7. North By Northwest (1959)
Don't get me wrong: I still love the ending to Alfred Hitchcock's espionage masterpiece
North By Northwest, if only for its phallic imagery, but given the scope and span of the movie that comes before it, there's no denying the fact that the movie ends too darn quickly. You barely get a moment to consider what's happening before we're looking at the words "The End" superimposed on the screen. The climatic (and incredibly famous) part of the movie, of course, has Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint clambering around the faces of Mount Rushmore. The ending kicks in once the bad guy has been shot, and Grant is pulling Saint up to safety, reassuring her that she can make it. Suddenly we cut to the inside of a train carriage, where the two are alive and well and are preparing to have, uh, "relations" - a notion that Hitch ensures we understand by cutting to an iconic shot of a train going into a tunnel. Get it?
Get it? (Let's hope Grant's not as fast as that train). So although it's a famous ending, everything I described happens in about 20 seconds. It doesn't fit well with the pacing of the rest of the movie - a couple of extra minutes would've certainly helped to lose the "rushed" feeling of this ending.