From rapture in Casablanca to a Corleone death sentence, here are the movies’ key lip-locks ahead of international kissing day

10. Casablanca (1942)

In the movies, a kiss is never just a kiss. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Ingrid Bergman walked into Humphrey Bogart’s. A haunting chiaroscuro closeup tracks into a dissolve, recalling happier times. As time goes by they agree “No questions”, making them free to kiss. The result is exquisitely deferred gratification.

9. The Kiss (1896)

Cinema’s earliest kissing scene lasts the entire 25 seconds of the film. Thomas Edison had deliberately shot this activity, one generally considered private, to attract audiences. Its success led to a 1900 remake, featuring svelter characters. This was quickly removed from public gaze, being considered indecent. So began a long contest on both sides of the Atlantic between film-makers and legal authority.

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8. Notorious (1946)

Hitchcock’s two-and-a-half-minute snogging sequence overcame Hays Code rules by disengaging Ingrid Bergman’s lips every three seconds from Cary Grant’s. This cinematic coitus interruptus thereby restored those “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses” mentioned in Bull Durham (1988). In The Paleface (1922), Buster Keaton’s smooch is even longer. He kisses the girl. Fade to black. “Two years later”, he’s still in the same clinch.

7. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Groundbreaking … Guess who’s Coming to Dinner. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia

Hays prohibited miscegenation. So Sidney Poitier kissing Katherine Houghton was a landmark. Seen via the taxi driver’s mirror, Poitier’s head obscures locked lips. The film was made before but released after the supreme court deemed state laws forbidding interracial marriages illegal.

6. L’Age d’Or (1930)

This iconoclastic film, out of circulation for decades, parodies the veneration of sacred effigies with kisses. In the absence of her lover, The Young Girl (Lya Lys) fetishistically toe-sucks a nearby statue. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí turn homage into an erotic substitute for repressed desires. It’s a swipe at the Catholic practices of their native Spain, where sexuality had been sublimated into bourgeois religious conformity.

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5. Swing Time (1936)

Bollywood delights in implicit kisses but Hollywood can be as coy. Ginger Rogers enters Fred Astaire’s room. Embracing behind the door, they are briefly blocked from view. When they reappear, there’s lipstick on his face. The story goes that Astaire’s wife objected to seeing her husband kissing other women, particularly the woman with whom he was so closely associated throughout his career.

4. Rear Window (1954)

Grace Kelly in pulsating slo-mo closes in on James Stewart. Face filling the screen, she’s no longer kissing him but us. Jane Russell is similarly straight-to-camera in The Outlaw (1943). Closeups like these have been described as “the apotheosis of the cinematic art, the point at which it has been said to approach the condition of holiness … which endows an individual visage with aesthetic dignity and ontological gravity”.

3. Wings (1927)

The first ever male-on-male kiss was in the first film to win an Oscar. Akin to Nelson’s “Kiss me, Hardy”, a dying comrade is consoled. Three years later, Marlene Dietrich enjoyed a same-sex lip-lock in Morocco – just ahead of the Hays clampdown.

2. The Godfather Part II (1974)

Psychologists suggest faking a loving kiss is hard. Movie characters regularly fail to read the sign delivered by a Delilah, Judas or femme fatale that seals their fate. In The Godfather Part II (1974), Michael, realising his brother Fredo’s disloyalty, roughly kisses him: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” All is not forgiven.

1. Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Film director Salvatore, returning to his native village, receives a reel of film. It’s a compilation of screen kisses the parish priest censored. Clips range from Visconti’s Ossessione to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Watching, Salvatore cries, enchanted by film’s ability to articulate the power of dreams. Instead of Eros denied, this montage of world cinema is love in the transcendent.

• Stephen Brown is a film teacher, broadcaster and journalist based in Yorkshire