THOMAS LEITCH
Every filmgoer can recall moments in which the people on-screen have stopped talking like real people and talked instead like characters in a book. Sometimes these moments pass quickly, as moments do, marking the sudden eruption of literary language as a lapse in decorum. Sometimes literary language is extended through an entire scene or identified with every utterance of a specific character, as a way of marking that scene or character off from the movie’s norms. Occasionally excursions into literary language extend for the length of an entire film, establishing new rhetorical norms that recast the world of the film. The effect, that is, may be momentary and disruptive; it may help define a particular character or situation; or it may establish a new decorum for an entire film. It therefore seems worthwhile to ask exactly what it means for someone in a movie to talk like a character in a book.
The locus classicus of the speech that feels uncinematic, literary, bookish – a speech that feels like a speech instead of someone talking – is the speech architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) makes in his defence in the climactic courtroom sequence of The Fountainhead (1949). After allowing his weak-willed friend Peter Keating (Kent Smith) to submit Roark’s design for Cortlandt Homes as his own on the condition that these plans be followed without alteration, Roark watches as Keating caves in to pressure from the traditionalist clients, builders and critics whom the film has long established as Roark’s enemies. Concluding that his design for the project has been hopelessly compromised, Roark, with the aid of his former lover Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), dynamites the project and publicly takes responsibility for its destruction. Given the opportunity to present his defence, Roark replies to the final question the prosecutor tells the jury is ‘the crucial issue of our age’ – ‘Has man any right to exist if he refuses to serve society?’ – by saying:
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived, and he lifted darkness off the earth.
Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors stood alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed, every new invention was denounced, but the men of unborrowed division went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid, but they won.
No creator was prompted by a desire to please his brothers. His brothers hated the gift he offered. His truth was his only motive. His work was his only goal. His work, not those who used it; his creation, not the benefits others derived from it; the creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men. He went ahead whether others agreed with him or not, with his integrity as his only banner.
He served nothing and no one. He lived for himself, and only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on Earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon, but the mind is the attribute of the individual – there is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be subordinated to the needs, opinions, or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice.
The creator stands on his own judgement. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks. The parasite copies. The creator produces. The parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men. The creator requires independence. He – he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power. He wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery. He – he claims that man is only a tool for the use of others – that he must think as they think, act as they act, and live in selfless, joyless servitude to any need but his own.
Look at history. Everything we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from the attempt to force men into a herd of brainless, selfless robots without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will, hope, or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name: the individual against the collective.
Our country, the noblest country in the history of men, was based on the principle of individualism, the principle of man’s inalienable rights. It was a country where a man was free to seek his own happiness. To gain and produce, not to give up and renounce. To prosper, not to starve. To achieve, not to plunder. To hold as his highest possession a sense of his personal value, and as his highest virtue his self-respect.
Look at the results. That is what the collectivists are now asking you to destroy as much of the earth has been destroyed.
I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live. My ideas are my property. They were taken from me by force, by breach of contract. No appeal was left to me. It was believed that my work belonged to others to do with as they pleased. They had a claim upon me without my consent: that it was my duty to serve them without choice or reward.
Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt. I designed Cortlandt, I made it possible, I destroyed it. I agreed to design it for the purpose of seeing it built as I wished.
That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid. My building was disfigured at the whim of others who took all the benefits of my work and gave me nothing in return. I came here to say that I do not recognise anyone’s right to one minute of my life, nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim.
It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. I came here to be heard in the name of every man of independence still left in the world. I wanted to state my terms. I do not care to work or live on any others. My terms are a man’s right to exist for his own sake.
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The most remarkable feature of this speech is its length. Although it was not the longest speech any character had ever made in a Hollywood movie – at six minutes, Charlie Chaplin’s climactic anti-war speech in The Great Dictator (1940) tops it by thirty seconds – it had more words than Chaplin’s speech, although it was only a quarter as long as the corresponding speech Roark had made in the 1943 Ayn Rand novel on which the film was based (see Rand 1986: 710–7), and merely a blip compared to the summative sixty-page speech John Galt makes in Rand’s next novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957) (see Rand 1999: 1009–69), a speech that would take longer than the running time of most movies simply to recite in full.
