Verbal anachronisms in period movies

[BlueTrain]

One of the remarkable things about The Longest Day was that a few soldiers (on the Allied side) who had been in the actual D-Day landings were in the movie. That was also true of Blackhawk Down.

I read somewhere that the filmmakers in Saving Private Ryan recruited some reenactors to play German soldiers and the first thing they did was to give them haircuts. Apparently they, the filmmakers, were unaware of the WWII hairstyles. By today's standards, however, they all had long (and greasy) haircuts. See the photo of John Banner above. The Soviets always had short hair. However, many of the photos of German soldiers with rather long hair were taken in the field and probably would not have been acceptable in the barracks on parade. But German soldiers to this day are happy they are not required to spit-shine boots like the Americans and especially the British. I learned that directly from German soldiers in the field when I was in Germany about 50 years ago.

As far as cowboy movies made in the 30s, there were, of course, still real cowboys then. Some of the B-westerns of the time were set in contemporary times, with radios, cars and current fashions if they weren't in cowboy outfits. But others were set in some vague year, presumably in the 1880s, with little reference to any particularly datable event, unless it was about the California gold rush or a few other things. But there was already myth making about the Old West even before WWI, what with Wild West Shows and so on. Personally, I don't worry too much about reality in the movies because I have enough of it in my own life to do me. I'm looking for escapist entertainment.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

One reason that Hollywood could make all those great cavalry movies in the Golden Era was that until WWII the U.S. Army still had horse cavalry, so they could always hire extras who knew how to perform all those parade-ground maneuvers like pass in review, etc. It would present great difficulties now.

 

[BlueTrain]

I rather doubt many cavalry veterans worked as movie extras but horses were a long way from being gone in, say, 1940. There were lots of people familiar with horses and riding. Anyone who grew up around horses avoided joining the cavalry anyway because they knew how much work it involved. My last duty station in the army was at Ft. Riley, Kansas, former home of the cavalry. That was a long ways from Hollywood. The old western movies did have a lot of horses in them, however.

I once knew someone who took part in the last mounted operation of the British Army, which was in Palestine in WWII. He later rode in the Olympics for Canada. I also met at a party at his house someone who had ridden for Poland in the 1936 Olympics and had been in the Polish army in WWII. That was something like 30 years ago.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Horses were still very common in cities during the 1930s -- most dairies still used horse-drawn delivery wagons on city routes because they were quieter than trucks. Up until 1938, Sheffield Farms, the big Sealtest dairy operation in New York, maintained the largest "fleet" of working horses on the East Coast.

Note the pneumatic truck-type tires on the wagon -- much quieter than the usual iron-tired wagon wheels. You can't really see it in the picture, but the horse is also fitted with rubber horseshoes to eliminate the clatter of hooves on the pavement.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

It's interesting. Years ago, I read the 1961 book, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. There was swearing in it--mostly g.d. and other milder curse words. However, there was one use of the "F" word.

In the 2008 movie of the same name, there are about 8 to 10 "F" words splattered throughout the movie. Yes, the characters were arguing, but I felt it was a bit much, even for the 1950s. They followed the novel nearly to a T, except for the exta "F" words thrown in that were not in the book.

I can't stand it when writers or screenwriters look at everything through 21st Century glasses and have no clue that yes, language and slang were different back then. If you want to have it authentic to a T, get the dialogue period-correct. The same goes for novels too.

-Kristi

John Cheever's 1957 novel The Wapshot Chronicle was notable for being the first Book of the Month Club book to use the f-word. I have a copy of the book, but I've never gotten around to reading it, so I don't know the extent of the word's usage within the text.

The language that struck as being quite anachronistic were the subtitles used in "The Seven Samurai". The old man at the edge of town is often referred to as "Pops" or "Gramps". While I don't doubt Feudal Japan had it's share of slang... some of these folks were made to seem like they'd just sprung from 1940's Brooklyn.

Worf

One of the challenges in translating from one language to another is organically conveying the sense of colloquial language and expressions. Maybe something like "old-timer" would have been better.

 

[BlueTrain]

It's true that languages do not always neatly translate word for word, even in closely related languages. There are even a lot of English words for which I do not understand the meaning. But then, the users may not have intended for me to understand.

