Verbal anachronisms in period movies

[BlueTrain]

I meant to add in my previous post that while the larger cities sucked the life out of small towns, it was small towns that grew at the expense of villages and the tiny crossroads communities. One thing that made all of that possible was advances in transportation; better roads and more cars. I don't think the railroads made nearly as much difference. I think the trend is continuing, too. But there are other trends, too. Small towns near the big cities (without defining small and big) are now bedroom communities where more of the residents commute to the big city to work. But that practice has been around longer than you might think. I knew people when I was little and living in a small (8,000 or 9,000 people) town who drove 20 or 30 miles a day to work, something you wouldn't have thought people did in the 1950s. The small towns where most people work elsewhere enjoy a sort of rebirth but they still aren't what they used to be, with the downtown business district missing all the businesses that used to be there. You do your shopping somewhere else, usually outside of town at a cookie cutter strip mall with just about everything you need all in one place--with plenty of parking, free parking, too. The so-called downtown business district, all three blocks of it, is given over to lawyer's and real estate offices because these bedroom communities tend to have high incomes compared with what they used to be. But there's no drug stores, no hardware stores, no butcher shops and so on. Is it better or worse? You tell me! I don't know.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Moving to the suburbs or the equivalent has been going on a long time. When horse cars were introduced in the 1870s it made it easy to live on the edge of town and commute to work or shopping. The brownstones and town houses of the 1870s and 1880s were the middle class housing of the day. Electric trolleys were even better, and automobiles brought suburbia as we know it, at least for the rich, in the 1920s.

There is an old book "The Rise Of Silas Lapham" about a man who makes a fortune in the paint business and decides to build a mansion in Boston. He starts by buying a 20 foot wide lot on the Back Bay. I had to read that paragraph about 4 times. A 20 foot wide mansion for a show off business tycoon? Yes, in the 1820s and 1830s that is what they built if they wanted to be within walking distance of downtown. No trolleys or horse cars back then.

 

[GHT]

These happen because the scripts are written by people too young to remember the period. They've heard these phrases all their lives and assume they were always in use. Period scripts should be proofread by people old enough to remember the vocabulary and speech patterns of the time depicted.

Interesting thought, but what if the period depicted goes beyond the date of of anyone who would be alive. The TV series : Downton Abbey is depicted from such a time. There were one or two modernisms in the script, despite the best efforts of the author Jullian Fellowes. It didn't draw that much criticism. Maybe fans of the series were too engrossed in the portrayal of the drama to bother.
One British series that, from my experience, does seem to get things right, is: 'Morse.' Better still, since the death of John Thaw, a new, innovative series, depicting Morse as a fresh faced young Constable, in a series named: 'Endeavour," set in the late fifties, early sixties seems to hit the spot with expressions and sayings from that period. One such expression, tripe hound, did make me smile. It was in regular use from about the end of WW2. It's just my speculative guess but I think tripe hound and similar expressions, came about as a sort of euphemism for a profanity. Swearing on TV was absolutely forbidden, unless it was a word like ba***rd, which could be used to describe someone who did despicable things, but only that, any other use of the word was deemed to be swearing.
Endeavour really is like being back in the sixties.

That's one of my least-favorite phrases in the world -- "we are, are we? Will *we* be having an episiotomy?" The only phrase that irritates me more is "baby bump." Don't get me started. I doubt very much any actual couple of any class in 1928 would have said "we're pregnant," unless they were two women who were pregnant at the same time.

Will we be having an episiotomy? Are we speaking perineumly? I haven't seen the Selfridges program, but the British upper and middle classes of the time really did mimic royalty, and the royal: 'we' was all too common, as was the over use of the term: 'one' as in the first person singular.

 

[MikeKardec]

If you find singing cowboys humorous or just odd see Rustler's Rhapsody. It's actually one of the funniest, un funny films I've ever seen. I don't think I laughed once but, intellectually, if you're into dealing with old Westerns as I am, it's pretty funny. An alternate universe that operates as if the laws of old Western Movies were the laws of physics. We used to have a theater (before my time but not before my younger uncle's) called The Hitching Post, they played non stop Westerns aimed at kids. You had to check your toy guns at the door.

