Whether the hero lives happily ever after, dies in a hail of bullets or declares that tomorrow is another day, the ending is often the measure of a great film.
For aspiring screenwriters, there are countless maxims about the proper way to finish a story: End on a high note. Always leave 'em laughing. If there's a gun on the mantel in the first act, it has to go off by the third.
Aristotle said that audiences want emotional catharsis, and his theories about narrative structure are the basis of linear storytelling. In modern times, the tidy resolution has became known as a "Hollywood ending," a convention that is parodied in Woody Allen's new film of the same name.
One reason it's called a Hollywood ending and not a Greek ending is that the convention was codified in the early days of talking pictures. In 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code spelled out the standards of Hollywood storytelling. Asserting that movies "can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind," the code required that "no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin."
Sending audiences home with the soothing message that good triumphs over evil was an economic imperative. Thus most American movies in the first half of the 20th century are characterized by happy -- or at least hopeful -- endings.
Perhaps the pivotal film in the evolution of the Hollywood ending was Casablanca (1942), a script that was continually rewritten during production. The last scene, in which Humphrey Bogart sacrifices Ingrid Bergman to freedom fighter Paul Henreid, established the archetype of the rootless, self-sacrificing hero that would echo in neo-westerns such as Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956).
During and immediately after the Second World War, European émigrés such as Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder sparked a new complexity in Hollywood storytelling. In 1941, Hitchcock tried (but failed) to convince the RKO Studios that Suspicion should end with heartthrob Cary Grant murdering wife Joan Fontaine.
Yet duplicitous females were suddenly fair game. In The Maltese Falcon (1941), Bogart rats on his beloved Mary Astor rather than take the fall for a dame. Wilder's film-noir classic Double Indemnity (1944) ends with insurance cheaters Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck shooting each other. In the last scene of Sunset Boulevard (1950), Wilder aims a poison dart at Hollywood hokum by having a silent-film heroine go mad.
The cardinal rule with film noir had become no story should end happily, and often the innocent suffered as much as the guilty.
Simultaneous with film noir was a revisionist version of the Hollywood ending, in which ordinary people prevail against moneyed oppressors. The patron saint of populist uplift was director Frank Capra. At the end of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the townsfolk rally to save Jimmy Stewart from ruin at the hands of a corrupt banker. Yet given that old man Potter still owns everything in the town except the Building & Loan, it hardly constitutes a socialist revolution.
By the prosperous 1950s, politicians were pressuring Hollywood to rid itself of leftists. A survey of the Oscar winners from that decade reveals a schism between upbeat entertainment such as Gigi, The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days and neo-realist downers such as On the Waterfront, Marty and From Here to Eternity.
For every movie like A Place in the Sun (1951), in which Montgomery Clift is executed for trying to rise above his social class, there were a dozen like Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), in which a backwoods beauty wins a rich husband through spunk and home cooking. The message was that America was a land of opportunity -- as long as you were attractive and didn't rock the boat.
Then, amid the social turmoil of the 1960s and 70s, directors revolted against the presumption of moral certainty and the pacifying effects of false hope. The Graduate (1967) ends with would-be rebel Dustin Hoffman and would-be bride Katharine Ross sitting at the back of a bus, staring straight ahead with nothing to say to each other.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ends with a shootout of unprecedented bloodiness, prefiguring the abrupt endings of 1969's Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The last scene of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), in which war hero Al Pacino assumes control of his father's Mafia empire, was even more subversive. It heralded the triumph of corruption. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1983) both end with psychotic criminals becoming celebrities -- a notion that no longer seems far-fetched after the Watergate years.
Concurrent with the rebel generation, neo-classicists such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg peddled a version of the Hollywood ending that was deliberately (and profitably) out of step with the times. Yet even crowd-pleasing entertainment such as Rocky (1976) had to acknowledge the new universe, as the hero actually loses the climactic boxing match (albeit while winning respect).
More recently, endings have felt the impact of box-office pressures and technological changes. Some films have had their endings changed after test screenings. Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction (1987) were re-edited to ensure the restoration of familial harmony in the last act.
In today's blockbuster era, franchise films such as the Star Wars and Austin Powers movies are likely to end with the bad guy still at large, paving the way for a lucrative sequel.
Another consequence of mass marketing is that the home-video releases of films often have alternate endings to choose from. (The DVD of Joy Ride has a total of four.) Thus, viewers who are accustomed to the hypertext structure of the Internet can reconfigure the narrative to suit their own world-view.