The 10 most evocative objects in film Charlie Marshall 2) The Rosebud Sled from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Practically every notable bit of movie memorabilia has been bought for some obscene sum. But the sale of the Rosebud sled was special: the buyer who laid out a fortune for it wasn't bidding on behalf of an ostentatious movie museum-cum-café or an anonymous Charles Foster Kane-esque collector. He was Steven Spielberg. Just as Citizen Kane is often the default answer to the unanswerable question of what is the greatest film ever made, so its Rosebud sled is the easiest answer to the equally unresolvable question of what is film's most evocative object. Within the film, Rosebud is the undiscovered answer to the riddle that powers the entire plot, while to audiences it is symbolic of the loss of maternal love, childhood and a life unspoilt by greed or ambition. Rosebud's final, devastating appearance - when it is tossed into an incinerator by a pair of uncomprehending workmen - is, quite simply, the key scene in the world's most celebrated film. Although it will be forever associated with Orson Welles, the sled was actually the invention of his co-writer, Herman J Mankiewicz. As a boy, Mankiewicz had his beloved bicycle stolen when he left it outside a library. As a harsh punishment for what they evidently saw as his carelessness, his parents refused to buy him a replacement and Mankiewicz mourned the loss his entire life. In his childhood, his lost bicycle became emblematic of Mankiewicz's lost innocence. In his adulthood, it mutated into a lost sled and became emblematic of a masterpiece. And by becoming emblematic of Citizen Kane, Rosebud became emblematic of Welles's achievement as its director - an achievement envied and imitated by almost every artistic-minded moviemaker who has come since. But just as Charles Foster Kane found it impossible to recapture his childhood, so every would-be Welles has found it impossible to replicate Kane's quality and impact - and so it is unsurprising that film-makers would fixate on the object that best represents it. The Rosebud sled is the secret of Citizen Kane. Perhaps that is why Spielberg was so keen to possess it. Jayde Perkin 3) Marilyn Monroe's White Dress from The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) Marilyn Monroe is the definitive American sex symbol, and the definitive image of her comes from The Seven Year Itch. Tom Ewell's Richard Sherman is a middle-aged Manhattan executive who has been married for seven years - which accounts for the seven years in the film's title. While his wife and neighbours take a holiday to escape the summer heat, Monroe's unnamed knockout moves into the apartment upstairs - which accounts for the itch. When the two go to the cinema, Monroe wears a splendid ivory cocktail dress that seems to lift her out of the film, making her more than a movie star and transforming her into some new archetype of femininity. The scene that follows ensured that was what she became. Ooh! Do you feel the breeze from the subway?" she coos as she positions herself over some grates in the street. A subway train rattles underneath and a rush of air makes her dress billow around her legs in an image that will live as long as any from film. The dress, by costume designer William Travilla, is the most famous in the movies. It could be the most famous in the world. Whenever a publication or organisation announces the most iconic images of the 20th century, the image of Monroe wearing it is somewhere on the list. By 1955, the tensions that would explode into the sexual freedoms of the Sixties were rumbling under America's staid exterior like a subway train and the struggle to suppress them is symbolised by Monroe's dress. White dresses traditionally connote virginity: Monroe plays upon that to show the appearance of chasteness that exists on the surface of her character's life - and that still existed on the surface of Fifties society - but that is stretched too tightly over the vibrant sexuality beneath to properly contain it. "Isn't she a living doll?" asks a janitor who sees her in Sherman's apartment. In this film, as so often in the American imagination, it is as a living doll that Monroe is treated. And Travilla's white dress is the most evocative outfit in which Hollywood ever dressed her. 4) Mrs Robinson's Stockings from The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) It is one of the most iconic shots in American movies: Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock, young and nervous, stands in front of a white bedroom door, gazing with conflicted desire at the outstretched leg of Anne Bancroft's Mrs Robinson as she slowly rolls off a stocking. It is film's definitive image of a younger man being seduced by an older woman. But the popular memory of it is different from the way it appears in the film. The shot takes place while Ben and Mrs Robinson are arguing, and she is not taking her stockings off as prelude to sex but putting them back on afterwards. The pair have already slept together many times and she has just angered him by suggesting he is not good enough to associate with her daughter. When that iconic shot occurs, Mrs Robinson is far from filled with a seductress's confidence that she is irresistible: in fact, she is talking about how she suddenly disgusts Ben. The shot became so famous primarily because of its appearance on posters for The Graduate, explaining why it is better known as a still photograph than as a moving image. Furthermore, those posters feature the shapely leg not of Bancroft but of model Linda Gray (later famous as Sue Ellen in the soap opera Dallas). Nevertheless, the idea of Mrs Robinson's stockings as a symbol of seduction persists, supported by another scene, earlier in the film, in which the camera briefly shoots Ben from between Bancroft's crossed, stocking-covered legs just before he delivers the endlessly quoted line, "Mrs Robinson! You're trying to seduce me. Mrs Robinson's stockings symbolise seduction, forbidden love and the enduring attraction of the older woman but they also symbolise sex itself. Although The Graduate dealt more explicitly with sex than most films before it had done, it still contains no sex scenes. The stockings, then, come to represent the sex acts that motivate so many film characters, and create so many film plots, but that are never shown by film-makers. 