Colin Fletcher (of "The Complete Walker" fame) wrote in his book "The man from the cave," that, in so many words, at some point in the research he was doing about someone, he realized that "old-timer" may not have really meant old, as he had been using the words. More like someone who was there before he was.

 

[2jakes]

Always amused me watching Gene Autry or Roy Rogers movies from the '30s or '40s during the fifties on TV.

A western village with stagecoach
and Ford convertibles.

The hero's six-shooter that never ran out of bullets.

Hero mostly wore a white cowboy hat and never lost it even when he
jumped from his horse to tackle the villain down.

Never showed blood when shot.
And a bandana wrapped around
a wound was all that was
needed.

I miss the galloping hoof
sounds during the chase scenes.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, let me see. The heroes in the horse operas were the good guys, you know, and their fans were adolescent boys for the most part. They usually never killed anyone, the didn't smoke or drink, never kissed a girl and of course they never swore. The bad guys did all of those things in the course of swindling somebody out of their land, which was the usual plot, with variations. The six-shooters used in film were real Colts using blanks, of course, but they had to be reloaded, though rarely shown.

Stagecoaches are more problematic. Supposedly they continued in use into the 1920s when they were finally replaced by busses (motor coaches) and they do show up in a few movies. Another plot device was that the railroad was coming through, causing some local land speculation but the railroad didn't replace horse-drawn stagecoaches.

There were such things as singing cowboys, too, but they never made recordings. Gene Autry was a recording star years before his first movie. There was no blood in those movies but plenty of fighting and riding. Come to think of it, war movies usually weren't very bloody, either. That hadn't changed much by the time the Longest Day was filmed, either. By the way, we visited some of the locations of that movie when we were in Normandy a few years ago. Hard to believe anyone could get over the beaches alive.

I always thought it funny that in many Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies, none of the "natives" appear to be African. But who cares?

 

[2jakes]

I always thought it funny that in many Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies, none of the "natives" appear to be African. But who cares?

Tarzan says...

Many interpretations. You decide how he meant it!

 

[BlueTrain]

Another visual twist in some of the old Western movies, all of them, too, was the location. While some movies were made on location, most Westerns were made in the hills somewhere north of L.A. or up Big Bear way. That goes back to the silent era. They were wonderful locations and all those scenes with the big rocks were great. But that isn't what Kansas looks like. The movie ranches in the Simi Valley area are mostly gone now but there are a few a little further afield, off Highway 14, including Disney's. But even in the 1930s, a few movies were made overseas.

 

[2jakes]

Hollywood sign.
In the '70s, for no other reason than that it was there. I climbed to get a closer view.
It was in bad shape. I've read that it has been fixed, but now is fenced off to the public.

Nearby, I visited the Bronson cave.

There have been over a dozen movies using this location going back to the 30s.
Gene Autry in "Phantom Empire" serial.

My favorite, "The Searchers" (John Wayne)

 

[Zombie_61]

Hollywood sign.
In the '70s, for no other reason than that it was there. I climbed to get a closer view.
It was in bad shape. I've read that it has been fixed, but now is fenced off to the public.

I don't know about a fence, but there are motion sensors attached to the letters at various points that allegedly trigger an alarm for local police. They can be avoided, however, as evidenced by the fact that "artist" Zachary Cole Fernandez altered the sign to read "HOLLYWEED" in the early morning hours of January 1st, using sheets and clamps so as not to cause any actual damage to the sign. Apparently, the local authorities take this sort of thing seriously--Fernandez turned himself in on the 9th, was charged with misdemeanor trespassing, released on bail, and could face up to six months in prison.

 

[2jakes]

Erected in 1923, the sign was studded with some 4,000 light bulbs and had nothing
to do with movies until later.
It's original purpose was to advertise the name of a new segregated housing development.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

One of my favorite Western tropes is when someone gets shot in the shoulder and it's "only a flesh wound." Reach over and feel your shoulder. Not much flesh there is there? What you feel is a lot of bone and if you get shot in the shoulder you're crippled for life, like Bob Dole was in WWII.