In addition to its length, Roark’s speech is notable for its high ideational content and its high level of abstraction. Identifying ‘the motive and purpose of my writing’ as
‘the projection of an ideal man’, an ‘ultimate literary goal … to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means’, Rand maintained in a 1963 address that ‘my purpose is
not the intellectual enlightenment of my readers … My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark …
as an end in himself’ (Rand 1986: xi; emphasis in original).
Pace Rand, whatever interest this speech has in exhibiting Roark’s character or his relationships to other characters seems subordinated to its goal of developing an intellectual position, even if it is a position powerfully and comprehensively incarnated in Roark. The cast of the speech is accordingly abstract. Except for two references to the Cortlandt Homes project, it includes no proper names that make any reference to particular places or people. Instead, Roark declines to name his enemies, casting their schemes in the passive voice: ‘It was believed that my work belonged to others.’ By contrast, he makes twelve references (considerably more, if pronoun references are counted) to
man, men and
mankind, whom he clearly sees as the appropriate context for his defence.
As befits his argument against the blandishments of parasites, Roark makes no attempt to win over his audience by sounding informal or colloquial. Although he makes scant use of certain obviously literary devices – Latinate words, syntactic inversions, lengthy sentences, hypotactic constructions – and indeed trips twice over the initial word ‘he’ in neatly parallel constructions four sentences apart, his delivery is otherwise resolutely formal. Unlike most speeches in most movies but like students’ compositions, Roark’s speech is divided into paragraphs corresponding to units of thought, complete with transitional markers and summary formulations. His first two paragraphs begin with the sort of introductory phrases (‘Thousands of years ago’; ‘Through the centuries’) far more common in literary language than in oral speech. He prefers the more literary ‘which’ to the more informal ‘that’ in the phrases ‘the creation which gave form to the truth’ and ‘the things which are the glory of mankind’. His entire speech includes no contractions and only four possessives: ‘the creator’s’, ‘the parasite’s’, ‘man’s’ and ‘anyone’s’. The care he takes to avoid contractions produces such formal locutions as ‘a gift they had not conceived’, ‘I do not recognise’ and ‘I do not care’.
Roark declines to engage his audience in more subtle ways as well. Although his speech includes two direct apostrophes – ‘Look at history’ and ‘Look at the results’ – it is otherwise virtually devoid of phatic gestures. Ignoring the fact that he is being tried for a criminal offence, Roark frames his case on his own terms from the historical context he establishes at the beginning (‘Thousands of years ago’) to the rationale for his defence he provides at the end (‘It had to be said … I came here to be heard … I wanted to state my terms’). His speech, nominally framed as a defence, establishes him as an educator who has wisdom to offer both the movie audience and other interested parties in the film, whose variously thoughtful reaction shots (like the contemplative pose the trial judge strikes as Roark cites ‘the principle of man’s inalienable rights’) are systematically intercut with medium shots and medium close-ups of Roark addressing no one in particular. Unlike the ingratiating tactics of attorneys, defendants and witnesses in and out of Hollywood who encourage jurors to identify with them, Roark’s stern tone makes it clear that he is lecturing his courtroom interlocutors, not conversing with them.
The film frames Roark’s speech as a formal lecture. It is a more austere version of the kind of speech politicians give when they are addressing a crowd they do not expect to respond except by applauding. It is not surprising, then, that Roark’s speech makes liberal use of such elaborative and intensifying tropes of formal rhetoric as synecdoche (‘the first man discovered how to make fire’), parallelism (‘His truth was his only motive. His work was his only goal’), asyndeton (‘The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors’; ‘I designed Cortlandt, I made it possible, I destroyed it’), conduplicatio (‘the man who thinks must think and act on his own’), anaphora (the repetition of ‘they’ in Roark’s first paragraph and ‘he’ in his second paragraph and his later reference to ‘brainless, selfless robots without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will, hope, or dignity’), analogy (‘It has another name: the individual against the collective’) and metabasis (‘Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt’).
The most important trope in structuring Roark’s speech, however, is antithesis. Beginning with a contrast between ‘the creator’ and ‘his brothers [who] hated the gift he offered’, Roark enlarges this contrast to arrive at a pair of closely related distinctions – ‘his work, not those who used it; his creation, not the benefits others derived from it’ – that are the logical fulcrum of his defence: his claim that as a creator, he cannot be deprived of ownership of his creations without adequate recompense. In the context of Roark’s speech, however, this claim merely prepares for a more tendentious antithesis that fleshes out the exemplum with which he began: the difference between ‘the creator’ and ‘the parasite’, which unfolds in a series of four pairs of contrasting sentences in Roark’s fifth paragraph before he expands his rhetorical scope through amplificatio, devoting three sentences each to the creator’s independence and the parasite’s servility. The climax of this rhetorical strategy comes when Roark identifies ‘the parasite’ with ‘the collective’, a barely coded reference to Communism designed to encourage not only the court Roark was explicitly addressing but filmgoers around the country to recoil from any person or motive or cause opposed to what Roark identifies as ‘the noblest country in the history of man’, one ‘based on the principle of individualism’.
