WGTC Weekly Throwdown: Saddest Cinematic Deaths

Gem – Shelby (Steel Magnolias)

Those of you who’ve seen it cannot deny the amount of Kleenex required to survive this film’s entirety. A late eighties female ensemble set in Louisiana, Steel Magnolias hits all the marks required for a Southern comedy-drama. Women bonding (in a beauty parlour), gruff fathers shooting guns (out of the goodness of their heart), sharp wit (“Why are you in such a good mood? You run over a small child or something?”) and a heart-wrenching death.

We join the story on the morning of Shelby (Julia Roberts)’s wedding, as she and her mother M’Lynn (Sally Field) visit Truvy (Dolly Parton)’s beauty parlour. Along for the ride are newly-hired glamour technician, Annelle (Daryl Hannah) and the funniest odd couple since Matthau and Lemmon, Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine) and Clairee (Olympia Dukakis.)

Sadness and tears in film often present themselves as tragedy suddenly befalls a character the audience has fallen in love with. When you don’t know someone is about to die, it makes their death all the more devastating. This is where Steel Magnolias dallies with tradition and lets the audience know right away: Shelby is very ill. Death is not danced around, as Clairee tells Shelby she hopes she and her fiancé will be as happy as she and her late husband were.

The story glides through the seasons, and against the wishes of her doctors and parents, Shelby becomes pregnant. She fights with her mother, as all M’Lynn wants is for her daughter to be responsible; her body is weak. The only thing that will make Shelby happy is to have a baby and live a normal life. In what at first sounds like a throwaway aphorism, she pleads with her mother to understand: “I’d rather have thirty minutes of wonderful, than a lifetime of nothing special!”