 

[MikeKardec]

... others were set in some vague year, presumably in the 1880s, with little reference to any particularly datable event, unless it was about the California gold rush or a few other things. But there was already myth making about the Old West even before WWI, what with Wild West Shows and so on. Personally, I don't worry too much about reality in the movies because I have enough of it in my own life to do me. I'm looking for escapist entertainment.

Reality in entertainment is greatly overrated but that "willing suspension of disbelief" concept is important! WAY too many Westerns in both prose and film exist in that nebulous "late frontier period" and behave like it somehow lasted for longer than the 30 short years that it did. Really, for anyone interested in the fantasy-land of Westerns, watching Rustler's Rhapsody (there isn't a laugh in the film but it is still quite the satire of the genre) is a must.

For a long time it was unbelievably rare to see an actual period costume or firearm or set. Red River is one of the few that, at least in a few places, had some authenticity in it's props. Much of the lack of authenticity was based around the fact that Westerns were the inexpensive action films of the day and doing them cheaply was the goal. On the action side, they wanted to be sure to have lots of gunfire so muzzle loading rifles and revolvers that took five minutes to reload were OUT. Odd when you realize cap and ball revolvers were still the staple self defense weapon of the poor up into the 1930s. You could get them "new surplus" for a couple bucks in a lot of catalogs. My dad used to remark that they were common among hobos and typical working stiffs all through the 1920s.

While some movies were made on location, most Westerns were made in the hills somewhere north of L.A. or up Big Bear way. That goes back to the silent era. They were wonderful locations and all those scenes with the big rocks were great. But that isn't what Kansas looks like. The movie ranches in the Simi Valley area are mostly gone now but there are a few a little further afield, off Highway 14, including Disney's. But even in the 1930s, a few movies were made overseas.

Seeing "exotic" locations like those in Mexico (or wherever they were filmed) in the Lady From Shanghai is wonderful but too rare in the period. A Western location you never see anymore is the Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley and, a place I shot a couple of times, the Sonora/Jamestown/Columbia area of the California Gold Country ... productions go there for the train (like Back to the Future or Unforgiven) but they don't stick around for all the other beautiful scenery.

Movies can get very locked in on exactly what the script says and fail to improvise to get great production value. I remember arriving from LA on the location of a Western shoot near Sonora to find the stars doing a scene in the nearby river. Then the entire unit had lunch using a 100 year old covered bridge as a commissary. I was livid (though I had no position to justify my lividity!) and pulled the producer aside and asked if anyone had thought of actually using the bridge as a location! No. Same with the 1910 era abandoned mill just down the road. Both would have been improvements over where we shot some of the other scenes and would have required no rewriting. We also could have stayed at the bridge/river location longer. A big piece of filmmaking wisdom here: It never pays to move all your trucks until you absolutely have to. Always find a minimum of two days of work before you have to move. See, it's been 30 years and I'm still irate!

My other "reality" oriented gripe is that you rarely ever see appropriate architecture. Those board and bat towns often didn't last long, succumbing to fire and lots of times being replaced with brick buildings with steel shutters. In the southwest of course adobe was common but movie back lots were obsessed with the early Kansas plains town look ... jammed together buildings of board and bat. It didn't hurt that that was easy to build and could cover the Dennis the Menace set on the next street over. For all it's faults Young Guns is just breathtaking in the way it catches the true look of New Mexico in the 1880s ... because they shot it in a town that has barely changed since then. Towns without residence blocks bug me too and "ranches" without out-buildings. All these are victims of not having enough money to construct the complete historical effect.

It's no sillier than ranching in Monument Valley in classic westerns. I can't think of a quicker way to go broke. It does look good, however, and reality is overrated!

 

[BlueTrain]

I've heard that a few movies lost money because they went overboard on period accuracy. The so-called Poverty Row studios of the 30s survived by making movies, invariably 60-minutes long, by operating on a shoe string budget for everything and sticking to it. Yet the big studios sometimes lost big on some productions while making it all back on a hit. Go big or go broke, I suppose was the rule.