Its extraordinary length and ideational abstraction makes it tempting to treat this speech as a unique phenomenon, a freakish exception to leading theories of cinematic dialogue, except perhaps as an instructive example of how not to write it. But the speech is a quintessential example, not simply an isolated instance, of the dialogue Rand wrote for the screen adaptation of her novel. Roark, of course, always sounds as if he is speaking from a soapbox. But so do his untalented friend and rival Peter Keating, venal columnist Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas), and especially newspaper publisher Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey), whose elocutionary delivery of his lines is even stiffer than Roark’s own. Imperious Dominique Francon, whom the film introduces in the act of destroying a statue before she can become imprudently attached to it, delivers a series of high-sounding speeches to Roark both before and after he rapes her. Despite the often striking visuals director King Vidor and cinematographer Robert Burks provide for the film, it is organised around its speeches – not in the manner of witty dialogue comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938) or The Palm Beach Story (1942), but in the manner of a Presidential debate in which the goal of each candidate is to articulate and defend his or her position rather than to draw the other candidate into dialogue.
In fact, Roark’s speech is typical not only of Rand’s dialogue for the film but of a great deal of cinematic dialogue, whose general decorum depends to a remarkable extent on such speeches – that is, on speeches that sound like speeches – even if they are less long and self-justifying. Roark’s speech, along with many other speeches like it, challenges the fundamental premise of Sarah Kozloff’s seminal theory of film dialogue, aptly titled
Overhearing Film Dialogue: that accounts of film as a visual medium overlook the extent to which ‘
viewers are also
listeners, in fact, they are
eavesdroppers, listening in on conversations purportedly addressed to others, but conversations that – in reality – are designed to communicate certain information to the audience’ (2000: 14). In support of this position, Kozloff cites Jean Chothia’s work on Eugene O’Neill:
Stage dialogue is different from real speech. It operates by duplicity: it is not spontaneous but must appear to be so. It is permanent but must appear to be as ephemeral as the speech it imitates. The actor must seem to speak what in reality he recites. In sharing the convention, the audience in the theatre has a share in the duplicity.… The audience sets each utterance beside each previous utterance made within the limited time span of the play and, in doing so, catches implications beyond those immediately relevant to speaker and interlocutor. (Chothia in Kozloff 2000: 16)
The example of The Fountainhead indicates that this account is incomplete in at least two ways. Although a good deal of film dialogue has clearly been written and delivered in a manner that is meant to be overheard by filmgoers who fancy themselves unusually perceptive eavesdroppers, at least some film dialogue, like some stage dialogue, is designed to be heard rather than overheard; it is addressed directly to the audience, with the fictional characters to whom it is ostensibly addressed mere conveniences. And because speeches that are addressed to the audience typically take the form of speeches in the more public, rhetorical, or political sense of that term, it would be misleading to construct a theory of stage dialogue or film dialogue based on a duality of real speech (spontaneous, unpremeditated, casual, realistic) and staged speech (expository, rehearsed, formal, artificial). At the very least, film dialogue draws on three sets of conventions: naturalistic conventions of oral conversation, formal conventions of literary language and declamatory conventions of public speaking.
In reality the status of film dialogue is even more complicated for several reasons. To begin with, none of these three conventions is univocal. They all overlap, if only because each of them frequently and consciously imitates the others, and each one of them is hard to pin down individually. The performance of Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice-Presidential debate with Joseph Biden gives some idea of how differently different speakers can interpret the apparently stricter decorum prescribed for public speaking events ostensibly governed by the conventions of rhetorical persuasiveness, even when they are placed in the most formal settings and compete for the highest stakes. And the conventions of literary language, unless it is defined purely in contradistinction to oral language, are equally chimerical.
