The famous movie speeches are long. Al Pacino gets four minutes in Any Given Sunday. Chaplin gets nearly four at the end of The Great Dictator. Quint gets three and a half on the Indianapolis. They are magnificent and they are also, if we are honest, a bit of a sit.
The ones that live in your head tend to be shorter. A speech under two minutes has no room for a warm-up. It has to arrive with a point of view, make it, and get out before the other character can answer. These are ten that do exactly that. Timings are approximate and taken from the moment the speaker starts to the moment they stop.
Harold Shand sacks the mafia, The Long Good Friday (1980)
About ninety seconds. Bob Hoskins has spent the whole film trying to bring American money into Docklands, and when the Americans lose their nerve he tells them what he thinks of them: a sleeping partner is one thing, but you are in a coma. It ends with a line about the mafia we cannot print and a threat about going into partnership with the Germans instead. It is the best speech in British crime cinema, and it is also a weirdly accurate piece of economic forecasting.
Coffee is for closers, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Alec Baldwin's entire performance is one scene and around seven minutes, but the part everyone quotes, from "put that coffee down" to "third prize is you're fired", is well under two. David Mamet wrote the character for the film; he is not in the play. It has become a sales training video, a meme and a warning, usually all at once.
It ain't about how hard you hit, Rocky Balboa (2006)
Ninety seconds on a street in Philadelphia, Sylvester Stallone talking to his son about getting hit and moving forward. Stallone wrote it when he was sixty and the studios thought he was finished, and you can hear that in it. It is the most quoted motivational speech of the century so far and the only one that earns it.
I'm as mad as hell, Network (1976)
Howard Beale's breakdown on live television runs longer, but the part that matters, from "I want you to get up now" to the window, is a minute and a half. Paddy Chayefsky won an Oscar for the script and Peter Finch won one for the delivery, posthumously. Fifty years on, every line still applies.
You can't handle the truth, A Few Good Men (1992)
About a minute and forty. Jack Nicholson was on set for ten days and this is most of what he did with them. Aaron Sorkin wrote it as a play first, and the trick of it is that Colonel Jessup is right about almost everything until the last sentence.
Choose life, Trainspotting (1996)
Around seventy seconds, delivered while running from store detectives. Ewan McGregor lists everything you are supposed to want and then explains why he chose heroin instead. It was on every student wall in Britain for a decade. It is still on some.
The Sicilians, True Romance (1993)
Dennis Hopper's history lesson to Christopher Walken is under two minutes and it is the most dangerous speech on this list, because Hopper's character knows exactly what it will cost him and says it anyway. Quentin Tarantino wrote it. Tony Scott shot it in one afternoon. Nobody has ever been sure whether to laugh.
You talkin' to me, Taxi Driver (1976)
Barely a minute, and most of it is the same four words. The script said only that Travis speaks to himself in the mirror. Robert De Niro improvised the rest, which is why it sounds like a man discovering what he is going to become in real time.
Welcome to the layer cake, Layer Cake (2004)
Michael Gambon gets about a minute to explain the facts of life to Daniel Craig: you are born, you take some shit, you climb a little higher, you take less. It is the speech that got Craig cast as Bond, or at least the film that did, and it is the most economical summary of British class in any crime film.
Shut up you long streak of paralysed piss, The Long Good Friday again
Not a speech, a sentence, but it deserves its own entry. Hoskins says it to a very tall American in the middle of the speech above and it has outlived almost everything else in the film. Some lines are speeches on their own.
What they have in common
Every one of these is a character telling someone a truth that the other person does not want to hear, and every one of them ends before the reply. That is the shape. The long speeches are performances; the short ones are attacks. If you want to write one, find the person who least wants to hear it, put them in a room, and give your character ninety seconds before the door opens.
Five of these are on our TikTok this month as clips, and three of the films are on This or That. Pick a side.