While I understand your point about the old towns not being accurately recreated in movies, I was always struck by, in old photos of gold rush towns in the West or in Alaska, a remarkable number of fancy (relatively speaking) structures were built early on, mainly banks and churches. I am also struck by seeing photos of small towns in places I'm familiar with, mainly southern West Virginia, that have a marked resemblance to big cities, with crowded streets, busy-looking store fronts and those movie theaters I mentioned in another thread. Of course the buildings are rarely more than four or five stories high but that also described many neighborhoods in Manhattan not that long ago. Those neighborhoods in New York were razed decades ago for space to build more high rise apartments, the UN building and even more skyscrapers, while the main streets in the small towns just got boarded up.

 

[MikeKardec]

This is interesting and I'm trying to catch up ... if anyone has a problem with my blathering on just skip right by my entries!

Recently I saw an old Western from the '30's, and when one cowboy wanted another to leave he said "Beat it.". I can't prove that cowboys didn't say that, but I doubt it.

We have to be careful assuming stuff like that, they were a lot closer to those times than we are. I've been revising a book my father started in the 1930s and ran onto one character calling another "Lame Brain," if I didn't know it had been written in 1938 I'd have cut it out for fear it was anachronistic. It sounds like something that was invented in my youth.

On the other hand, my father, the same one who hardly ever cursed, would freely use racial expressions that are no longer acceptable and he was not racist at all, though other family members certainly were and still are.

All my earlier comments about anachronisms in motion pictures and other things they don't quite get right is not so much based on comparing movies today with what things were like in, say, 1940, so much as it is my comparing it with movies made in 1940, which is another thing altogether.

Up until the 1980s I noticed people identifying other people using casual racial slang with no racist intent whatsoever. That went away all of a sudden in younger people. I have a friend, an older man who worked as a USAID engineer all over the Third World. When it comes to clean water and hospitals and the like he probably saved more lives than anyone I know. He dug ditches and slept shoulder to shoulder and even gave blood transfusions under primitive conditions with, and to, people all over Asia and Africa when he could have easily had an office job in DC or at the UN. To hear him talk any modern college student would immediately call him out as a racist and he does see different peoples as having different qualities both good and bad but ... but ... but ... I don't know. Someone may be a racist, or not, but I'm not sure in most cases if its accurate for someone else to identify them as such. A person who self identifies that way, that's easy, they are telling you who they are.

I'm convinced that old movies suffer from "old movie speak." Hollywood had it's own way of presenting reality. No doubt people began to emulate it as movies penetrated the culture but I don't think that movies are the best source of authentic period dialog!

I always thought German officers spoke British English. They always did in the movies. Mind you, I've never met a single German who spoke English with a German accent--and I lived in Germany for two years and visited there year before last.

I've worked side by side with a huge German corporation for the last couple of decades and my take is that the "German Accent" has a lot to do with where you are from and how old you are. I'm sure a German would say that there are LOTS of German accents, just as there are lots of American accents, British accents and Australian accents.

That Classic Hollywood German accent, at a guess, comes from Germans who learned English later in life. I think what you are hearing is the "muscle memory" of German sounds projected onto English. I've heard it in the very old and people who grew up in more isolated areas ... and then a few others for whom I have no explanation. Most Germans I deal with in Germany have a British accent but that came from teachers who grew up in areas dominated by the British after WWII and from going to school in England or both.

When writing characters with accents I rarely (except in the book mentioned above because Dad did it) try to write the sound of 'dialect.' But I do try to use the sort of sentence construction and vocabulary that the person would use. Sometimes I'll get a native speaker to translate a bit of the language directly, meaning word for word, and then try to copy that syntax. Oddly, if I fake the accent myself (realize I have a little acting and dialect training) it, 1) gets better the longer I do it, like much, much, better without even studying the accent in others ... I think this is establishing muscle memory pattern in my lips and tongue and, 2) it leads me, unconsciously, to what seems to be the right word choice. Is that because those words work better with the muscle memory? Am I channeling the character and the accent is just a bridge or a way in? I don't know. It can sometimes be VERY hard to stop and the personality of those characters (even if they are just just a tool to get the syntax right and have no relation to the character I am writing) is often very different from my own. I'm not very good at this but it is a strange and powerful force. I can see how someone like Peter Sellers or Robin Williams could get lost in a bewildering array of faux personalities!