One of the problems with observing that someone talks like a character in a book is that characters in books talk in many different ways, depending on what sort of characters they are and what sort of books they are in. Although few poets apart from William Shakespeare have had their work widely adapted to film, the influence of self-consciously poetic diction – ritualised dialogue ripe with allusions, figurative language, syntactically formal constructions, intertextual play and a precise, even recondite vocabulary – on cinema is surprisingly persistent in dialogue from crime movies like
Body and Soul (1948) to romantic comedies like
Moonstruck (1987). Fewer movie characters talk as didactically as characters in works of nonfictional prose, but the example of Howard Roark indicates that their number is still greater than zero.
Despite the poetic inspiration of such dialogue, a debt as surprising as it is retrospectively obvious, movie dialogue owes far more to novelistic dialogue. The range of voices permitted by the decorum of a single literary genre is greatest in the novel, partly because it incorporates so much direct dialogue, partly because it is what Mikhail Bakhtin has called ‘multiform in style and variform in speech and voice’; the novel, according to Bakhtin, is a heteroglot form whose ‘style is to be found in the combination of its styles’ whose often radical heterogeneity it never completely assimilates (1981: 261; 262). Hence Mark Twain could conclude his facetious ‘Explanatory’ headnote listing the seven different varieties of dialect used by the characters in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: ‘I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding’ (1982: 620). Indeed, Huck as narrator wastes no time in his opening two sentences – ‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly’ – in distancing his own narration as far as possible from that of ‘that book’ (1982: 625). As Bakhtin would say, Huck’s narrative voice is ‘not merely heteroglossia vis-à-vis the accepted literary language [but] heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language’ (1981: 273). Although Huck’s path crosses those of many characters who have spent entirely too much time with books, from the late Emmeline Grangerford to the Duke and the Dauphin, Huck himself, whether as speaker or narrator, never talks like a character in a book – except of course for the narrators of all the books from The Catcher in the Rye (1951) to Bright Lights, Big City (1984) that follow his example.
Because the novel incorporates so many diverse voices, because it frequently sets itself up as an anti-literary genre, and because it looms so large as an influence on the dialogue patterns of Hollywood films, even a brief consideration of its language suggests a need to supplement the history of Hollywood dialogue Kozloff presents. In her overview, the relatively formal rhetoric of silent films and early sound films is succeeded by the snappy, colloquial dialogue crafted by a new generation of writers Pauline Kael characterised as ‘fast-talking newspaper reporters’ (Kael in Kozloff 2000: 22). Thus begins a trend toward a normative film language of expository precision masked in colloquial expression, variously inflected by the pressure of the 1930 Production Code and the tailoring of dialogue to the vocal and expressive gifts of specific stars. Kozloff sees the trend away from rhetorical formality accelerating with the waning of the Code’s influence in ‘the late 1960s and early 1970s, when (possibly influenced by the breezy scripting of the French New Wave) American films appeared in which the dialogue was noticeably more colloquial, less careful about rhythm, less polished, more risqué and marked by an improvisational air. The accompanying acting style was less declamatory, faster and more throw-away; the recording of lines allowed much more overlapping and a higher degree of inaudibility’ (2000: 23).
In Kozloff’s historical survey, what might at first seem ‘the overall progression of film dialogue from 1927 to the present [as] a movement toward realism, toward a more colloquial, naturalistic style’ is complicated by several factors, the most important of them the power of ‘genre conventions … in shaping film dialogue’ (2000: 24; 26). Compelling as it is, this account overlooks several other key developments. Chief among these is the rise of the novel, not so much as a source for particular Hollywood films as a more general influence on what filmmakers and viewers alike came to consider movie dialogue.
Before movies ever spoke, they wanted to speak like books. Even before Hollywood shifted from actualités, interviews and virtual tours of exotic locales to the narrative films that ‘had clearly become the dominant product … throughout the motion picture industry’ by 1904, movies like Rip Van Winkle (1903) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) depended on filmgoers’ knowledge of famous literary originals to supply their narrative continuity (see Musser 1991: 235). The widespread threat of patchwork local censorship provoked studio heads to fight back on several fronts, and ‘films based on acknowledged cultural masterpieces in other media were positive proof that producers and exhibitors were uplifting and educating the audience’ (Bowser 1990: 42). As the silent era continued, film intertitles, as Kamilla Elliott has pointed out, shifted from awkward expository summaries of the scenes they introduced to a more interactive relationship with those scenes, easing the often disorienting shifts ‘between cognitive processes of reading and viewing’ and the ‘emotional bipolarity between intertitles and scenes [by] mixing words and images on the intertitles and in the scenes’ and ultimately replacing ‘curt, didactic mid-silent [era] intertitles’ with ‘the more fluid and loquacious prose of later silent intertitles’ in ‘patterns that wove intertitles and filmed scenes into hybrid visual-verbal “sentences” … governed by verbal syntax, not by visual editing rhythms’ (2003: 92–3).
