Leonardo DiCaprio‘s extreme performance as Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street includes a little fourth-wall breaking — i.e., looking into the camera end and explaining directly how amazing or thrilling this or that episode felt like. That got me thinking about other fourth-wall smashthroughs, and then I remembered this Indiewire/Press Play recap. At the 6:24 mark it offers a little clip from Tony Richardson‘s Tom Jones (’63). If I’m not mistaken Jones was one of the first mainstream films to use fourth-wall breaking as a stylistic signature, going there at least five or six times. I’m presuming that a few studio-era films (’30 through the ’50s) dabbled with this device but I can’t think of any right now.
Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut from Leigh Singer on Vimeo.
