JEFF JAECKLE
Let’s begin by lingering for a moment over the following lines of dialogue:
‘meet me in yonder window embrasure’
‘cock-eyed cookie puss’
‘the night will be heavy with perfume’
‘let us be crooked but never common’
These lines evince a spectrum of verbal registers, from erudite to vernacular, poetry to slang. Their use of archaic diction, alliteration and internal rhyme attest to their verbal complexities, yet they also rely on basic conversational language. Despite this striking range of linguistic constructions, these lines blend together seamlessly to create one portion of the aural experience known as The Lady Eve (1941), which issued from the singular mind of Preston Sturges. It is no wonder, then, that critics and fans alike have praised Sturges as an unparalleled author of film dialogue. In her chapter on screwball comedies in Overhearing Film Dialogue, Sarah Kozloff points to his characters’ ‘verbal dexterity’ and ‘impeccable delivery’ (2000: 177). Jared Rapfogel praises Sturges’ dialogue as ‘beautifully crafted, peerlessly witty’ (2006: 8), while Jay Rozgonyi describes it as ‘razor-sharp’ (1995: 1). Biographer Diane Jacobs characterises it as ‘voluptuous, geographically unrooted language, filled with slapstick and brilliant repartee’ (1992: xii), and Dennis Drable goes even further to claim, ‘Nothing quite like these verbal volleys has been heard before or since’ (1996: 109).
In addition to the opening examples from The Lady Eve, a brief look at some of Sturges’ most memorable lines reveals that these superlative commendations are indeed warranted. The eccentric ‘Wienie King’ (Robert Dudley) of The Palm Beach Story (1942) dispenses the following advice on aging:
Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly, but without pity, that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years.
Despite the Wienie King’s awkward appearance, which includes an oversized trench coat and large-brimmed hat, his speech is mellifluous: its alliterations (cold/creep, yesterday/young) and near-rhymes (relentlessly/slowly/pity/lovely) shape an evocative two-sentence aphorism on the tensions between physical decay and the resilience of memory.
Although seemingly distinct from the comic dialogue often associated with Sturges, the Wienie King’s monologue is nonetheless typical of language in his films: substantial speeches captured in single shots featuring characters who, in evenly paced and perfectly articulate voices, use sophisticated and poetic language to frame their thoughts on a given topic. The characters that utter these lines are often orators by trade, such as politicians, lawyers and ministers, or those who, like the Wienie King, are in a privileged position to dispense advice. Related examples include the manager’s lecture on success in Christmas in July (1940), John L. Sullivan’s commentary on class and comedy in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Sir Alfred’s lesson on love and loyalty in Unfaithfully Yours (1948).
This same wit and crispness can be found in Sturges’ multi-character dialogues, such as in the opening scene of Sullivan’s Travels in which Sullivan’s (Joel McCrea) producers attempt to dissuade him from his plans to make a film about misery, citing the director’s lack of personal experience with the subject:
LIBRAND: That’s the reason your pictures have been so light, so cheerful, so inspiring.
HADRIAN: They don’t stink with messages.
LIBRAND: That’s why I paid you 500 a week when you were 24.
HADRIAN: 750 when you were 25.
LIBRAND: A thousand when you were 26.
HADRIAN: When I was 26, I was getting 18.
LIBRAND: 2,000 at 27.
HADRIAN: I was getting 25 then.
LIBRAND [aside]: I’d just opened my shooting gallery. [to Sully] 3,000 after Thanks for Yesterday.
HADRIAN: 4,000 after Ants in your Plants.
SULLIVAN: I suppose you’re trying to tell me I don’t know what trouble is.
HADRIAN: Yes!
LIBRAND: In a nice way, Sully.
Despite the characters’ rapid-fire dialogue, not a single word is lost; rather, audiences hear each actor’s lines clearly as if the three men form a single rhythmic unit. According to Joe McElhaney, this attention to intelligibility and articulation reveals the degree to which ‘the actors are also controlled by the overall form of the film’ (2006: 281). Such control goes hand in hand with Sturges’ reputation as a writer of witty, polished dialogue.
