Movie Quotes’ Oscar Poster: Academy Makes Offer You Can’t Refuse + 3 Missing Classic Lines

Movie quotes: 2007 Oscar poster celebrates iconic and less-than-iconic bits of film dialogue, from The Great Ziegfeld (1936) to Brokeback Mountain (2005). Somewhat ironically, some of the most memorable movie lines ever uttered actually originated elsewhere; for instance, Marlon Brando’s/Don Corleone’s “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” heard in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 Oscar-winning blockbuster The Godfather, was originally found – as “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” – in Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel.

Oscar poster celebrates the Academy Awards via celebrated movie quotes (mostly) from past Best Picture winners & nominees

Below is a trio of famous and not-so-famous movie quotes from Best Picture Academy Award winners & nominees:

“Chico—Diane—Heaven!”

“Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”

“I vant to be alohhhne.”

None of the above lines – the last one actually from an Academy Award-winning film – are to be found in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ poster celebrating the upcoming 2007 Academy Awards by way of movie quotes (mostly) from Best Picture Oscar winners or nominees.

You will, however, find no less than two quotes from the dreary – and wildly popular – 1996 comedy-drama Jerry Maguire.

Jerry Maguire, after all, was directed by Cameron Crowe, and it stars Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, all three still very much in evidence. Indeed, even today you can hear people at dinner parties quoting that film’s most famous line, “Show me the money!” (After which display of movie cliché knowledge, said guests should be summarily kicked out, never to be invited back.)

Having said that, this film watcher must admit that “You had me at hello” is indeed one of the cleverer movie quotes of the 1990s.

Old and forgotten

But why two Jerry Maguire lines and zero from Lewis Milestone’s Best Picture Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front (“When it comes to dying for country, it’s better not to die at all”) or Gregory La Cava’s Best Picture nominee Stage Door (“The calla lilies are in bloom again”)?

Well, as so often happens with just about anything celebrating American cinema history, the focus of the Movie Quotes Oscar Poster is on more recent and better-known films.

The oldest movie represented in the poster is Robert Z. Leonard’s 1936 Best Picture winner The Great Ziegfeld – curiously, not by its most famous line, “Hello, Flo!” – while releases from the last three decades get the bulk of the space.

‘Everyday’ movie quotes

“They are the unforgettable lines,” says Academy president Sid Ganis, “that you hear in everyday conversations, in meetings, at parties, or walking down the street.”

Perhaps while fighting a war, some people have heard/will hear utterances such as “No prisoners! No prisoners!” Not to mention “You can’t handle the truth” and “When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.” But in reference to, respectively, Lawrence of Arabia, A Few Good Men, and The Apartment?

Really, how many people have heard anyone anywhere quote “No, a golf course is nothing but a pool room moved outdoors,” or “You can break a man’s skull. You can arrest him. You can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what’s up here? How do you fight an idea?” or “My name is Gladiator”?

In fact, how many people paid any attention to the dialogue in that Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe sword-and-sandal flick? Academy voters who chose it as the year’s Best Picture sure didn’t.

Handsome work of art

Now, forgettable Oscar-winning/nominated movie quotes aside, the Oscar 2007 poster is a handsome work of art. As per the Academy’s press release:

“The concept and design for the poster [were] created for the Academy by TBWAChiatDay Los Angeles. Photographer Albert Watson captured the Oscar statuette featured on the poster.

“The 27×40 poster, printed on premium recycled paper, uses a black canvas and highlights the quotes in gold metallic ink, each in a distinctive typeface to reflect the movie it represents.

“Starting today, more than 65,000 posters will be distributed worldwide.

The “Movie Quotes” Oscar poster will remain available for purchase through March 12 on the Academy’s Web site at http://www.oscars.org/publications/ or by calling 1-800-554-1814.”

Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce with Joan Crawford. In Michael Curtiz’s 1945 Best Picture Oscar nominee Mildred Pierce, waitress-turned-entrepreneur Joan Crawford is having a tough time with willful and psychopathic teen daughter Veda (Ann Blyth). Best friend Eve Arden gives the motherly Crawford some sage advice: “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”

Janet Gaynor, Eve Arden & Greta Garbo movie quotes

The Academy’s press release adds that only one of the movie quotes found in the Oscar 2007 poster comes from a film that was not nominated for Best Picture or for any of the Best Writing categories. There are actually two: one from Wall Street and one from Pretty Woman.

