Best Opening Scenes

Only the Lonely: Comedy and Heart

That opening of Chris Columbus’s 1991 gem Only the Lonely is one of the best openings I’ve ever seen for establishing tone. Roy Orbison’s haunting croon under a sequence that perfectly sets up Danny Muldoon’s quiet, Chicago-cop existence. The movie usually gets filed under 90s nostalgia or Candy’s comedic era, but the real pull is the wonderfully suffocating, deeply affectionate tug-of-war between John Candy and his mother, played with terrifying accuracy by Maureen O’Hara (what a legend). She nails that specific Irish mother-son dynamic: a mix of manipulative guilt, fierce loyalty, and sharp-tongued love that only a son raised in that household truly recognizes — and likely spends a good chunk of adulthood unpacking with a therapist or an audience at a VFW comedy night. It balances the broad comedy of overbearing parenting with the genuine heart of two people stuck together by history and habit. Reminding you that sometimes the funniest things in life are the ones that hit closest to home.

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