Someone posted the opening to Breakfast at Tiffany’s this morning and I was struck, once again, by its excellence. You had Mancini, New York in the early morning, Audrey Hepburn, that dress. It was, I think a perfect homage to begin a kind of American tour.

New York City

Mike Nichols, the ferry, the incredible camera work, and this glorious Carly Simon song. The Twin Towers still live in this film, and the sight of them still breaks my heart.

The American South

Places in the Heart, set in the Great Depression, was also evocative of my Dad’s growing up on the Ozark Plateau. This lovely hymn carries this film’s equally lovely visual essay about a small Southern town in the Cotton Belt.

New England

The premonition of a fisherman’s wife, and then the boats come in safely. From A Perfect Storm.

“The March Family seemed to create its own light…” The 1994 version; I’m especially fond of Gabriel Byrne’s German Romantic, who suddenly and instantly connects with Jo, steeped in Transcendentalism. Susan Sarandon is perfect, and I think the backdrop to this winter scene would’ve been the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, in which the Union suffered enormous casualties.

Oregon

Milos Forman’s use of the musical saw and the dark landscape reminds you that, for all the fun you’ll have, this is an immensely tragic film.

The Great Plains

The master of this part of America is Terence Malick, first in his fictional treatment of the Charlie Starkweather murders in the 1950s Dakotas, then in his account of the immigrant experience in Days of Heaven. Gassenhauer’s “Street Song” has stayed with me ever since this opening sequence. Martin Sheen’s cowboy boots are impudent. The marvelous homage to this film is Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

The Shining is terrifying on many levels, but, to me, the Montana opening, from the air, is even scarier that “All Work and No Play Will Make Jack a Dull Boy.”

West Texas

The landscape’s evocative, and who better to narrate than Tommy Lee Jones, from No Country for Old Men. (Jones’s own film, The Three Deaths of Melquiades Estrada, in a similar locale, is superb.)

L.A.

What a contrast: Billy Wilder’s in Sunset Boulevard, with the voice of William Holden, already dead, and the freeway scene from La-la Land.

San Francisco

It’s studio-shot, but you can’t escape the bridges and the bay. And the chase scene so skillfully sets up the detective Scotty’s phobia. Poor James Stewart. A film full of evocative San Francisco street scenes and some cool vintage cars, too.

Long-ago America

In The Last of the Mohicans, the foot-chase is thrilling and tragic; the prayer to the fallen stag is profound. Malick strikes again in The New Land, whose opening sequence—about innocence about to be lost— might be the finest of them all.

One cheater, because it’s near the opening.

From Baz Luhrmann. Stunning.

“In Progress” because I’ll probably think of another dozen places and another dozen films.