As for the three movie quotes mentioned at the beginning of this post, they are delivered by:

• “Chico—Diane—Heaven”: Janet Gaynor (via intertitles) in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927). The line is found in Austin Strong’s 1922 play, which Benjamin Glazer, Katherine Hilliker, and H.H. Caldwell adapted to the screen.
• “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young”: Eve Arden in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945). In a career spanning more than half a century and 60+ features, wisecracking Eve Arden had plenty of opportunities to deliver memorable movie quotes, but this bit about the wisdom of alligator parenthood remains her most oft-quoted line. Credit reportedly should go to screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, who adapted James M. Cain’s 1941 novel in which alligators and their young aren’t mentioned.
• “I want to be alone”: Greta Garbo in Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel (1932). The line is reportedly found in Vicki Baum’s 1929 German novel Menschen im Hotel – and, one assumes, in William A. Drake’s 1930 U.S. stage adaptation – on which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s all-star* blockbuster is based. Numerous online sources on Grand Hotel indicate that Drake and, erroneously†, Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs were the Hollywood version’s key adaptors. The opening credits state only “Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum” and “American play version by William A. Drake.”

Grand Hotel cast + now largely forgotten Grand Hotel…!

* Besides Greta Garbo delivering one of the best-known movie quotes ever, Grand Hotel also stars John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, and Jean Hersholt.

† Budapest-born Béla Balázs (1884–1949) was credited for the screenplay of Johannes Guter’s 1927 German release Grand Hotel…! a.k.a. Hotel Boulevard, which shares several plot elements with Vicki Baum’s novel (e.g., the luxurious hotel setting, various intertwined stories, a jewel thief). Mady Christians, Werner Fuetterer, Dagny Servaes, Günther Hadank, and Paul Otto star.

The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. The Movie Quotes Oscar Poster features a whole array of, what else, movie quotes. One of the lesser-known lines comes from director-screenwriter Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond’s 1960 Best Picture Academy Award winner The Apartment; it’s the final sentence from Shirley MacLaine’s dialogue bit, “How could I be so stupid? You would think I should have learned by now. When you’re in love with a married man you shouldn’t wear mascara.”

Academy Awards poster’s movie quotes list

Some of the movie quotes listed below actually originated on stage or in print. For instance, a version of Don Corleone’s line “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” heard via Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 Oscar winner The Godfather, was originally found in Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestseller.

Sticking to Marlon Brando and his movie quotes, he – as Stanley Kowalski – was bawling “STELLA!” at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre about four years before reprising his A Streetcar Named Desire role in Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie version, adapted to the screen by playwright Tennessee Williams himself.

Whatever their origin, here they are.

• “Can’t you see I have you Chump? Get me some viskey!” from The Great Ziegfeld, 1936.
• “Sometimes you’re so beautiful it just gags me” from You Can’t Take It with You, 1938.
• “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” from Gone with the Wind, 1939.
• “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” from The Wizard of Oz, 1939.
• “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” from Rebecca, 1940.
• “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane, 1941.
• “Here’s looking at you, kid” from Casablanca, 1943.
• “No, a golf course is nothing but a pool room moved outdoors” from Going My Way, 1944.
• “One’s too many an’a hundred’s not enough!” from The Lost Weekend, 1945.
• “I’ve seen nothing. I should have stayed at home and found out what was really going on” from The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.
• “You don’t want much. You just want the moon … with parsley!” from Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947.
• “Frailty, thy name is woman!” from Hamlet, 1948.
• “You throw money around like it was money” from All the King’s Men, 1949.
• “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” from Sunset Blvd., 1950.
• “STELLA!” from A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951.
• “Well, what am I? I’m a private no-class dogface. The way most civilians look at that, that’s two steps up from nothin’” from From Here to Eternity, 1953.
• “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am” from On the Waterfront, 1954.
• “An Englishman never jokes about a wager, sir” from Around the World in 80 Days, 1956.
• “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” from The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957.
• “Such stupidity is without equal in the entire history of human relations” from Gigi, 1958.
• “You can break a man’s skull. You can arrest him. You can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what’s up here? How do you fight an idea?” from Ben-Hur, 1959.
• “When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara” from The Apartment, 1960.
• “Come in, come in! We won’t bite you – till we know you better” from West Side Story, 1961.
• “No prisoners! No prisoners!” from Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.
• “It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man’s desire. Indeed it will, in a dull man” from Tom Jones, 1963.
• “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room” from Dr. Strangelove, 1964.
• “The Von Trapp children don’t play. They march” from The Sound of Music, 1965.
• “Hope that was an empty bottle George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary!” from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966.
• “They call me MISTER Tibbs!” from In the Heat of the Night, 1967.
• “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” from Cool Hand Luke, 1967.
• “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.
• “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969.
• “I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” from Midnight Cowboy, 1969.

