‘You’re pressing too hard!’: The best and worst Hollywood kisses

Sometimes actors have a terrible time kissing on screen but it pans out swimmingly; sometimes the inverse.
OPINION
The on-screen kiss can seal the illusion of chemistry, or break it. These are cinema’s five greatest smooches – and five we’d rather forget.
Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), which paired Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver in a memorably exotic romance, is now as far back in time from us as Rebecca (1940) was when that came out. Pause for a moment to let that sink in. Weir’s film may be remembered for lining up one of the hotter screen pairings of that era, but it took a moment. Indeed, getting the lovebirds, aged 25 and 32 at the time, to kiss convincingly required tactful direction to come off at all.
Gibson, back then, was much more experienced at speeding around the desert with spiked-up hot rods, and Weaver at playing hide-and-seek with alien stowaways. Neither had much expertise at kissing on screen, and, to all appearances, even IRL.
“It was a very bad kiss,” Weir has recalled, while giving a Venice Film Festival masterclass. “I took Mel aside and I said, ‘Mel, what’s wrong? You’re pressing too hard.’ He said ‘No, it’s not me, Sigourney is coming too hard at me.’” Only by showing them a handful of the most famous kisses from cinema (including Hitchcock, where they really can be hit and miss) did he coax the duo into relaxing, laughing it up, and making the scene work.
Capturing a great kiss on screen, it turns out, is something of a crapshoot: sometimes the actors have a terrible time but it pans out swimmingly; sometimes the inverse. Here are five of the best and five of the worst.
5. Spider-Man (2002)
The effect on screen was startling, borderline kinky, and deservedly iconic: the first kiss between Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane. The fact that it’s upside down, with Spidey dangling from a fire escape in an alleyway, and with both of them drenched in rain, is also quite clever: would you necessarily recognise your classmate’s lips in that scenario? For both of the stars, though, it was lacking in anything like the same magic. “It was kind of miserable actually doing it,” Dunst admitted while promoting Civil War. “Tobey couldn’t breathe, so it was almost like I was resuscitating him.”
4. Gone with the Wind (1939)
If the power of cinematic illusion counts for anything, it’s this: when Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler kiss, they both very much stay kissed. While barely consensual, it feels like their destiny, even if Scarlett very much protests to the contrary – “You aren’t a gentleman!” and Rhett wryly retorts, “A minor point at such a moment.” Max Steiner’s orgasmic music has done a lot of Rhett’s work for him, in giving the scene such clout and getting the audience to somehow root for them necking. But the illusion was built from anything but scorchio chemistry. Because Gable was a chain smoker, Leigh absolutely hated kissing him. “His dentures smelled something awful,” she confided.
3. Cruel Intentions (1999)
The MTV Movie Awards included Best Kiss from the word go in 1992. Most winners were fairly vanilla up until this one, the first same-sex champ (there have been several since, including moments from Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight). This is the snog, though, that got a lot of adolescent hormones fizzing in the midst of the 1990s teen movie craze. The idea is that virginal Cecile (Selma Blair) needs a lesson, and Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the one to give it to her, en plein air in Central Park. Blair’s mother complained afterwards that there was too much tongue (there is a LOT). “I was concerned,” said Blair, “that I was a little slug-like in Sarah’s mouth.”
2. The Notebook (2004)
Rain machines have rarely been pressed into more urgent service than in this clinching moment – another MTV winner – when Ryan Gosling admits to Rachel McAdams that he’s never stopped loving her, and then they jump each other. “The weird thing about rain is too much kind of looks fake,” said the director, Nick Cassavetes. “But it was plenty enough to get all their clothes wet and all that kind of stuff.” It was also a pivotal day behind the scenes, in resolving the rather testy relationship between the leads, who wound up dating for several years. “They weren’t together before that kiss,” Cassavetes added. “But they were together after that kiss, so maybe that was one of the deciding moments.”
1. From Here to Eternity (1953)
The waves crash on an otherwise deserted beach in Hawaii, and the adulterous romantic leads in this smash-hit wartime drama, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, roll in the sand, lost in each other. “I never knew it could be like this,” rhapsodises Kerr’s character in a halterneck swimsuit. They move up out of the wash and Lancaster ardently gets stuck back in. It was his idea to film this lying down – the Oscar-winning script had them merely standing. Thanks to the sudsy setting and a score that’s as keen as mustard, we buy into it as a sex scene by implication, even though nothing is going on below the neck. Pretty racy stuff by 1953′s standards: had MTV been a thing back then, it would have been a slam dunk for the prize.
5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Even Potter-heads disarmed on the page by the romance between Harry and Ginny Weasley wound up getting the ick here. The films turned her into such a wet blanket, and this first kiss is off-puttingly creepy, not at all romantic, and takes place against the unappealingly dingy backdrop of Hogwarts’ Room of Requirement. Both actors have spoken of how “weird” it was having to go through with it, given they’d known each other since the age of 10 and had precisely zero mutual attraction. It’s particularly weird that Ginny skulks up while Harry’s eyes are shut, then glides backwards away from him as if she’s on a travelator.
4. Aladdin (1992)
At least, with this one being animated, the actors responsible for playing Princess Jasmine and the wicked grand vizier, Jafar, were spared the indignity of having to fake it for this oh-no-they-didn’t moment. It’s intended as a distraction so our scamp can steal the lamp, but the leering, smirking Jafar finds it delicious: he never looks more repellent. Not only does Aladdin recoil with a downturned expression of disgust, but so do all the other creatures in the cave – and, indeed, the audience. Never has the heroine of a movie been more urgently in need of some cleansing Listerine.
3. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
It was meant to make Han jealous, this abrupt and passionate smooch between Luke and Leia, which now seems inescapably “yikes” whenever you go back to it. To be fair, not only were the twins entirely unaware of being related, but even George Lucas hadn’t decided on supplying that twist in Return of the Jedi: in the original development of the trilogy, he had certainly toyed with making them love interests. These mitigating circumstances led Mark Hamill to defend the kiss on Twitter with the hashtag #innocestuous, when a segment of Saturday Night Live poked fun at it in 2019.
2. Back to the Future (1985)
How would you feel, trying not to be rude, but stuck on a date with your own mother? Such is the predicament faced by Marty McFly, as Lea Thompson’s Lorraine moves in for That Kiss. We don’t have an angle on their lips locking but his expression – think “trapped rat” – says it all, and so does Lorraine’s deeply bewildered reaction. “Not to be crude,” said Michael J Fox years later, “but it’s a movie about almost f—ing your mom and she’s totally ready for it. Even at the time, I realised it was bizarre – plus Lea was pretty cute.” Thompson soon became something of a specialist in screen kisses that were off-the-charts wrong: see her inter-species cuddle time in Howard the Duck (1986).
1. The Shining (1980)
Of course, it doesn’t start out so very bad. One doubts Jack Nicholson had too many complaints about making out with Lia Beldam, the willowy model who plays the ghostly guest having a bath in Room 237 when Jack Torrance intrudes. Indeed, they did hundreds of takes over the course of a whole week. “He immediately kissed me as if we were actual lovers,” recalled Beldam, “which was a big surprise.”
The real surprise is on Torrance – and the audience – when he catches a glimpse in the mirror, and realises he’s been swapping saliva with a hideous, gap-toothed old crone (played by Kubrick family friend Billie Gibson) whose skin is rotting away. This has to be cinema’s oscular rock-bottom.