My gripe with Westerns, because I make a good deal of my income there, is the brittleness of the audience/genre. Thought there have been some healthy forays into other aspects and times, it's way too stuck in that post Civil War era. Much of that was the influence of the movies because that era and those stories were cheap to produce. Movies about the prewar era like The Big Trail were wonderful but expensive and rare. Personally, I sort of think that everything really interesting that happened in the west happened before 1860 ... I'm exaggerating a bit for the sake of making a point.

Though many Westerns do fall into that Black Hats and White Hats dialectic, personally I find that the genre is at it's best when it deals with moral ambiguity. A significant theme in the history and some of the best Westerns is the fact that getting away to the free lands west of the Mississippi, heck even the Appalachians, allowed a person to become a new person, escape their reputation, start over. It set loose a avalanche of recreation, not all of it positive. When you can do anything you want as long as you survive, that freedom can often create both good and bad in the same person. The space between good and bad absolutely makes The Searchers, The Ox Bow Incident, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 310 to Yuma, just to name a few movies and no books. Regardless of my complaints about the genre, it actually doesn't obey its greatest cliches as much as it's reputation sometimes suggests.

Regardless of the historical inaccuracies in many old Westerns, it is very true, the early movies were made by people who had come west under similar circumstances and some of them had experienced the actual events they portrayed. It's important to remember that few of them took film making so seriously as to think they were recreating the historical record. They were creating entertainment, having fun, play acting, and they did so with the toys they had at hand ... movies weren't the dreadfully serious, and expensive, business they have become.

 

[BlueTrain]

I'm not so sure that the West, beginning with the Alleghenies, ever allowed a person to escape his past. I believe people were better informed about events and people than we are likely to give them credit for, the only difference being the inevitable time lag because of slow communication. I was amused to read in a book written around 1900 entitled "History of the New River Settlement," which was about the area along the New River in Virginia and West Virginia, something about the frontier period there. Indians were a constant problem until the defeat of the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. After that, they basically had to move further west. The book said that after that, "the frontier was flooded with land speculators."

Another point rarely made clear in movies is that the Indians were never anonymous bands of redskins. The first settlers generally knew who the chiefs were and there was sometime more or less friendly contact. Hunters, more particularly fur trappers (the Mountain Men) were a sort of fringe people and the Indians recognized the fact. I'd say the representation of Mountain Men was fairly accurate in such movies that featured them. There are a few books written during that period, so our knowledge of those days is more than pure speculation. In any event, the movie makers weren't out to produce documentaries.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

It's funny that the post-CW period is what most people think of when they say "Wild West." Actually, that was when the West was settling down and coming under rule of law. Look at a photo of El Paso from 1885 and it looks like any big eastern city with big, brick buildings and streetcars providing transportation. Tombstone AZ had telephones and ice cream parlors when the Earp-Clanton feud was going on. The real Wild West was the 1830s-50s. Gold Rush San Francisco was ten times as violent as Tombstone.

Jim Cornelius in his Frontier Partisans blog has pointed out that Hollywood insists on telling the same four or five stories over and over again: Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral, Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, Wild Bill Hickock and Deadwood, Custer and the Little Bighorn, one or two others. The recent film "The Revenant" was a welcome break, taking us back to the real Wild West. I hope there will be more like it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The whole "remote Wlid West" thing becomes mind boggling when you realize that Wyatt Earp died in Hollywood in 1929, and was a crony of movie cowboys William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

 

[BlueTrain]

El Paso was 200 years old in 1885.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Some of the most authentic-looking films were the early silents with William S. Hart. The action, plots and dialogue (cards) were hokey, but the look was quite accurate from costumes to architecture. After all, until no more than three decades before the silents, California was the Wild West. Many people in the audience would have remembered the time clearly. It was like us seeing a movie about the late '70s.

 

[AdeeC]

One thing that has struck me in recent years is that, even in movies as meticulous as "Saving Private Ryan," the Germans are portrayed with shaven or buzzcut hair. If you study actual photographs of real German soldiers from WWII, they almost always had hair noticeably longer than their American and British contemporaries. It's just that modern, neo-nazis affect the skinhead look, and we now project that back on the geniuine Nazis of the '40s.

A few long haired young German soldiers and Waffen SS Hitler Youth captured in France 1944.

