The Saddest Movie in the World
How do you make someone cry for the sake of science? The answer lies in a young Ricky Schroder
- By Richard Chin
- Smithsonian.com, July 21, 2011, Subscribe
(Page 2 of 3)
In 1995, Gross and Levenson published the results of their test screenings. They came up with a list of 16 short film clips able to elicit a single emotion, such as anger, fear or surprise. Their recommendation for inducing disgust was a short film showing an amputation. Their top-rated film clip for amusement was the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. And then there’s the two-minute, 51-second clip of Schroder weeping over his father’s dead body in The Champ, which Levenson and Gross found produced more sadness in laboratory subjects than the death of Bambi’s mom.
“I still feel sad when I see that boy crying his heart out,” Gross says.
“It’s wonderful for our purposes,” Levenson says. “The theme of irrevocable loss, it’s all compressed into that two or three minutes.”
Researchers are using the tool to study not just what sadness is, but how it makes us behave. Do we cry more, do we eat more, do we smoke more, do we spend more when we’re sad? Since Gross and Levenson gave The Champ two thumbs-up as the saddest movie scene they could find, their research has been cited in more than 300 scientific articles. The movie has been used to test the ability of computers to recognize emotions by analyzing people’s heart rate, temperature and other physiological measures. It has helped show that depressed smokers take more puffs when they are sad.
In a recent study, neuroscientist Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed the film clip to women to collect tears for a study to test the sexual arousal of men exposed to weepy women. They found that when men sniffed tear-filled vials or tear-soaked cotton pads, their testosterone levels fell, they were less likely to rate pictures of women’s faces as attractive, and the part of their brains that normally light up in MRI scans during sexual arousal were less active.
Other researchers kept test subjects up all night and then showed them clips from The Champ and When Harry Met Sally. Sleep deprivation made people look about as expressive, the team found, as a zombie.
“I found it very sad. I find most people do,” says Jared Minkel of Duke University, who ran the sleep-deprivation study. “The Champ seems to be very effective in eliciting fairly pure feeling states of sadness and associated cognitive and behavioral changes.”
Other films have been used to produce sadness in the lab. When he needed to collect tears from test subjects in the early 1980s, Frey says he relied on a film called All Mine to Give, about a pioneer family in which the father and mother die and the children are divided up and sent to the homes of strangers.
“Just the sound of the music and I would start crying,” Frey says.
But Levenson says he believes the list of films he developed with Gross is the most widely used by emotion researchers. And of the 16 movies clips they identified, The Champ may be the one that has been used the most by researchers.
“I think sadness is a particularly attractive emotion for people to try to understand,” Gross says.
Richard Chin is a journalist from St. Paul, Minnesota.
Single Page « Previous 1 2 3 Next »
Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.






Comments (174)
+ View All Comments
I contend that the saddest movie ever is Sophie's Choice. The moment of her decision is heart breaking - a scene that is haunting and of utter despair.
Posted by Laura on February 9,2013 | 02:38 PM
I think the 8-minute love story scene in the animated movie Up will have a better effect on emotions. I have never cried watching a movie. This one certainly moved me.
Posted by Harry Chris McNair on February 7,2013 | 11:49 AM
I think that sensitivity to the tragic dimensions of life may be a gift bestowed on depressed people. It can be overdone, of course, but my responses to particularly poignant and cathartic moments in films are particularly meaningful to me. Come to think of it, the particularly 'sad' moments in film that stand out in my memory are not usually those of irreversible loss, as in 'The Champ', but of particularly vital crises in the lives of principal characters. One of these is the moment in 'The Mission' when the DeNiro character, who murdered his own brother in a duel, finds forgiveness at the hand of a Guarani Indian, whose people the mercenary had enslaved for reward for most of his life. The former has just completed a journey of atonement in which he slogged for days through the rainforest bearing a sack containing his armor (Is that symbolic or what?)to the eponymous mission. Instead of slashing the utterly exhausted man's throat with a knife, a young Guarani cuts the bindings of the burden. My sense of identification with the forgiven man was so strong I could barely contain my sobs, grateful that I didn't arrive at the theater stoned, as was my practice in those years (the late '80s). There are cinematic episodes that have moved me to sustained bouts of extreme, nearly homicidal, rage. The slide show of news photographs of bar raids and arrests of homosexuals in the pre-Stonewall era that prefaces 'Milk'.
Posted by Mark E Harder on February 6,2013 | 01:01 AM
In the 1970s Psychology Today reported on the composition of tears. The researchers they quoted reported the use of sad films and found the the original Brian's Song to be the best "tear getter." I still agree.
Posted by Catherine Houser on February 3,2013 | 12:16 AM
no, not at all.
Posted by yuraro on January 27,2013 | 01:47 PM
Not the saddest but the most inspiring movie scene (also the funniest) I ever saw on tv long after it was in the theaters was Mickey Rooney as a terribly injured skater crawling to the window of his hospital room, pulling himself up and yelling out the window to no one in particular, "I'll skate again!" I use that expression often: I'll [whatever] again!
Posted by Mary Apodaca on January 26,2013 | 01:11 PM
As far as I'm concerned, the five-minute marriage montage at the beginning of "Up" is the saddest scene in all of film.
Posted by Lauren on January 25,2013 | 09:18 AM
@GNR Yeah, because a boy losing his dog is much more tragic than a boy losing his father.
Posted by VulpesRex on January 22,2013 | 10:43 AM
Also, I have to assume that if this was done today, Marley and Me would be a top contender.
Posted by GNR on January 7,2013 | 11:51 AM
The title of this article is misleading. The Champ isn't the Saddest "Movie" in the World, it has the Saddest "Movie Scene" in the World. And even then, it's hard to know how "Old Yeller", didn't win out.
Posted by GNR on January 7,2013 | 11:48 AM
I have never heard of "The Champ" All the people I talk to say that "Old Yeller" was the saddest movie ever.
Posted by PuffMuff on January 4,2013 | 10:02 AM
"Marley & Me" is by far the saddest movie ever made. I challenege anyone to sit through the ending of that movie and not be a wreck afterward.
Posted by Toucan Sam on December 27,2012 | 02:43 PM
Do vampires really exist
Posted by kamranahmed on December 6,2012 | 11:25 PM
The entire film "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is sadder than that, imho.
Posted by Bobby D on December 6,2012 | 05:42 PM
+ View All Comments