Brian Henderson and Diane Jacobs have substantiated Sturges’ level of control by tracing his films’ verbal brilliance back to the writer-director himself. Henderson notes that, apart from his last two films, Sturges never adapted his screenplays from previous stories, novels, or plays. The witty one-liners and verbal repartee are the products of his imagination. Moreover, the phenomenal success of Sturges’ films enabled him to gain almost complete control over their uses of language, which, he notes, provided Sturges ‘the opportunity to alter his dialogue, even to omit scenes or to change the order of scenes if he chose to, during shooting or in the editing’ (1985: 6). Jacobs observes that Sturges set a standard for control on the set by spending weeks with the actors, ‘instructing them to memorize their roles exactly as written’ (1992: 207). Sandy Sturges, Preston’s wife, expanded on this authorial control in an interview with Alessandro Pirolini: ‘He would tell the actors exactly and precisely how to say the line, how to deliver it … and every gesture to go with it’ (Sturges in Pirolini 2010: 127). True to this practice are the previously cited examples from The Palm Beach Story and Sullivan’s Travels: the dialogue in these films perfectly mirrors what appears in the screenplays.
Yet for all of Sturges’ crafting of highly literate and flawless lines, an equally important though largely overlooked source of his films’ greatness is the use of misspeaking. By ‘misspeaking’ I am not referring to unexpected errors in delivery that appear in the finished films, which Sturges’ control precluded. Instead, I use ‘misspeaking’ as a catchall term for Sturges’ fascination with and consistent deployment of intentional patterns of error that include (among others) mispronunciation, exaggerated cultural dialects and malapropism. Although these instances of misspeaking vary in density and complexity from film to film, they occur without exception in every one of Sturges’ single-authored screenplays from The Power and the Glory (1933) to The French, They Are a Funny Race (1957). While the brevity of this essay prevents me from including examples from every one of these productions, I will cite from a wide and representative sample of films to demonstrate that misspeaking is integral to Sturges’ signature style, on a par with his oft-discussed fascinations with pratfalls, non-chronological narratives and genre blending. This essay will also, I hope, initiate a conversation on the comedic, narrative and cultural dimensions of misspeaking in cinema, including Sturges’ lasting impact on Hollywood writer-directors.
MISPRONUNCIATION
When Sturges left New York in 1932 to begin his career as a screenwriter, he quickly discovered that he had to re-earn his fame, which rested in part on name recognition. ‘In Hollywood’, he observes in his posthumously published autobiography, ‘I started at the bottom: a bum by the name of Sturgeon who had once written a hit called
Strictly Something-or-Other’ (Sturges 1990: 267). Sturges would use this experience of anonymity to creative advantage in his second film,
Christmas in July (1940), in which aspiring sloganeer Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is referred to offhandedly as ‘McTavish’; he would also employ misnaming for the inventor of painless dentistry, W. T. G. Morton (Joel McCrea) in
The Great Moment (1944), who a surgeon’s assistant dismisses as ‘Dr. Martin’. Although not exactly hilarious, these mispronunciations do provide a modicum of biting humour at the expense of two characters who so earnestly desire to succeed. They also point to Sturges’ fascination with the mispronunciation of names as a source of film comedy and satire.
According to McElhaney, ‘Sturges’ naming is part of a comic impulse indebted to everything from commedia dell’arte to Restoration comedy to Dickens, comprising rhymes, alliterations and innuendoes’ (2006: 284). We see this impulse in ridiculous names, nicknames and pseudonyms such as Captain McGlue, Toto and Snoodles (The Palm Beach Story), Hopsie Pike, Murgatroyd and Sir Alfred McGlennan-Keith (The Lady Eve), and Kockenlocker and Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944). These polysyllabic names, with their hard consonants and allusions, are humourous in themselves. However, Sturges extends this comedy by frequently making his characters incapable of correctly pronouncing them. In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Trudy Kockenlocker’s (Betty Hutton) one-night-stand with army private Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki proves difficult to explain, in part because no one can agree on the pronunciation of the soldier’s name, which includes: ‘Ratziwatski’, ‘Ratastki Watastki’, ‘Razly Wazly’, ‘Ignatz Razzberry’, ‘Razzby Wadsgy’, ‘Katzenjammer’ and ‘Ratinski’. Thus the already absurd plot of a character who marries and conceives a child with a man whom she has almost no memory of other than his hairstyle becomes all the more fantastically comedic.