The early movement of silent films towards a verbal/visual aesthetic was accelerated by the development of processes that could record and reproduce synchronised soundtracks. Every historian of early synch-sound films has stories of silent stars whose careers were suddenly imperilled by voices that were weak, foreign-accented, or incongruous with their roles. The sudden emphasis on dialogue meant that the stars most likely to remain stars were those whose voices were at once distinctive, pleasing (or entertainingly unpleasing) and clear enough to understand. Foreign or ethnic dialect was acceptable if it could be naturalised by sociological circumstance or racial stereotyping, as in
Hallelujah! (1929) or
Scarface (1932). But any deviation from what Kozloff has identified as ‘the crisp articulation of the “transatlantic style” advocated by dialogue coaches of the 1930s as “proper” pronunciation’ (2000: 173) was marked as a deviation from a norm inherited from public declamation and theatrical performance. Throughout the early 1930s, Hollywood’s obsession with achieving cultural respectability meant that, except for those given specific exemption by their class or ethnicity or genre, virtually every character in every movie was expected to talk not like a character in a book but like a character in a play.
Or, by the end of the decade, like a performer on a radio programme. The aesthetics of radio, whose explosion in popularity and market penetration had gone far to create an appetite for talkies, prescribed above all clear, pleasing, and distinctive diction in a medium wholly dependent on sound to carry its message. If the widespread popularity of radio prepared moviegoers in 1928 to accept a novel synchronised-sound technology they had ‘yawned through or rejected as recently as five or six years earlier’ (Eyman 1997: 178), the development of synch-sound narrative was largely coeval with that of radio storytelling, the rise of best-loved radio performers and characters both feeding off and reinforcing the triumph of the talkies. The Amos ’n’ Andy Show, the first continuing radio programme and the first to be syndicated nationwide, began its long and successful run in 1928. After several tastes of radio, vaudeville and Broadway comedian Fred Allen first took to the airwaves with his own show in 1932. So did Jack Benny. George Burns and Gracie Allen, who had appeared regularly on The Guy Lombardo Show since 1932, got their own program in 1934. Lamont Cranston, the Shadow, made his radio debut in 1930, Buck Rogers in 1932, the Green Hornet in 1936. The case of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello is especially instructive. Although their rapid-fire comedy act had been successful on stage, their early routines on The Kate Smith Hour in 1938 were bedevilled by an unexpected problem: radio audiences who could not see them had trouble telling their voices apart. The problem was solved by having Costello adopt a high, childish screech. If the problem illustrates the tyranny of normative speech patterns for early sound technologies, the solution points towards the future of both radio and cinema.
The foundation for this future had been laid by Amos ’n’ Andy, whose 170 characters were all voiced by two performers, Freeman F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll. Elizabeth McLeod has described the ways in which their work marked a decisive break with the language of the theatre:
Correll and Gosden never declaimed, never emoted, never engaged in broad theatricality.… They understood that with radio there was no balcony one had to reach, there was no need to project one’s voice to the furthest rows of a large auditorium – and there was no need for the exaggerated vocal gesturing necessary to make an impression on a large live audience. They also understood that radio acting required an entirely new set of techniques, involving careful modulation of the voice, sensitivity to pacing, and a thorough understanding of the microphone’s directional characteristics. The slightest motion of the head away from the microphone, the slightest hitch in the voice could help define the meaning of a line of dialogue and the personality of the character delivering it. (2005: 58)
The program’s success, based largely on the two performers’ ability to create so many distinctive vocal characterisations, prophesied the decline of transatlantic diction as a performance norm. It also established a crucial fourth convention for Hollywood dialogue: a radio-based convention of distinctive vocal characterisation that complemented and often conflicted with the conventions of oral conversation, literary language and public speaking.
