8 Incredible Movie Scenes Shot In A Single Take
4. Touch Of Evil - The Opening Shot
It seems like elaborate single takes are incredibly effective when placed at the front of movies. It makes sense, really: the beginning of a film is when the audience is guaranteed to be most alert, paying attention to everything going on on-screen. It's a well-known fact that excessive cuts in films are used in order to try and retain the audience's attention, and though this makes it much easier for actors to get things right (they only have to focus on perfecting very short performances at a time) they're nowhere near as striking or inventive.
It's no surprise, then, to find an amazing scene shot in a single take show up in one of Orson Welles' films. His 1958 film Touch Of Evil is one of the last examples of film noir in the genre's classic era, and begins with an incredibly striking opening shot.
The shot sees a bomb planted in a car by a mysterious man, only for the car to be entered by a man and woman who drive out of the car park and into the city. The camera then attaches itself to a different couple, the film's main characters played by Charlton Heston and Janet Leight, who walk past the rigged car at various points on their journey, only to share a kiss right before it explodes.
The shot is incredibly ambitious for the time, making use of a massive crane to sweep from sky to street level. And if that isn't impressive enough, the time bomb which is set to around three minutes is timed incredibly realistically, as the scene itself lasts about three minutes (compare that to the one-minute countdowns that last more than five minutes in most action films). It must have been absolute nightmare to co-ordinate, but the end result is something very special.