What's this movie about?

Brad DeLong watched Casablanca recently, and notes as follows:

It is a fact that we are nine minutes into the movie "Casablanca" before we first catch sight of Humphrey Bogart. And we are twenty-five minutes into the movie before we catch sight of Ingrid Bergman, or of the third headliner, Paul Henried.

...

Would anything like that happen today? Would anyone in Hollywood today construct a movie in which the female lead is offstage for nearly the first half-hour? Would anyone in Hollywood today construct a movie in which the first ten minutes are starless?

Well, let's consider a few.

I'm not sure if the original Star Wars counts as "modern", since it's twenty-eight years old, but given that first film's Campbellian structure, it's notable that we don't meet our hero, Luke Skywalker, until about twenty minutes into the film. (In fact, this is interesting in that George Lucas originally shoehorned some additional stuff about Luke into the film's opening act on the advice of his friends and later rejected it because it mucked up his intended story structure. People are always saying of Lucas, "Geez, if he only had someone around to tell him how bad his ideas are." Well, here's a case where he was absolutely right to ignore them.)

The same year, we didn't meet Roy Neary until a similar amount of running time had passed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring may be a special case, since it opens with some background narration before we meet Frodo. But then, Casablanca also opens with some background narration. And in the Extended Edition, it's even longer before we meet Frodo: in the theatrical release, we cut from Galadriel's narration to Frodo sitting against a tree, where in the EE we have Bilbo telling us what Hobbits are.

Going back before Star Wars, there's Jaws. We meet Chief Brody pretty early on -- the first five minutes, I think -- but Matt Hooper doesn't show up until quite a while later, and aside from a brief scene during a town meeting, Quint arrives even later than that.

Twenty minutes or so of running time elapses in Princess Mononoke before we meet the female lead, although the male lead is introduced in the first two minutes of the film.

A special note must be made of Titanic's story structure. (And stop laughing, dammit. That movie was freaking brilliant.) We open with some lengthy expository material set in the present day, some of which is grounded by our introduction to the female lead -- but eighty years after the film's main story has taken place. Then we jump backward to 1912, where we meet the heroine at the age of the story. And then five minutes after that we finally meet the male lead, Jack Dawson. (No, the glimpse of his eyes as Old Rose flashbacks to the drawing of her nude sketch doesn't count.)

And in Amadeus, we don't actually meet Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart until around fifteen minutes in, after we've already become well acquainted with Antonio Salieri. (This might not be a good example, actually, since the main character of Amadeus is actually Salieri and not Mozart.)

Damn, this was a fascinating question on Prof. DeLong's part!