Only a few years after theatrical performance became the normative speaking style for the talkies, the theatre, already under serious challenge from radio as a model for Hollywood norms of vocalisation, faced a further challenge from the growing influence of the novel. The success of David Copperfield in 1935 paved the way for a wave of literary adaptations based on novels rather than plays, whether those novels were classics like Pride and Prejudice (1813) or contemporary bestsellers like The Good Earth (1931). Along with the distinctive vocal characterisations increasingly common to radio, the heteroglossia of the novel, especially when it was complicated by radio’s demand for distinctive vocal characterisations, opened the movies to a mode of dialogue, at once stylised and realistic, that was far more comprehensive in expressive range and sensitive to subtle distinctions in class.
It is ironic to think of American movies as heteroglot, for omnivorous as they became in their appetite for distinctive speech patterns, they were anything but an unofficial, anti-authoritarian language of the folk. Indeed Hollywood represented the most dedicated, highly industrialised, intensively capitalised site of discourse production the world had ever seen. In an obvious sense cinematic heteroglossia is nothing more than simulated heteroglossia, a few heavily capitalised studios’ attempt to shape their own distinctive language by imitating and consolidating conventions and examples drawn from the languages of novels, radio, journalism and the theatre rather than drawing directly from the language the movie audience spoke. In another way, however, the Hollywood product was surprisingly true to the spirit of Bakhtin’s formulation. Shifting individual, social and political pressures on every utterance in every movie guaranteed that contextual cues would dominate textual cues in determining, or more precisely in not quite determining, the valence of every speech.
Hollywood’s acceptance just a few years earlier of a single normative verbal style collides in fascinating ways with the exploration of class differences during the later 1930s. Linguists know that one of the surest markers of class difference is language, and films of the 1930s take pains to mark lower-class characters as deviant through their use of substandard diction (she ain’t, he don’t), pronunciation (lovin’, I dunno, dese and dose) and expressions (Kingfish’s trademark ejaculation ‘Holy mackerel!’ on Amos ’n’ Andy). But they are far less likely to make any such distinction between middle-class and upper-class characters, or even between working-class and middle-class characters, unless of course they are making fun of the differences.
Hollywood’s inconsistency in marking class differences is already apparent in
It Happened One Night (1934), which surrounds its newspaper reporter hero Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), the heiress who has run away from her father, who speak essentially the same language even though they are separated by wide gaps in their worldly experience, with proletarian characters whose speech patterns are distinctly different. Attempting to fend off the question posed by her garrulous fellow bus passenger, Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns), of why she is not responding to his clumsy advances, she tells him: ‘It seems to me you’re doing excellently without any assistance.’ Shapeley instantly repeats her response in a snooty accent, parodying it as hopelessly blue-blooded. Shapeley’s burlesque is justified because the word ‘excellently’, uncommon even in written discourse and virtually unheard in speech, unerringly identifies Ellie as upper-class. But this sentence is clearly an isolated target written into the screenplay specifically to provoke Shapeley’s response. Neither Ellie’s diction nor her speech patterns are strikingly different from those of the proletarian swain who drives Shapeley away.
This pattern continues in other contemporaneous screwball comedies. Although newspaper reporter Bill Chandler (William Powell), attempting to pose as a plausible suitor for heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) in Libeled Lady (1936), must pretend to share her father’s passionate interest in fishing, he does not have to alter his speech patterns because they are virtually indistinguishable from those of the wealthy Allenburys. The comic outlier among the wealthy Bullock circle in My Man Godfrey (1936) is not Godfrey (William Powell), the butler they never notice is actually a Boston blueblood because they accept without comment the similarity of his speech patterns to their own, but the sulking artist/poseur Carlo (Mischa Auer). Holiday (1938) takes considerable pains to establish that Johnny Case (Cary Grant) is meant for free-wheeling Linda Seton (Katharine Hepburn) rather than his fiancée, her straitlaced sister Julia (Doris Nolan), because he talks the same way Linda does even though the Setons’ wealth has erected a comical series of barriers that seem destined to keep Johnny at a distance from the whole family.
By the end of the decade, the replacement of the theatre’s normative declamatory style by the more flexible new style modelled on novelistic heteroglossia and radio delivery fueled an examination of American class distinctions at once more pointed and more inconsistent, as in the clashes – initially farcical, then more subtle and substantive – between another journalist and another heiress in
The Philadelphia Story (1940). When they first meet the magazine reporter and photographer who have become their unwelcome wedding guests, aristocratic socialite Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and her sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler) put on a wildly exaggerated show, complete with ballet steps and French conversation, designed to ridicule what they assume are middle-class assumptions about how old money lives. But this initial scene provokes nothing but bewilderment in Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) and when she realises that the guests know they have been unmasked as interlopers, Tracy settles down and realises that Mac speaks the same language she does and can therefore, and only therefore, be fairly considered a potential protégé and romantic partner.