Sturges also uses the mispronunciation of names in a more pointed fashion to ridicule powerful characters and accepted notions of authority. Whereas Jimmy MacDonald’s mispronounced name in
Christmas in July underscores his anonymity and lack of reputation, Sturges uses this same device later in the film to undermine the department store owners, Mr. Hillbeiner (Al Bridge) and Mr. Shindel (Alexander Carr), who dismiss Jimmy and his fiancée Betty (Ellen Drew) because of their low economic status, and falsely accuse them of being thieves. Yet the owners get their comeuppance when no one shows them respect enough to pronounce their names correctly: Mr. Hillbeiner becomes ‘Hillbeimer’ and ‘Heillbimer’, while Mr. Shindel becomes ‘Schwindel’. Not coincidentally, both mispronounced names call to mind similar words with negative connotations: the ‘heil’ in Heilbimer subtly echoes ‘heil Hitler’, while the name Schwindel calls to mind ‘swindle’.
2 Following this verbal disrespect, the residents of Jimmy and Betty’s neighbourhood rally around the couple and add injury to insult by pelting the men with fish and tomatoes.
In The Lady Eve, Sturges uses misnaming to comment on the superficial nature of wealth and celebrity. Although everyone on the S.S. Southern Queen is aware that the young man coming aboard is fabulously rich and famous, most have difficulty recalling his actual name:
WOMAN: You think he’d have a bigger yacht than that if he’s so rich.
MAN: That isn’t a yacht; that’s a tender.
WOMAN: What’s a tender?
SECOND MAN: I said Pabst.
THIRD MAN: It was Pike.
FOURTH MAN: So what?
SECOND WOMAN: Go put on your shorts.
THIRD WOMAN: You can try, can’t you?
SECOND GIRL: But, Mom, it makes me puke.
FIFTH MAN: Puke?
SIXTH MAN: No. Pike.
These gawking and gossiping characters’ fascination with Charles ‘Hopsie’ Pike’s (Henry Fonda) wealth and power consists not of a sincere appreciation of his person, but rather of rumors tinged with a modicum of disgust, conveyed in part through the wordplay on Pike and puke. Sturges builds upon the confusion surrounding Charles’ last name by extending it to the source of his family’s fortune. Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) believes that his family produces beer instead of ale, while Charles himself is unsure if Pike’s ale is fermented on the bottom or on the top.
In Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) Sturges uses misnaming to critique popular notions of heroism. When Woodrow (Eddie Bracken) protests the erection of a statue in his honor, citing his lack of valour, Sarge (William Demarest) dismisses his concerns. He points out that while everyone in town idolises war heroes, no one actually knows or cares much about the facts of heroism, including himself:
SARGE: I been a hero, you could call it that, for 25 years. And does anybody ever ask me what I done? If they did I could hardly tell them, I told it so different so many times. It ain’t as if you done it on purpose. By Tuesday you’ll be forgotten.
WOODROW: Boy, I hope you’re right.
SARGE: I know I’m right. You take General Zablitzki, for instance…
WOODROW: Zabriski.
SARGE: All right, where did he tend bar?
WOODROW: That’s a different case entirely. They bought him at an ironworks that was going out of business. He was just a bargain, that’s all.
SARGE: Well you’re the only guy who knows it. All everybody else knows is he’s a hero. He’s got a statue in the park and the birds sit on it. Except that I ain’t got no birds on me, I’m in the same boat.
Sarge’s debunking of hero myths is made all the more pointed by his mispronunciation of Zabriski, whose acts of heroism are so far removed from current reality that both the site of his heroism and the name of the warrior are difficult to recall.
Typical of Sturges’ films, this social commentary seems tossed off and fleeting. Rather than halting the film’s narrative and comic rhythm, such dialogue constitutes a passing criticism, not a fully-fledged critique. Alessandro Pirolini locates this distinction at the centre of Sturges’ identity as a filmmaker, noting that he ‘does not propose solid alternatives, let alone “universal truths”. He simply exposes the contradictions and the absurdity that lie beneath the cultural, social and economic values commonly accepted by most people’ (2010: 13). In the context of Sarge’s misnaming, Sturges never allows the dialogue on hero worship to overtake the scene; instead, these and related moments continue uninterrupted, as Sturges piles speech error upon error.