Post 1970 movie quotes: From ‘Patton’ to ‘Brokeback Mountain’

• “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!” from Patton, 1970.
• “This is Doyle. I’m sittin’ on Frog One” from The French Connection, 1971.
• “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” from The Godfather, 1972.
• “I love it when guys peel out” from American Graffiti, 1973.
• “Well, to tell ya the truth, I lied a little” from Chinatown, 1974.
• “Hit me, Chief! I got the moves!” from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975.
• “Attica! Attica!” from Dog Day Afternoon, 1975.
• “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” from Network, 1976.
• “Follow the money” from All the President’s Men, 1976.
• “The Force is strong with this one!” from Star Wars, 1977.
• “Stanley, ya see this? This is this. This ain’t something else. This is this. From now on, you’re on your own” from The Deer Hunter, 1978.
• “The horror. The horror” from Apocalypse Now, 1979.
• “I am not an animal. I am a human being. I am a man” from The Elephant Man, 1980.
• “Wanna dance? Or would you rather just suck face?” from On Golden Pond, 1981.
• “E.T. phone home,” from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982.
• “Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you’re lookin’ at ‘im” from The Right Stuff, 1983.
• “Wind in the hair! Lead in the pencil!” from Terms of Endearment, 1983.
• “Do I ice ‘er? Do I marry ‘er?” from Prizzi’s Honor, 1985.
• “Shut up! Shut up and take the pain! Take the pain!” from Platoon, 1986.
• “Snap out of it!” from Moonstruck, 1987.
• “Greed is good” from Wall Street, 1987.
• “Ten minutes to Wapner” from Rain Man, 1988.
• “If you build it, he will come” from Field of Dreams, 1989.
• “In case I forget to tell you later, I had a really good time tonight” from Pretty Woman, 1990.
• “Good evening, Clarice” from The Silence of the Lambs, 1991.
• “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men, 1992.
• “The truth, Helen, is always the right answer” from Schindler’s List, 1993.
• “My Momma always said ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get’ ” from Forrest Gump, 1994.
• “Show me the money!” from Jerry Maguire, 1996.
• “You had me at hello” from Jerry Maguire, 1996.
• “I’m the king of the world!” from Titanic, 1997.
• “You make me want to be a better man” from As Good as It Gets, 1997.
• “Off the record, on the QT, and very Hush-Hush” from L.A. Confidential, 1997.
• “I am a dead man and buggered to boot” from Shakespeare in Love, 1998.
• “Remember those posters that said ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life?’ Well, that’s true of every day except one – the day you die” from American Beauty, 1999.
• “My name is Gladiator” from Gladiator, 2000.
• “Frodo!” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001.
• “Give ’em the old razzle dazzle” from Chicago, 2002.
• “You don’t throw a whole life away just ’cause it’s banged up a little” from Seabiscuit, 2003.
• “Don’t jive me, man” from Ray, 2004.
• “No, if anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving” from Sideways, 2004.
• “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Brokeback Mountain, 2005.

Movie quotes Oscar poster: © A.M.P.A.S.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website.

Joan Crawford and Eve Arden Mildred Pierce image: Warner Bros.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine The Apartment image: United Artists.

“Movie Quotes’ Oscar Poster: Academy Makes Offer You Can’t Refuse + 3 Missing Classic Lines” last updated in August 2020.