Anyone seen Arrival? Language is very powerful and mysterious.

 

[MikeKardec]

I've heard that a few movies lost money because they went overboard on period accuracy. The so-called Poverty Row studios of the 30s survived by making movies, invariably 60-minutes long, by operating on a shoe string budget for everything and sticking to it. Yet the big studios sometimes lost big on some productions while making it all back on a hit. Go big or go broke, I suppose was the rule.

While I understand your point about the old towns not being accurately recreated in movies, I was always struck by, in old photos of gold rush towns in the West or in Alaska, a remarkable number of fancy (relatively speaking) structures were built early on, mainly banks and churches. I am also struck by seeing photos of small towns in places I'm familiar with, mainly southern West Virginia, that have a marked resemblance to big cities, with crowded streets, busy-looking store fronts and those movie theaters I mentioned in another thread. Of course the buildings are rarely more than four or five stories high but that also described many neighborhoods in Manhattan not that long ago. Those neighborhoods in New York were razed decades ago for space to build more high rise apartments, the UN building and even more skyscrapers, while the main streets in the small towns just got boarded up.

Sadly, cities these days have a sort of winner take all dominance over more mid and small sized towns, that didn't used to be the case. The local town often had just as important businesses and economy as the "big city" did. Places in the West (or institutions) that had money often went for broke, building some pretty nice buildings. The consistency of mid west agriculture led it to construct some impressive towns when the boom and bust of the far west could not ... except where there was mining or the like. A far out example would be Virginia City's homes with solid silver hardware. I was always impressed that many pioneer towns in Australia built government buildings befitting the grandeur of the British empire ... more impressive than you'd see in their US equivalent. In reality a lot of Old West buildings were brightly painted but black and white photography does them no favors.

I think one reason you don't see an attempt at 'historical accuracy' in old Westerns is that they weren't considered 'historical' at the time (pre war) ... they were just fantasies set in the very recent past. Those were the days people's fathers lived in. The reality of them was remembered well enough that the historical record wasn't really considered.

The West has always been a weird place and what a Western really is has been caught in a feed back loop between Hollywood and History and Novelists for a LONG time. Westerns also got a revival (not that they'd gone away but just in their mythic energy) because of WWII. They were a "safe" adventure genre that wouldn't so easily activate war oriented PTSD or the memories of dead loved ones when compared to the prewar Adventure genre. The were "safe" in the past and "safely" at home in the USA. Though there were probably better and more accurate Western films made after the war, westerns didn't really need to be accurate. They were about citizenship and rebuilding society and such. All sorts of agendas were worked into them from, "we all have to be good little patriots who are happy to die in nuclear fire" to "we all have to give up our individuality and join the hive, er, community to survive."

They were the mirror of America. And then, because they were so deeply accepted, they were superficially hashed and rehashed to the point where they had no point until fairly recently.

 

[vitanola]

This is interesting and I'm trying to catch up ... if anyone has a problem with my blathering on just skip right by my entries!



We have to be careful assuming stuff like that, they were a lot closer to those times than we are. I've been revising a book my father started in the 1930s and ran onto one character calling another "Lame Brain," if I didn't know it had been written in 1938 I'd have cut it out for fear it was anachronistic. It sounds like something that was invented in my youth.



Up until the 1980s I noticed people identifying other people using casual racial slang with no racist intent whatsoever. That went away all of a sudden in younger people. I have a friend, an older man who worked as a USAID engineer all over the Third World. When it comes to clean water and hospitals and the like he probably saved more lives than anyone I know. He dug ditches and slept shoulder to shoulder and even gave blood transfusions under primitive conditions with, and to, people all over Asia and Africa when he could have easily had an office job in DC or at the UN. To hear him talk any modern college student would immediately call him out as a racist and he does see different peoples as having different qualities both good and bad but ... but ... but ... I don't know. Someone may be a racist, or not, but I'm not sure in most cases if its accurate for someone else to identify them as such. A person who self identifies that way, that's easy, they are telling you who they are.