5) The .44 Magnum from Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) Among all the guns in film, none is more infamous than the .44 Magnum carried by Clint Eastwood's trigger-happy police lieutenant "Dirty" Harry Callahan. When bank robbers foolishly interrupt Harry's lunchtime hot dog, he whips out the enormous phallic form concealed in his clothing and blasts the criminals, their getaway car and standard police procedure all to Hell. In Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Robert De Niro's character is told that a .44 Magnum can kill an elephant. Callahan makes it seem like it could sink a battleship. But, impressive as the gun's firepower is, in this scene it is words that speak louder than actions. As he approaches a supine perp about to reach for his own sidearm, Callahan gives the speech that ensures the Magnum's immortality: "I know what you're thinking: 'Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?" ... Well, do ya, punk?" Part of the gun's resonance is in its Old West associations. Just as Harry is the lone gunslinger in an environment filled with timid modern law officers, so his handgun recalls those carried by cowboys. Most of the gun's resonance, however, is in its aforementioned phallic imagery. It is often laziness that makes us label a significant object as phallic but here it would be lazy not to. Callahan's character, his successes and his setbacks all depend upon his ultra-masculine methods. He is the most macho man in every encounter in each Dirty Harry film and it is his overlong weapon that announces it. Its absurd size and threatening weight intimidate everyone in the films and became so famous outside them that for the sequel, Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973), the gun's name replaced Harry's in the title. The .44 Magnum is as much the star of the Dirty Harry franchise as Eastwood. David McMillan 6) The Horses' Head from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Few objects in Hollywood history can have caused as much controversy as the horse's head in The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola often recalls that he received far more complaints about it than about any of the brutal professional murders in his film. When Al Martino's middle-aged crooner, Johnny Fontane, is refused a part in the film that promises to revive his career, he appeals to his godfather, Marlon Brando's Don Corleone. Corleone dispatches his consigliere, Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen, to talk to movie mogul Jack Woltz, who has personal reasons for denying Fontane the role. Woltz (John Marley) invites Hagen to dinner, shows him around his impressive mansion and takes him to meet Khartoum, the beautiful thoroughbred racehorse he has recently bought for $600,000 and for which he has erected a state-of-the-art stable. Woltz is adamant about his decision, announcing that "Johnny Fontane will never get that movie!" but adding that he is willing to grant Corleone another request, if he has one. Hagen politely leaves, having explained that "the Don never asks a second favour when he has been refused a first." The next morning, when Woltz wakes up, his bed is sodden with blood. Throwing back the covers, he sees Khartoum's severed head. Fontane gets the movie. What makes the scene so shocking is that the horse's head looks so real. And that is because it is. It was bought from a dog-food factory and painted to match the head of the horse that played the living Khartoum. The slaughter of Khartoum sends a simple, dreadful message from Don Corleone to one who has dared defy him: "My power is absolute. My evil is unlimited. My will is law. What fascinates us about the Mafia in movies is not that they live outside our laws - all kinds of criminals and anarchists do that - but that they live so rigidly within laws of their own. When one of those laws is broken, the consequences are both awful and inevitable. And, in the entire history of gangster movies, nothing expresses this more arrestingly than Khartoum's bloody head. 7) Kermit the Frog's Bicycle from The Muppet Movie (James Fawley, 1979) In the age of computer-generated images, it is impossible to understand how much of a commotion was once caused by Kermit the Frog's bicycle. Its appearance was the main event of The Muppet Movie, the 1979 film debut of Jim Henson's peerless puppets. America's foremost movie critic, Roger Ebert, began his review: "Jolson sang, Barrymore spoke, Garbo laughed, and now Kermit the Frog rides a bicycle." He wasn't being funny. The bicycle was big business. People bought tickets just to see it. And, having seen it, they argued about how it could exist. When Kermit hopped from the small screen to the big, he needed to do something he could not do on television to entice his fans to follow him into cinemas. Something like ride a bicycle. The bicycle's first appearance is not built up within the film: Kermit simply needs to cycle somewhere, and so he does. The bicycle is not in itself extraordinary and that is the point of it: it is a bicycle you or I might ride that, through the magic of the movies, is being ridden by a Muppet. Like all the most impressive magic tricks, this illusion occurs in plain sight. Refusing the easy option of directing our attention away from the details of Kermit's amazing ability to cycle, the camera zooms in on his little amphibian feet as they push the peddles around. Even so, we cannot quite work out how it is done. The close-up might as well be subtitled, "Isn't this incredible?" The marvellous mechanics needed to create the sequence could not be sustained throughout the film, so Kermit's bike is soon rendered unrideable when it is squashed by a steamroller. It is a cartoonish end for an object that impresses us entirely because it is so real. I have never been sure it is true that once you learn to ride a bike you never forget - but I am certain that once you have seen Kermit the Frog ride his you will always remember it. 8) Jake Lamotta's Title Belt from Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) There is no better biopic than Raging Bull. It retells the life of "The Bronx Bull" Jake LaMotta, who was popular among boxing fans for his ferocity and for fighting through the first 10 years of his professional career without being knocked down. