Sunday Times 2
Forget Jennifer Lawrence: Audrey Hepburn chat-up line named best in movie history
View(s):LONDON (AFP) – Jennifer Lawrence may have won the Best Actress award but she was not even nominated for another film prize, that has just announced its first winner – one for the Best Movie Chat-Up Line. The new award goes instead to a line delivered by Audrey Hepburn to Cary Grant 50 years ago in the 1963 romantic thriller, “Charade”: “I don’t bite you know… unless it’s called for”.
Hepburn’s line wins on the basis of an online test of flirtatious movie lines in “live” conditions, conducted by Badoo.com, the social networking site for chatting, flirting, dating and meeting new people.Badoo offered female users across the English-speaking world the chance to select from a list of 10 such lines from Hollywood movies and use them as “ice-breakers” to start online conversations.
“This is a study of chat-up lines in action”, says Louise Thompson, Badoo’s Director of PR. “And not just any lines but Hollywood’s finest.”Badoo then analyzed the data on 1,000 interactions using such lines. It measured two things – first, which lines were most picked by women to approach men, and second, which lines got the highest response rate from the men approached. The two gave very different outcomes. The line picked most by women was Hepburn’s from “Charade”. But the one that got the best response from men was even older – first delivered in a Southern drawl by Bette Davis in the 1932 movie, “The Cabin in the Cotton”: “I’d love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair”.
In both categories, however, the old movie lines outperformed more recent ones.”But then the old lines do seem better”, says Thompson. “In fact, we found it much harder to find strong candidates from recent movies. They don’t seem to write them like they used to.”
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