 

[AdeeC]

Another anachronism I see all to often in modern period films that require vintage cars is that if the film is say set in 1950 the cars are usually all from exactly that period. When more likely there would have been many cars 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years old on the roads in 1950. It's like everyone drives new cars in period films.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Another anachronism I see in all to often in modern period films that require vintage cars is that if the film is say set in 1950 the cars are usually all from exactly that period. When more likely there would have been many cars 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years old on the roads in 1950. It's like everyone drives new cars in period films.

Another thing I see is that many times in films set in the '20s-'30s the cars are always gleaming and spotless. This is because the cars are rented from collectors/restorers who aren't about to allow their cars to be marked up. Back around '78 I saw a tv movie of "The Dain Curse" and it took place in NYC in the 20s in winter with snow everywhere, but every time a car drove past the camera it was perfect and spotless, totally unlike the way a real car would look under those circumstances.

 

[MikeKardec]

The whole "remote Wlid West" thing becomes mind boggling when you realize that Wyatt Earp died in Hollywood in 1929, and was a crony of movie cowboys William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

My Dad (in the 1920s) worked for Deluvina Maxwell, the lady who inadvertently sent Billy the Kid to his death. I stood in her house, abandoned now, about 20 years ago. Kinda spooky, the connection to my father who often ate lunch on the porch and to the earlier history too. He also knew a guy, at the same time, who'd had a thumb shot off in a gunfight in the Lincoln County War.

Another anachronism I see all to often in modern period films that require vintage cars is that if the film is say set in 1950 the cars are usually all from exactly that period. When more likely there would have been many cars 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years old on the roads in 1950. It's like everyone drives new cars in period films.

Oh yeah, I hate that. The movie car problem is that the guys with the huge fleets of cars that rent to films rarely maintain their vehicles, they only have them to make money off of and so just drive them til they drop. Sometimes they can barely get them off the transporter. Many times it's the background cars, owned by real collectors, that are really nice.

Never let anyone from a film crew drive your car ... or shoot in your house. Their main method of operation is use it up and move on.

I didn't try to do the math but in the recent film "The Founder" (about Ray Crock and McDonalds and pretty good) you see Michael Keaton driving a fairly clapped out early fifties car ... the only problem; it's the early fifties. For that level of disrepair it should have been a bit older. If they could just get it through their heads that using an older car than the period of the film will disguise the level of distress the car is in. The other side of the coin is that when you don't want to blare "This Film is About 1952" in a subtitle, then you use all early '50s cars so people know what time period they are in.

 

[BlueTrain]

The funny thing is, if the movie or television show were set in the present, you'd never notice the cars and in most cases, the cars aren't important. One exception was the British TV series, "Inspector Morse." He drove a 1960 Jaguar. The series ended in 2000 (!!!) by which time the car was 40 years old. It was a scene stealer, if that could be said of a car.

Another film, "The Group," made in 1966 about a bunch of preppie young women in the 1930s featured a lot of old cars and I recall a write-up in some car magazine about it. Seems just like yesterday.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have loaned props to film crews -- we get a surprising number of them here -- and invariably something ends up damaged or outright broken. Never, never, never ever again. I don't care how much they offer me.

Kroc was a paper cup salesman, driving his car all over the country, in all kinds of weather and road conditions. I'm glad to hear they make it look dumpy -- my usualy complaint with movie cars, other than their homogenity, is that they're usually too shiny and clean. The roads in the Era were not clean, and neither were the cars.

A couple more irritating anachronisms that bug me. They rarely ever make an effort to get newspaper layouts and typefaces right -- when you see somebody reading some phony looking sheet called "The New York Globe" or some such with headlines in Franklin Gothic or Impact or --gawd forbid -- Helvetica off some intern's Mac, it takes you completely out of the moment. NOt all movies are this sloppy -- I smiled a big smile in "Trumbo" when the title character's daughter was seen at the breakfast table flipping thru a genuine-looking copy of the Daily Worker -- but attention to detail on this point is the exception rather than the rule.

I also hate the way radio is portrayed in movies. A radio newscaster in the 1930s or 1940s did not sound like some "Ricky Radio" type character on your top-40 boss hits station in 1968. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find out how broadcasters actually sounded during the period in question and base your portrayals on these, instead of resorting to some corny Gary Owens stereotype that never had much of any basis in reality in the first place.