The decline of transatlantic diction and elocution as defining elements of the normal speaking voice of the American middle and upper classes is nowhere clearer than in the ultimate 1930s parable of the perils of social climbing, Stella Dallas (1937). When Barbara Stanwyck wants to emphasise the heroine’s working-class roots, she adopts a whining or shrewish tone and fixates on Stella’s most selfish and short-term goals. But although she is not as articulate as Stephen Dallas (John Boles), her differences with him about how she ought to behave soon after bringing home a new baby or which sorts of friends she should cultivate are more substantive than rhetorical. The situation changes when Stella meets Helen Morrison (Barbara O’Neil), her successor as Stephen’s wife, who clearly speaks a more formal language than Stella but perceives her unselfish love for her daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), more clearly than Stephen has ever done. Despite the differences between her language and Helen’s, however, the only time Stella speaks truly substandard English is when, in a supreme gesture of self-sacrifice, she plays a self-consciously slatternly role in order to push her daughter Laurel away from her household and into theirs. Social decline, especially when it is a role assumed for a specific purpose, affects speech patterns much more dramatically than social ascent not because it is more realistic to emphasise Stella’s reversal than her rise but because it is more dramatic.
The quintessential product of the union of the novel’s heteroglossia and the distinctive vocalisations common to radio was a normative new mode of Hollywood dialogue, a signature style Michael Wood has identified with ‘the movies’. When a fellow cadet in The Mark of Zorro (1940) asks him, ‘Have you forgotten that you are to cross swords with Captain Fulano at three o’clock this afternoon?’, Diego (Tyrone Power) replies, ‘Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind’. Wood uses Diego’s speech as a quintessential example of ‘what life is always like in the movies: stylishly overdone’ and explains that such movies are
simultaneously hammed up and just right, pitched at their own chosen level of swagger and exaggeration. There is no irony there, just a modest excess of style; and this … is Hollywood’s signature in the cinema. This is not life, the signature says, and it is not art, not realism, not even fantasy. It is the movies, an independent universe, self-created, self-perpetuating, a licensed zone of unreality, affectionately patronised by us all, the only place in the world where anyone says, ‘Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind’. (1975: 3–4, 8)
Movies are not really unique in the way Wood claims, for ‘Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind’ is exactly the sort of thing that comic-book characters used to say before they realised they were actually figures in graphic novels that demanded a certain decorum. Unlike comic books, however, movies show this impetus toward stylisation comporting comfortably with an impetus toward naturalistic speech. What Wood calls ‘the movies’ – by which he means ‘Hollywood movies, from the end of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s’ – do not constitute ‘a world’ simply because they ‘tend to assume that we spend every waking moment at the pictures’ (1975: 9, 11) but because they depend on a signature narrative, visual and dialogue style that embraces radical stylistic shifts without ever wholly assimilating them. Unlike the theatrical productions that so strongly influenced the first wave of talkies but very much like the novels and radio programmes that influenced the second wave, Hollywood movies in the 1930s moved towards heteroglossia. Indeed the question of how the movies became ‘the movies’ – a question Wood raises in passing but does not answer – is best answered by adducing both the example and the influence of the novel. Defiantly anti-literary, anti-univocal and anti-institutional, the novel has periodically lapsed into schools and norms almost despite itself. So has Hollywood cinema, whose history, driven by the apparently warring impulses of stylisation and realism, is constantly creating new patterns and clichés and genres in the ashes of the old ones it wishes both to replicate and to disavow. The only reason that radio dialogue has not been perceived as undergoing a similar pattern of development is that the heyday of radio was so short. But such a pattern will be readily apparent to anyone who considers television dialogue as an extension of radio dialogue.