I'm convinced that old movies suffer from "old movie speak." Hollywood had it's own way of presenting reality. No doubt people began to emulate it as movies penetrated the culture but I don't think that movies are the best source of authentic period dialog!



I've worked side by side with a huge German corporation for the last couple of decades and my take is that the "German Accent" has a lot to do with where you are from and how old you are. I'm sure a German would say that there are LOTS of German accents, just as there are lots of American accents, British accents and Australian accents.

That Classic Hollywood German accent, at a guess, comes from Germans who learned English later in life. I think what you are hearing is the "muscle memory" of German sounds projected onto English. I've heard it in the very old and people who grew up in more isolated areas ... and then a few others for whom I have no explanation. Most Germans I deal with in Germany have a British accent but that came from teachers who grew up in areas dominated by the British after WWII and from going to school in England or both.

When writing characters with accents I rarely (except in the book mentioned above because Dad did it) try to write the sound of 'dialect.' But I do try to use the sort of sentence construction and vocabulary that the person would use. Sometimes I'll get a native speaker to translate a bit of the language directly, meaning word for word, and then try to copy that syntax. Oddly, if I fake the accent myself (realize I have a little acting and dialect training) it, 1) gets better the longer I do it, like much, much, better without even studying the accent in others ... I think this is establishing muscle memory pattern in my lips and tongue and, 2) it leads me, unconsciously, to what seems to be the right word choice. Is that because those words work better with the muscle memory? Am I channeling the character and the accent is just a bridge or a way in? I don't know. It can sometimes be VERY hard to stop and the personality of those characters (even if they are just just a tool to get the syntax right and have no relation to the character I am writing) is often very different from my own. I'm not very good at this but it is a strange and powerful force. I can see how someone like Peter Sellers or Robin Williams could get lost in a bewildering array of faux personalities!

Anyone seen Arrival? Language is very powerful and mysterious.

I grew up in a Midwestern city surrounded by elderly immigrants who came over before the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924. The accents which the older folks had were VERY different from those of more recent immigrants from the same countries. In some cases this is due to early "foreign language" training in European schools. German, Czech, Slovenian or Polish immigrants no longer find some American English consonants impossible to vocalise. A Czech waiter at Koliba in Astoria, Queens, who immigrated from Žižkov at the age of fifteen sounds entirely different from my late grandfather, who immigrated from the same town at the same age (but came over in 1911 rather than 1992). The newer immigrant was fluent in English from elementary school, so he can easily pronounce all English consonants and finds English grammar to be almost second nature. My grandfather still rolled his Rs, and often used German grammatical construction, as in "Hey, Bobby, come up from downstairs. Don't forget now the light to put out!"

Of course, radio, television and moving pictures have over the past century brought a standardization similar to that which we have seen in American English. The odd little rural dialects, with their archaic grammars and sometimes gutteral and idiosyncratic pronounciation, have largely disappeared. After all, NO Berliner today speaks like THIS:

 

[BlueTrain]

Many interesting comments here about many different topics.

Regarding the old Westerns, referring now to the B-Westerns and the Singing Cowboy movies, I think one element not mentioned is that they were aimed at an adolescent audience, not adults. That's not the reason for their disappearance, though. Later Westerns and the Western television shows were considered "adult," though not exactly in the sense that we usually use the word. It's worth noting that a few people who went west in wagon trains before the Civil War were still alive when the first motion pictures with sound came out. Yes, they were old.

Regarding those movies generally, though, I think the plots often sounded very believable, for a Western. Ranchers fighting over water rights, people trying to buy up land because the railroad was coming through, the bankers foreclosing on the daughter of the recently deceased father's ranch and so on. Of course, the audience always knew who the bad guy was as soon as he appeared on the screen but it took fifty minutes for the good guy to figure it out.

English is now apparently a dominant language around the world, although it is spoken differently in different places, of course. One can travel through Europe and have no trouble finding people who speak English. Curiously, when we visited France a few years ago, none of the English speakers had what you would call a French accent, although I have met a few in this country who did. One relative, technically a former relative (was married to one of my wife's cousins), was Serbian and had a wonderful Hollywood Russian accent. But she spoke no Russian, she said, although I suppose Serbian is a Slavic language.