Other than mistakes in naming, these passing speech errors include comic mispronunciations of terminology and objects, such as ‘fox pass’ for faux pas in Christmas in July, ‘yach-et’ for yacht and ‘airy-o-plane’ for airplane in The Palm Beach Story and ‘delfumininums’ for delphiniums in Hail the Conquering Hero. Sturges places these words in the mouths of both major and minor characters, young and old, rich and poor. At times, he delights to such an extent in mispronunciation that he extends it to a character’s entire speech patterns through the use of exaggerated dialects, which draw attention to unusual diction, garbled syntax and nonstandard pronunciations.
DIALECTS
Like his formative experience with naming when being referred to as ‘Sturgeon’ by producer Jesse Lasky, Sturges’ interest in dialects stemmed from his own life: a cosmopolitan upbringing that included a childhood divided between the U.S. and Europe, primarily New York, Chicago, and Paris, during which he came into contact with the figures who would one day serve as the basis for his screenplays. Richard Schickel captured this influence well when noting, ‘It is in Sturges’ concern for the American language that one can best see the way his partial alienation shaped his sensibility’ (1985: 33). As an adult living in New York, for instance, Sturges expressed fascination with the multitude of dialects that shape the English language. He comments on this phenomenon in his autobiography. While at a dancehall in New York in 1931, just before moving to Hollywood, Sturges recounts:
The hostess I drew was a charming little creature who looked like a diminutive Helen Morgan and used such marvelous words such as ‘apperntment’ and ‘berled’ eggs and ‘take yur cherce’ and ‘ersters’. Although we spoke supposedly the same language, half the time I didn’t know what she was saying and three-quarters of the time she didn’t understand me. As a result, we found each other very funny. (1990: 262)
Sturges found these pronunciations so funny that he weaved them into each of his films by ensuring that his protagonists would encounter (if only briefly) a character with an exaggerated regional, ethnic, or national dialect. Notably, these characters are almost always secondary or bit players to his films’ major characters, who speak Standard American English (SAE). As such, these minor characters’ dialects are heard as ‘errors’ that point to their unusual and nonstandard speech. Yet, rather than reify xenophobic or racist tendencies, these dialects often suggest playful amusement with the sonic diversity of the English language. As James Curtis puts it, Sturges’ interest in dialects reveals that ‘his soft spot for the “whole cockeyed caravan” ran a mile wide’ (1982: 43).
This soft spot was apparent in Sturges’ consistent use of a troupe of performers with impressive vocal ranges, among them Eric Blore (upper-class British), William Demarest (working-class American), Akin Tamaroff (Eastern European), Rudy Vallee (Trans-Atlantic or Mid-Atlantic) and Sig Arno (ambiguously ‘ethnic’). Yet rather than relying entirely on his performers’ vocal abilities to craft dialect-heavy speech, Sturges often wrote his dialogue phonetically to ensure that his characters, when realised on film, would correspond exactly to his imagined world. To be more precise, Sturges dictated his scripts to a typist (often Bianca Gilchrist), who transcribed the sounds using a roughly phonetic form of notation. His wife Sandy explains this technique in an interview with Andrew Horton: ‘He almost literally became the characters he was creating as he paced around the office, speaking as they would speak, moving as they would move’ (Sturges in Horton 1998: 3). In the context of dialect, these enacted verbal patterns would immediately appear on the page. For instance, in The Power and the Glory, Sturges’ first produced, single-authored screenplay, he creates a stereotypically Irish character, Mulligan (J. Farrell MacDonald), a bridge construction worker, who hesitates when the foreman’s wife, Sally (Colleen Moore), asks to enter the job site. Instead of SAE, what appears in the final screenplay is a roughly phonetic transcription of Mulligan’s line:
Well if I send ye up, ye’ll be sure an’ say ye made me do it now … ye made me do it against me better judgment. (Horton 1998: 108)
By writing ye (you), an’ (and) and the third me (my) into the script, Sturges exerted greater control over his performers and, ultimately, over the sonic worlds presented on film, even those that he did not direct, such as the characters of Louis Louis (Luis Alberni) in Easy Living (1936) and Rufus (Fred ‘Snowflake’ Toones) in Remember the Night (1940).
