10 Worst Opening Scenes In Otherwise Perfect Movies

I don't know why this has always bothered me to such an extent, but the opening moments of the immortal film classic Casablanca almost put a quick end to the start of my beautiful friendship with this picture.

I'm talking about the brief scene that occurs after the main titles are over with; the camera zooms towards a spinning globe, as a rapid fire, newsreader-type voice relays a ton of exposition ("With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas...")

Cue a clumsy montage sequence made from what appears to be archive footage and a strange shot that brings the setting from a height and down to the streets of Casablanca, and you've got an incredibly scattershot start to an otherwise perfect picture.

Casablanca is so often associated with a timeless sort of romance that the abrasive - and kind of unintentionally comical - nature of this opening strikes as so particularly jarring; it also seems like a bit of a lazy way to establish the setting of the movie, though it might not have seemed that way had it been employed in a less aggressive fashion.

In spite of this, the rest of the film is flawless.