expressing things unsaid to one another. There are any number of contenders for the “Best Kiss” throne – grand old romances like Gone with the Wind or Casablanca; beloved rom-coms like Moonstruck or When Harry Met Sally; hidden romantic gems like Mississippi Masala or Enough Said - to say nothing of kisses that are stranger and more daring: the famed “egg kiss” of Tampopo, the upside-down kiss of Spider-man, the taboo-shattering moment that was Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s kiss in Cruel Intentions.

There’s the kiss between Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi in David Lean’s aching romance Summertime, for example. Lean, best-known for mighty epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, had another, fascinating shade – rich, swooning romantic dramas that left the heart in tatters. Summertime’s kiss, between Hepburn’s lonely, middle-aged secretary and Brazzi’s too-good-to-be-true Italian lover, is filled with longing and nostalgia for an affair already passing them by. There’s a gorgeous sense of inevitability to their kiss - the inevitability of their union and the fact that it must eventually end, symbolised by the sun distantly setting over Venice.

And there’s the climactic kiss of Alfonso Cuaron’s vivid portrait of youth and death, Y Tu Mama Tambien, in which the subtext of the relationship between two hyper-masculine young men (Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal) bursts up to the surface through their shared love affair with an older woman named Luisa (Maribel Verdu). The three are captured in a sweaty, drunken embrace in a small Mexican motel. They both kiss Luisa, who then retreats from the screen. The two boys are positioned close to each other, breathing hard, and then … they’re together. It’s a tortured moment of pure ecstasy and truth, all the more vital for the heartbreaking circumstances of the film’s final scenes.

More recently, a kiss that made my heart sing came near the end of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. In a moment of unambiguous happiness amid the pain and mystery of Lynch’s multi-part masterwork, we see the humble, forlorn long-term romance of Big Ed (Everett McGill) and Norma (the late Peggy Lipton) finally reach its pure, happy ending, set to the sound of Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. The way Ed waits for Norma, the way Norma’s hand drifts across his shoulder, the smile on his face – for Peaks fans who waited almost 30 years to see these tortured lovers finally get together, it’s about as joyful a moment of cinema as you’re likely to get.

But the greatest cinematic kiss of all time belongs to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In a sequence known as “Scene d’Amour”, Jimmy Stewart’s obsessive, grief-stricken detective Scotty attempts to recreate the visage of his departed lover Madeleine (Kim Novak) in a woman he’s met on the street named Judy (also Kim Novak), who for some mysterious reason has agreed to help him. In a hotel room drenched in neon green from a sign out the window, Scotty watches as Madeleine/Judy emerges, dressed as he always remembered her. They embrace and the camera slowly spins around them, flashing back to Scotty’s traumatic past before returning to the room in a single shot. The two kiss in a flood of haunting green. The scene is set to Bernard Hermann’s soaring, magnificent score.

Everything about the moment is perfect, but it’s the look in Stewart’s eyes that makes it, an existential despair and desperation that is hard to forget. It’s a kiss that holds all the magic and possibility of cinema inside – love, longing, loss, grief, mystery, utter beauty. I could live in that moment forever.

Tom Augustine is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based feature writer and contributor to Canvas.