Sturges’ control over dialect is a key element of characterisation in
The Lady Eve, especially when Jean masquerades as the Lady Eve Sidwich as part of an elaborate scheme to make Charles fall in love with her. This scheme relies largely on Jean’s adoption of British colloquialisms, such as ‘ripping’ (excellent), ‘tube’ (subway), ‘boxes’ (trunk) and ‘drayer’ (truck); she also feigns ignorance of American colloquialisms, such as claiming to believe that ‘lady’ refers only to a royal title. Jean also elongates her pronunciation of words to make them sound unusual, such as adding an extra vowel to ‘been’ and enunciating the word Connecticut as ‘Connect-i-cut’. This verbal masquerade completely fools Charles. Even when his valet Muggsy (William Demarest) insists, ‘That’s the same dame’ – citing her similar appearance and behaviour as both Jean and Lady Eve – Charles protests: ‘She doesn’t talk the same.’ Jean’s speech affectations are in fact so powerful that Charles soon falls in love with and marries her. The power of dialect arguably extends to audiences as well who, despite their knowledge of Jean’s scheme, find her performance as Eve both believable and charming. Much the same is true of Sturges’ use of dialects in all of his films, in which he creates characters that audiences find bizarre yet captivating, unfamiliar yet sympathetic.
By the time he wrote and directed The Palm Beach Story, Sturges had perfected the art of juggling multiple dialects in a single film, among them Texan, East Coast, working class and Southern. Yet the most extreme incarnation of dialect in The Palm Beach Story, indeed in any Sturges film, is voiced by the character Toto (Sig Arno), whose speech is so nonsensical that it becomes its own language, which his occasional lover Maude (Mary Astor) claims is ‘Beluchistan’, yet admits, ‘it’s impossible to tell’. Kozloff seconds this ambiguity when describing Toto in Overhearing Film Dialogue: ‘This Foreigner is so “Other” that we are not sure where he’s from, and he speaks in incomprehensible, made-up language composed of strange-sounding words, the most comprehensible being “nitz”, “yitz”, and “grittniks”’ (2000: 196–7). This imagined dialect marks Toto first and foremost as a comic character. Along with his acrobatic pratfalls, which include tripping down stairs and out of cars, and his silly name that alludes to Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Toto is a figure that audiences laugh at; however, this comedy retains the ‘soft spot’ that Curtis refers to, as Sturges presents Toto’s gibberish and misfortunes in a manner both playful and lighthearted.
The same cannot be said of Sturges’ more pernicious uses of dialect to stereotype African American characters. Although intended to be comic, these speech patterns arguably distance current audiences from the characters while also striking a surprisingly retrograde note in films that are otherwise progressive. John Pym touches on this tendency in his BFI guide on The Palm Beach Story, noting that the film is ‘remarkably crude, carelessly crude in the manner of the times, in its depiction of black characters’ (1998: 38). The black train porter George (Fred ‘Snowflake’ Toones), for instance, speaks in a Southern dialect when he cautions members of the Ale and Quail hunting club, whom he refers to as ‘gentlemens’, not to shoot their guns in the car, pointing out that the ‘conductor is apt to get a little arritated’. In response to his suggestion, the members threaten to shoot him. After he complies with their demands to toss up crackers for target practice, they shoot directly at him until he cowers behind the bar, waving a white flag while wearing a bucket over his head.
Before creating the broadly stereotyped character of George, Sturges presented audiences with Rufus (also played by Toones), a household cook in
Remember the Night who speaks in a Southern dialect that calls to mind American minstrelsy. As he did when scripting
The Power and the Glory, Sturges used a roughly phonetic form of notation to create Rufus’ stereotypical character. When his employer John Sargent (Fred MacMurray) questions Rufus about the whereabouts of a bottle of perfume, the screenplay shows him to be little more than an inept and poorly spoken thief: ‘Perfume! You mean dat little bitty cheap bottle wid de bunch a pine needles tied onto it? […] Dat come in dat little green box wid de six-bit Christmas tree painted onto it? […] I ain’t seen it’ (Horton 1998: 363). Sturges’ dictation here transforms the letter cluster ‘th’ into an audible ‘d’ (the/de, that/dat, with/wid), as commonly found in the dialogue of ninteenth- and early twentieth-century American prose fiction attributed to black characters. Sturges also dictated the performers’ blocking, which involves Sargent grabbing Rufus’ head ‘like a basketball’ before pushing him away, and later referring to him as a ‘flat-headed baboon’ (Horton 1998: 363; 367). This developing exchange in which white characters become frustrated with, belittle and physically assault black characters is a pattern found in this and other Sturges films.
