Top 10 Movie Kisses That Happen Just Before Tragedy

At the end of the sixth James Bond film, the secret agent is determined to retire and settle down with his new wife, Tracy. The newlyweds have escaped death once. This time, they won’t be so lucky. As they stop beside the road and share a last kiss, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his henchwoman, Irma Bunt, blast their getaway car with bullets. The indestructible 007 is unscathed. Tracy is not so lucky. The film ends with a rare sight, an emotional James Bond. The agent cradles his dead wife’s body, leaving viewers with an uncharacteristically somber ending for the high-flying spy franchise.

It’s easily one of the most famous love scenes in movie history and it’s amazing to think the kiss comes so early in the film. “Ghost” singlehandedly made pottery sexy and the song “Unchained Melody” synonymous with movie romance. As Sam and Molly kiss and cuddle over her spinning pottery wheel, it is hotness overload. As you watch the movie and see what comes next, you realize it’s one of the couple’s last happy times together. In the next sequence, Sam is murdered, causing a dead man to try to take care of unfinished business in the land of the living before moving on to the afterlife.

Teenagers Chiron and Kevin are forced to hide their budding attraction. Even after a profound and intimate moment on the beach, the two must act like they don’t know each other at school. But this comes at a cost. To maintain his status and keep his feelings a secret from his friends, Kevin is forced to haze Chiron. This culminates with Kevin being forced to hit Chiron. The scene is torturous. He begs Chiron to stay down, but Chiron refuses, taking the hits and forcing Kevin and his friends to go through with the beating.

Relationships are complicated. When one half of a couple has literal scissors for hands, it’s bound to create a unique set of problems. Kim is a teenage girl who falls for the peculiar titular character who more than lives up to his name. But after tragedy strikes and the townspeople turn on him, she realizes that if he’s going to stay safe, she can never be with him. She must convince the gathered mob that Edward Scissorhands has died, but not before giving him one last kiss. The worst part is that they’ll live the rest of their lives just up the road from each other. Talk about a bittersweet ending.

This coming of age story about a mortician’s daughter and her best friend is charming and lowkey traumatizing. Vada Sultenfuss and her friend, Thomas J. spend most of their time hanging out in the woods and talking about subjects too mature for them to really understand. After sharing a sweet and relatively innocent kiss one afternoon, a smiling Thomas J. stumbles upon a beehive they’d knocked down earlier. He’s swarmed by bees and dies of an allergic reaction off-screen. This scene is devastating and may have taught many young viewers about the suddenness of death and loss.

This musical adaptation of “Romeo & Juliet” takes place among feuding gangs in midcentury Manhattan. Caught between two warring gangs, Tony kills Maria’s brother in a melee, and begs her forgiveness. They reaffirm their love while singing the emotional ballad “Somewhere.” They end the scene with an iconic kiss, framed against beautiful colored lights pouring in from the window. They have one more kiss after Anita arrives home and confronts Maria about the boy who killed her brother. Little do they know, it’ll be their last embrace before Tony’s death. He is shot down in the street before they can reunite, and Maria’s final kiss is upon Tony’s dead lips.

Rick and Ilsa met and fell in passionate love in Paris, only to have their love irrevocably changed by the Nazi occupation. Told in flashback, their last kisses are made as soldiers approach the city. The whole scene is full of longing and grief that’s not apparent to him at first. It’s just after this that Ilsa leaves him without warning or explanation, and Rick’s entire world changes. Her fateful request, to kiss her like it’s the last time, is filled with even more meaning in retrospect. Though Ilsa’s reasons are made clear later, the same war that tore them apart once does so again at the end of the movie. As Rick Blaine reminds his lost love, they’ll always have Paris.

Wracked with guilt over the death of Madeleine, the woman he fell in love with, acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson spirals into obsession when he finds out he was the pawn in an elaborate murder plot. Judy, the woman’s doppelganger and an accomplice to her murder, is similarly wracked with guilt. Feeling betrayed, Scottie takes her to the top of the belltower where Madeleine supposedly took her life, and makes her confess. Their cathartic and intense kiss is interrupted by a nun, who emerges from the shadows like a ghost. Judy’s panic and subsequent fall provides one of the most haunting endings in movie history.

There are a lot of great kisses in James Cameron’s epic love story, but the one right before the title ship hits the iceberg is by far the most cursed. Rose tells Jack that when the ship docks in New York, she’s leaving her fiancé behind and going with him. Rose’s sacrifice is huge. Yes, her mother is terrible and her fiancé is worse, but she’s throwing away everything she knows for him. The scene already has an air of sadness about it. We know what’s coming, but they don’t. They have no idea the ship will be at the bottom of the Atlantic by the next morning.

The sumptuous but contemporary setting of Baz Luhrmann’s remake of the Shakespeare classic made its famous climax all the more painful to watch. A series of misunderstandings leads Romeo to believe his love, Juliet, has died. He drinks poison rather than be without her, but not before kissing her supposedly lifeless corpse on the altar where she lies in repose. Of course, she’s not dead, but she’s too late to stop him. Their shared fate is what helped Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy set the standard for doomed lovers, and actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes bring it to heartbreaking life.

Did these doomed romances break your heart? Cry us a river in the comments.