 

[BlueTrain]

I remember 1968 pretty well. That was the year I got out of the army and went back to college. But I don't remember what radio broadcasters sounded like. I remember listening to Armed Forces Radio in Europe as well as Radio Caroline when I was overseas, too, but I can't quite remember what anyone sounded like.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Think big bass voice, orotund pronunciation, forced and exaggerated enthusiasm. Or Ted Baxter on the "Mary Tyler Moore" TV show. That was the stereotypical top-40 radio newscaster in the 1960s.

Real newscasters in the Era sounded nothing like this. While you had network personalities with a unique style like Kaltenborn or Winchell, these were very much not representative of the mainstream. A typical run-of-the-mill newscaster in the Era would have simply read the news in a clear, well-enunciated conversational voice, with no dramatic pauses, no overemphasis, and no "style" of any kind. Every town had "Your Esso Reporter," who was simply a local announcer reading United Press rip and read wire copy for four and a half minutes with no distinctiveness or "personality" in his delivery whatsoever.

 

[Fading Fast]

What I notice about radio or TV news in particular is how much there was a specific style to a time period. Be it fast or slow delivery, just-the-facts or folksy talk, stirring background music or just newsroom din, a period has a style that you can quickly identify. And it will usually be across all stations at the time.

I don't carry the encyclopedic knowledge around in my head that Lizzie does, but sometime when watching a period movie, they'll play a radio station either in the background or more prominently as part of the script and to my ear, sometimes, the style of the period is off for the actual period of the movie, but the style of the radio they chose fits the artistic moment better or is simply more iconic "old radio."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yup. The "teletype clatter" stereotype, for one thing, is way, way overdone. There was only one notable newscaster from the Era who ever used this, Paul Sullivan out of the Louisville/Cincinnati market, and he only used it at the opening and closing of his broadcasts, never while he was actually reading the news. It only became a stereotype when Top 40 hacks started doing it in the late fifties.

A lot of people think Walter Winchell's use of random Morse Code in the background of his broadcasts was typical -- it was not, he was the only broadcaster who ever did this. And it wasn't continuous -- it was only used as punctuation between items on the broadcast, in the same manner that he used an ellipsis (...) to separate items in his newspaper column.

News "sounders" did not become common until the rise of top forty radio in the late 1950s. The closest thing to a "sounder" was the beeping "Flying Red Horse" signature ("Da da dut da da dut da da doot doot doot doot doot...") used at the beginning of local newscasts sponsored by Socony-Vacuum Oil, under the "Mobilgas News Service" banner, and not all stations broadcasting under this sponsorship bothered to use it. Music of any kind at the start of a newscast was all but nonexistant -- the only broadcaster of note to use it was commentator Fulton Lewis Jr., who used an organ solo to open and close his broadcasts -- but this music was intended as a timing pad for drop-in local commercials.

Intros were very simple == there was no pompous "here now the news" foolishness. You'd hear something delivered in a simple, conversational tone: "Good evening, this is Lyle Van with your WEAF 6:30pm report, presented by Planters, makers of Hi-Hat Peanut Oil. Tonight the Allied offensive in Belgium made signficant gains..."

A lot of people confuse radio news with newsreel narration. Although many radio news broadcasters had moonlighting jobs with newsreel companies, they used different styles. Lowell Thomas on the air was not the same as Lowell Thomas narrating Movietone News. The only exception was Westbrook van Voorhis on "The March of Time," but that program wasn't a newscast, it was an audio version of the film series of the same name, presented deliberately in the same manner.

Few modern-day screenwriters or directors are going to know anything about any of this. That's why they need to be using technical consultants who do.

 

[BlueTrain]

I do remember a few voices, though. One was the voice of the narrator in a few Walt Disney movies. It was a pleasant and interesting voice and the narration was always well-done. Rex Allen was another person who narrated for Walt Disney but there was an earlier person who sounded different. Rex Allen as a Western or rural accent. I also recall from a recording of a Carneige Hall concert around 1939 or 1940 in which the band was introduced by someone with what I took to be a New York accent. I think the band was Glen Miller's.