A notable exception to Sturges’ pattern of using dialect to portray black characters in vicious comic fashion occurs during Sully’s imprisonment during the final third of Sullivan’s Travels. As the prisoners make their way through the swamp from the jail to a church to watch a movie, Sturges cuts to the interior of the church, specifically to the black minister (Jess Lee Brooks, credited as ‘The Old Preacher’) standing at the head of an all-black congregation. The monologue that follows is one of the most positive portraits of black life in any of Sturges’ films:
And once again, brethren and sisters, we are goin’ to share our pleasure with some neighbors less fortunate than ourselves. And when they gets here, I’m goin’ to ask you once more, neither by word, nor by action, nor by look to make our guests feel unwelcome, nor to draw away from them or get high-tone. For we is all equal in the sight of God.
The character goes on to quote scripture and lead his congregation in a moving rendition of ‘Go Down, Moses’ as the prisoners shuffle down the aisles. Despite the peppering of his speech with grammatical errors such as ‘they gets’ and ‘we is’, the character’s dialect never marks him as foolish or ignorant. Instead, his language effectively sets the scene’s serious tone and showcases his verbal dexterity, including the use of parallelism with the neither/nor clauses. Notable, however, is that this positive portrayal occurs during a decidedly non-comedic moment in the film. Instead of creating black comedic characters that transcend (or even undermine) cultural stereotypes, Sturges tends to make them the butt of jokes, rather than the deliverers of them.
Apart from employing mispronunciations and exaggerated dialects for comic and critical effects, Sturges would often draw upon the device of malapropism to deepen characterisation and comment subtly on his films’ central themes.
MALAPROPISM
In his history of American screenwriters, Richard Corliss describes Sturges’ film dialogue as a ‘racy, malapropriate idiom whose deceptive ease would prove inimitable’ (Corliss in Henderson 1985: 1). Part of this idiom, as I have been demonstrating, is based on cultivated errors in pronunciation, grammar and syntax. Yet another feature that makes Sturges’ dialogue so memorable is its outright revelling in wrong or inappropriate words. During such moments, characters find themselves unable to articulate the right word, so they instead come up with an approximate (though incorrect) alternative.
Sturges occasionally employed malapropism as a simple gag – a verbal pratfall on a par with physical accidents like slips and stumbling. In The Palm Beach Story, Muggsy approaches the ship’s doctor to ask him a ‘hypodermical question’, a clever play on hypothetical and hypodermic. As the Ale & Quail Club’s festivities reach a fevered drunken pitch, they take a vote to induct the train conductor, with one member yelling out, ‘All in flavor, say aye!’ In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Trudy’s father (William Demarest) worries that Norval (Eddie Bracken) will be arrested for ‘repairing the morals of a minor’. These malapropisms can also be syntactical in nature. In Easy Living, hotel proprietor Louis Louis fears a bank foreclosure: when failure seems imminent, he laments, ‘The cook is goosed!’ In Christmas in July, when Dr. Maxford (Raymond Walburn) believes that he has awarded the $25,000 prize in the Maxford House Coffee slogan contest to the wrong winner, he yells frantically to his secretary, ‘Bank the call!’ In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Trudy inadvertently makes Norval more terrified of her father when saying, ‘His bite is worse than his bark’.
Apart from these witty one-liners, Sturges also uses malapropism in a more elaborate manner by weaving it into core elements of characterisation, often using misspeaking as a Freudian slip to capture a character’s unspoken beliefs and true self. Audiences hear such slips in Sturges’ directorial debut, The Great McGinty (1940), a film that rehearses many of the filmmaker’s intertwined themes of verbal and visual masquerade, corruption, self-deception and love. As part of a series of rigged elections aimed to take him from alderman to state governor, Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) agrees to take part in several publicity stunts to improve his image, including a sham marriage with his secretary Catherine (Muriel Angelus). Unable to reconcile his commitments to bachelorhood with his unacknowledged feelings for Catherine, McGinty lashes out at her when he finds that she’s been discreetly seeing another man:
McGINTY: Where does that bozo get off to be propositioning my wife, anyway?