By the 1940s, the talkies, which in their early years had preferred to adapt plays rather than novels because they offered such clear models for dramatic construction, dramatic economy and histrionic delivery, had switched their allegiance to the models provided by novels. Despite the length and interiority of many contemporaneous novels, their heteroglot dialogue was far more flexible and expressive of a much wider range of social classes and ethnic types. The distinctive but homogeneous criminal argot in gangster movies like Scarface and The Public Enemy (1931), in which all the gangsters in a given movie come from the same background, yields to the symphony of voices in caper movies such as The Asphalt Jungle (1950), whose criminals, brought together from diverse backgrounds for a single heist, speak in the very different voices of Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, James Whitmore, Anthony Caruso, Marc Lawrence and Louis Calhern. If gangster movies were celebrations or critiques of family, ethnic and tribal solidarity, caper movies were anti-melting pot parables, studies of the costs of mobility across geographical space and class boundaries. The newer formula demanded an altogether more heteroglot approach to dialogue.
Although characters in movies may have talked more like characters in novels, they did not necessarily talk like the characters in the novels they adapted. Even film adaptations whose plots closely tracked those of their source novels felt free to take liberties with dialogue. The most celebrated example is
Out of the Past (1947), whose remarkably stylised dialogue marks a radical departure from its source novel,
Build My Gallows High (1947), even though the sole screenwriting credit goes to Daniel Mainwaring, who had written the novel under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes.
2 Raymond Chandler, who worked with Billy Wilder on the adaptation of
Double Indemnity (1944), memorably explained to James M. Cain, the author of the 1936 novella on which the film was based, why he felt the need to stylise Cain’s dialogue:
Nothing could be more natural and easy and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn’t quite play.… The effect of your written dialogue is only partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen this is all lost, and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. (1995: 1071)
Chandler’s argument that the primary value of film dialogue is not realism but sharpness is borne out by the famous exchange he wrote for the first scene between insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the client’s wife he is flirting with, an exchange that has no precedent in Cain’s flatly matter-of-fact dialogue:
NEFF: I wish you’d tell me what’s engraved on that anklet.
PHYLLIS: Just my name.
NEFF: As for instance?
PHYLLIS: Phyllis.
NEFF: Phyllis. I think I like that.
PHYLLIS: But you’re not sure?
NEFF: I’d have to drive it around the block a couple of times.
PHYLLIS: Mr. Neff, why don’t you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He’ll be in then.
NEFF: Who?
PHYLLIS: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren’t you?
NEFF: Sure, only I’m getting over it a little. If you know what I mean.
PHYLLIS: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
NEFF: How fast was I going, officer?
PHYLLIS: I’d say about ninety.
NEFF: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
PHYLLIS: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
NEFF: Suppose it doesn’t take.
PHYLLIS: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
NEFF: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
PHYLLIS: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
NEFF: That tears it.
(Wilder and Chandler 2000: 17–18)
It might be argued that what Chandler has done by pumping up the dialogue is to make Phyllis and Walter Neff talk more like characters in a novel. But it would be more accurate to say that he has made them talk like characters on the radio, and still more accurate, if apparently circular, to say that they talk like characters in the movies. Their speech is obviously not realistic or theatrically declamatory. Nor, as Chandler was at pains to elucidate to Cain, is it really novelistic. It is stylised and ritualised in its own distinctive way, the way of what Wood calls ‘
the movies, the only place in the world where anyone says, “Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind”’.
It seems clear that ‘the movies’ work to impose a fifth set of conventions on Hollywood dialogue, a complement to oral conversation, literary language, public declamation and the distinctive vocal characterisations of radio. And it is equally clear that once ‘the movies’ have established themselves as a normative force, they become far more powerful than any of the other four. Just as the novel emerged from an insurgent, anti-institutional mode of discourse to blossom into a mode with its own distinctive heteroglossia, the movies – or at least ‘the movies’ – flourished under the rule that every character in a movie should sound like a character in a movie. Even though Howard Roark apparently talks like a character in a book, it is only during the heyday of ‘the movies’ that such a baroque, overheated, heteroglot stew of high ideas, overcharged images and wildly inflated speeches as The Fountainhead could have been brought to American screens at all. In the end, Roark talks exactly like a character in a movie. Like radio, the novel played a crucial role in the evolution of Hollywood dialogue not by making movies sound more like itself but by liberating them to sound like themselves. Through the influence of radio and novels, movies found their own distinctive voice.
notes
1 This citation of Roark’s speech is based on my own transcription from the soundtrack, which differs slightly from the English-language subtitles provided for
The Fountainhead (1948).
2 The film’s signature dialogue was contributed almost entirely by the uncredited screenwriter Frank Fenton (see Schwager 1991).
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