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta in a performance for which he famously won an Oscar and for which he even more famously worked out until he had the body of an elite athlete, to enable him to play LaMotta in his prime, and then ate himself into obesity to enable him to play the ageing and overweight LaMotta who strives to establish himself as a nightclub entertainer. De Niro shows us a man whose first language is violence. LaMotta is as brutal and rage-fuelled outside the ring as he is in it, and his inability to curb the aggression that makes him a star in his sport poisons every other aspect of his life and forces his loved ones away. In one of the passages of Raging Bull when LaMotta's life is at its worst, he urgently needs money. Seizing the title belt he earned as middleweight champion of the world, he smashes it with a hammer to break off its jewels. Taking these to a pawnshop, he is told what we could have told him: the jewels themselves are worthless, but the belt they came from was a unique item that would surely have sold for a high price. Many big biopics focus on a subject with a talent for verbal expression, a politician given to making quotable speeches, for example, or a writer whose aphorisms may be easily appropriated for the script. LaMotta has no such faculty, and nor does anyone around him. And so it is his actions that define him - and no action defines him better than the way he treats his title belt, the physical symbol of his best accomplishments. Like almost everything of importance in LaMotta's life, he battles to get it, and then wilfully destroys it thinking he is doing the right thing. 9) The Wafer-Thin Mint from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (Terry Jones, 1983) For many, it is one of the most disgusting scenes in cinema. For others, it is one of the funniest. When the absurdly obese Mr Creosote (Terry Jones) waddles into a luxurious French restaurant, he is already about to vomit, and soon does so - with a ferocity rivalled only by the possessed little girl in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) - into a bucket hastily fetched by a waiter (Eric Idle). Even so, Mr Creosote orders everything on the menu "all mixed together" and, after eating it, seems about to burst. It is now that John Cleese's maître d" - who is as memorable and merciless a torturer as Dr Christian Szell, the deranged dentist played by Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) - insists that the meal be completed with one more morsel: a single wafer-thin mint. Mr Creosote protests that he is full but the maître d" insists. "It is only a tiny little one," he says in his exaggerated French accent. It is only wafer-thin. Placing it in Mr Creosote's mouth, he dives for cover. Mr Creosote expands and expands and at last explodes, showering the restaurant, and everyone eating in it, with a viscous orange-brown mixture of innards and undigested food that sets off chain reaction of vomiting and creates an image that stains the eyes of every cinemagoer who sees it. Just as the violence and gore in horror movies becomes more explicit as the frontiers of what is acceptable onscreen and what is possible with special effects are driven back over time, so the grossness in gross-out comedies becomes more and more nauseating. And yet this scene from a comedy that ought already to seem tame is so hilariously vile that Mr Creosote's mint remains film's icon of overindulgence, in both food and bad taste. Although it appears for only seconds the mint that burst the glutton's gut is one of cinema's most memorable objects, no matter how much those of us with sensitive stomachs try to forget it. 10) Sheriff Woody from Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) We often forget that Sheriff Woody is an object. He has the face and voice of Tom Hanks, and he is unforgettably animated in both senses of the word. But he is only a toy belonging to little Andy, in whose games he is always the hero. Like all the toys in Toy Story, Woody comes to life when humans are not looking but, when they are, he is utterly inanimate, his only voice the recording activated by a tug on his pull-string. Unlike Buzz Lightyear, the space-age action figure who threatens to usurp him in Andy's affections, Woody never believes he is anything but an object. Buzz thinks he is a space ranger who travels the galaxy, and despairs when he realises he is just a plastic plaything, but Woody embraces his status as a toy: it gives him his identity and purpose. Subsequent films go even further in underlining that Woody is an object. In Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999), he is stolen by a collector who wants to sell him to a museum and in Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010), when Andy becomes a man and puts away childish things, Woody faces being discarded or destroyed. Woody's design is brilliant; every detail is balanced between the original and the familiar. His outfit has all the standard features of a cowboy's clothing - a hat, a holster, spurs and brown boots - but the cowskin-pattern waistcoat and checked red and yellow shirt, coupled with those Hanks-esque features, make him unmistakable. It is unsurprising that he soon replaced another object, the living lamp Luxo Jr, as the character most associated with Pixar. With him, and with Buzz Lightyear, Pixar created fictional toys that became real-life ones. But Sheriff Woody is more than an iconic company mascot and a merchandising gold mine: he has become cinema's best emblem not only of our favourite childhood toys but also of every object we have ever anthropomorphised in our minds. This is an edited extract from Rosebud Sleds and Horses" Heads: 50 of Film's Most Evocative Objects by Scott Jordan Harris (Intellect Books, £9.95; intellectbooks.com)