CATHERINE: You mean ‘proposing’, Mr. McGinty, and he doesn’t anymore. He just takes me out to dinner.
This passing confusion of ‘propositioning’ and ‘proposing’ succinctly captures the characters’ fraught relationship. Catherine is made to feel more like a prostitute than a wife (or a secretary) so that Dan can essentially prostitute himself as a ‘public servant’ in exchange for material comforts. Dan also seems unable or unwilling to enact the word ‘proposing’ with Catherine, despite their apparent connection. Even in this scene, he initially fails to recognise her respect for him and his romantic feelings toward her. It is not until their argument reaches its peak that Dan kisses Catherine in a fit of anger and admits, ‘I musta been blind’.
Malapropism is a telling marker of Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry’s (Claudette Colbert) relationship problems in The Palm Beach Story. During their five years of marriage, Tom has been unable to break through professionally and financially, which has gradually worn on Gerry, who can no longer tolerate living in fear of creditors. After an unbelievable stroke of good luck allows the characters to pay off their debts, Gerry proposes that they divorce so that she can continue to live debt-free and Tom can pursue his professional aims. She begins her proposal by outlining her shortcomings as a wife:
GERRY: You’ll never make a success with me around. I’m just a milestone around your neck.
TOM: Millstone.
GERRY: I’m no good for you, darling. I don’t mean I’m not good for somebody, but I can’t cook or sew or whip up a little dress out of last year’s window curtains.
This milestone/millstone malapropism reverberates in the characters’ relationship, and is made more evident by its explicit acknowledgment. Although Gerry means to apply ‘millstone’ to herself as a non-domesticated wife, she has implicitly applied it to Tom, who has failed in his role as a breadwinner: he has yet to experience the milestone (or success) that will provide him with professional acclaim and Gerry with financial security. However, not long after she utters this malapropism Gerry experiences an economic milestone in the form of John D. Hackensacker III, one of the richest men in the world, who immediately falls in love with her and expresses his hope to marry her. Shortly after meeting him, during one of their early conversations about marriage, John D. utters a malapropism of his own:
JOHN D.: I see marriage as a a sort of a permanent welding, a growing together of two trees, in spite of anything my sister can demonstrate to the contrary, into a sort of permanent mess – mass – like a permanent grafting of two trees into a permanent graft.
GERRY: Oh that was too easy.
JOHN D.: Oh, you mean ‘a permanent graft’. [laughs] I get it.
Despite his excessive emphasis on sincerity and earnestness in this scene and the entire film, Hackensacker’s mess/mass malapropism betrays his own confused notions of marriage while also highlighting the problems of divorce and deception that attend every relationship in the film – a reality further emphasised by his unintentional pun on ‘permanent graft’.
Apart from using malapropism between two characters to identify their relationship issues, Sturges often employed it on repeated occasions with a single character to underscore his or her own hubris. In Hail the Conquering Hero, the verbal clumsiness of incumbent mayor Everett Noble (Raymond Walburn) reveals his incompetence. Dismayed to find that he is suddenly running for re-election against Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), a former Marine, Noble – a civilian whose main accomplishment is presiding over a chair company – endeavours to downplay his opponent’s credentials. While working with his campaign manager (Al Bridge) to craft his campaign message, Everett inadvertently unmasks his ignorance of military history when referring to the battle of Guadalcanal as ‘Guadalupe’, foxholes as ‘wolf holes’ and a military discharge as being ‘dismissed’. Even Noble’s basic skills as an orator are in question. When dictating his acceptance speech to his son Forrest (Bill Edwards), he betrays his limited knowledge of grammar:
NOBLE: I accept the responsibility with a sense of both humility, satisfaction, and gratitude.
FORREST: You can’t say ‘both’. Humility, satisfaction, and gratitude – ‘both’ means two, and you have humility, satisfaction, and gratitude – that’s three.
Unwilling to accept Forrest’s advice, Noble embraces the error, saying, ‘I’m not running on a platform of correct grammar. I even let my grammar slop over a little sometimes, purposely.’ Such malapropisms collectively mark Noble as the incompetent incumbent whose overconfidence serves as one cause of his eventual (and humorous) downfall.
Perhaps Sturges’ most pointed use of malapropism in connection with a character’s hubris occurs in Unfaithfully Yours, a film in which the masterful conductor Sir Alfred de Carter (Rex Harrison) finds that his entire world begins to fall apart (often literally) when he suspects his wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) of infidelity with his secretary Tony (Kurt Kreuger). Although he proves to be a flawless maestro in his direction of performances by Tchaikovsky, Rossini and Wagner, Sir Alfred’s suspicions and jealousies prompt him to make a series of physical and verbal pratfalls throughout the film.
Upon learning, for instance, that his brother-in-law August Henshler (Rudy Vallee) hired detectives to watch Daphne during his absence, Sir Alfred reacts violently, rips August’s suit jacket down the front, and exclaims, ‘You dare to inform me you had vulgar footpads in snap brim fedoras sluicing after my beautiful wife?’ The speech error here is twofold. August catches one mistake and comments, ‘I believe it’s called sleuthing’, but fails to notice Sir Alfred’s use of ‘footpads’ for flatfoots – an error that the detective, Sweeney (Edgar Kennedy), later observes. After accidentally setting fire to his hotel room during an argument with the house detective, the otherwise implacable Sir Alfred is confused, as evident in his mistaken references to the fire chief as ‘General’ and ‘Colonel’. Even toward the end of the film, when the innocent Daphne attempts to mollify her husband by running a bath and offering him a hot toddy, Sir Alfred scowls, ‘I don’t want anything nice and hot. I’m sweating like a bull now.’ Daphne immediately corrects her husband’s imprecision when responding, ‘You mean perspiring, darling’. Unwilling to admit his mistake, Sir Alfred actually clings to it: ‘I do not mean perspiring. If I say I’m sweating, I’m sweating.’ Of Sir Alfred’s many speech errors in the film, this verbal blunder is perhaps the most telling. When his jealousy achieves its height, Sir Alfred is shown up by Daphne, the one character repeatedly referred to as ‘a child’ who, earlier in the film, was unable to define the common literary device of simile. As with Noble’s character in
Hail the Conquering Hero, Sir Alfred’s malapropisms ultimately show him to be a boob deserving of his comeuppance.
***
The examples in this essay attest to the central role that misspeaking plays in Sturges’ career as a writer-director, yet much work remains to be done, including thorough treatments of his use of speech impediments (lisping and stuttering), meta-language and literary devices such as alliteration and allusion. Future scholars might also extend my comments about African American characters into a larger examination of how Sturges used dialogue to construct cultural identities, be they based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other markers. Finally, scholars might provide historical contexts for Sturges’ dialogue techniques by looking to their influences on his contemporaries (for example, Capra, Cukor, Hawks, Welles, Wilder) as well as their impacts on the current generation of writer-directors, particularly Joel and Ethan Coen and Wes Anderson. These investigations would, I believe, show Sturges to be a pivotal figure in the broader history of misspeaking in Hollywood cinema. With ready access to his published screenplays, three biographies, an autobiography and the Preston Sturges Papers archive at UCLA, what remains to be written are the articles and monographs that will critique and contextualise Preston Sturges’ dialogue, thereby giving the filmmaker his long-awaited due as one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century.
notes
1 All dialogue citations are based on my transcriptions of the films, unless otherwise noted.
2 This subtle nod to fascism is reinforced by one character’s comparison of the storeowners to Mussolini and Hitler.
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Drable, D. (1996) ‘A Gift for Dialogue’, Atlantic Monthly, 277, 2, 108–13.
Henderson, B. (ed.) (1985) Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Horton, A. (ed.) (1998) Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges. Berkeley, CA: University of California.
Jacobs, D. (1992) Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Kozloff, S. (2000) Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
McElhaney, J. (2006) ‘Fast Talk: Preston Sturges and the Speed of Language’, in M. Pomerance (ed.) Cinema and Modernity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 273–96.
Pirolini, A. (2010) The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
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Rapfogel, J. (2006) ‘The Screwball Social Studies of Preston Sturges’, Cineaste, 31, 3, 6–12.
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Sturges, P. (1990) Preston Sturges. New York: Simon & Schuster.