Verbal anachronisms in period movies

[LizzieMaine]

I read an interesting essay in our local alternative weekly which included a brief discussion of the word "*******," which nowadays is used in an almost jocular, teasing way -- "you old *******, you." But in the Era, calling someone a ******* was one of the most vicious insults you could throw -- an illegitimate person was, in "respectable" society, as well as in certain ethnic groups, essentially a non-person, and the general attitude in those classes was generally to blame a person for the circumstances of their birth. If you were illegitimate -- a ******* -- in society's eyes, you carried that stain to your grave. Calling someone a ******* in certain circles could -- and sometimes did -- get you killed.

 

[BlueTrain]

Sometimes, if you pay attention and listen closely, you might hear an expression that you never thought was in use before you were born. This doesn't involve cursing, however. Anyway, in one movie serial from 1943 or 1944, one character says to another, "How was your weekend?" Somehow, I never thought the concept of the weekend went that far back. My father worked Saturdays his whole life. He never had a weekend, just Sunday. The same serial had another character, in referring to the electric lights in a cabin, use the expression "modern conveniences."

On the flip side, however, sometimes movie makers go to great lengths to get something like the cars--I mean the automobiles--period correct, sometimes fantastically so. So much so, in fact, that movies made during the period in which the latter movie is set, if you follow me, seem to basically ignore the cars. In other words, the producers in making a movie set sometime in the past, but after about 1930, almost overemphasize things that would have been taken for granted at the time.

One thing filmmakers seem to have more trouble with than anything else is hair. It seems to be especially difficult to get a period hairstyle, both men's and women's, correct. But filming in color pretty much ruins the period look anyway.

 

[BlueTrain]

I thought I might add something here about cussing and cursing. I did not grow up hearing a lot of bad language. My father, for instance, almost never used a bad word, although hitting his thumb with a hammer usually did the trick. When I went in the army, I was surprised, if not exactly shocked, at the language. Some used it a lot more than others and sometimes it could be hilarious to hear but I never really got used to it and could never bring myself to use it myself. These days I actually quite shocked to hear bad language but I pick my company carefully. And as I have mentioned in other places, when people start cussing, some stop listening, and that's no way to get your point across.

There was a TV screening some years back of the motion picture "Saving Private Ryan" for a small audience of WWII veterans. One mentioned that he didn't think they cussed that much during the war. So I expect much cursing in the movies is "gratuitous" more than anything else.

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.

 

[Fading Fast]

...One thing filmmakers seem to have more trouble with than anything else is hair. It seems to be especially difficult to get a period hairstyle, both men's and women's, correct. But filming in color pretty much ruins the period look anyway.

Since most of our impressions, images from earlier decades are black and white, you are correct that it can hurt the period look to film in color. However, the better directors soften the colors (I'm sure others forum members [Lizzie for one] know all the correct technical terms and techniques they use] in a way that gives the film a period feel. The colors are less bright or crisp maybe - it's almost as if they turn the "volume" on the color down, but IMHO this helps give a made-today film of, say, the 1940s feel right. "Foyle's War" and "Manhattan" are two TV shows that get this technique right; whereas, "Mr Selfridge's" does not.

 

[BlueTrain]

Foyle's War is pretty good but I don't think they wear their hats like they did in the early 40s. Even so, it has always been difficult to be absolutely correct about everything in motion pictures. WWII war movies tended to have the Germans incorrectly dressed and wearing WWI helmets. But I can't complain.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing with color films from the Era is that they were not intended to represent reality -- they were "color designed" by the director and a consultant from the Technicolor Corporation to use color both to create mood and to display the capabilities of the color process to their best advantage. Those flamboyant bright reds, blues, greens and yellows we associate with "Technicolor" had nothing to do with the way the actual world looked in the 1930s and 1940s, and everything to do with the aesthetic choices of the director and the color consultant.

Today, color is not used that way in routine filming. Some directors have used electronic filtering to produce color styling that evokes the way color films looked in the Era -- but they aren't intended to be a realistic representation of the way the period looked. The best example of this is "The Aviator," the Howard Hughes biopic of some years back, in which the early part of the story was designed to simulate 1920s two-color Technicolor, the middle part simulated full three-color Technicolor, and the final portion simulated the flat Eastmancolor of the 1960s and 70s.

The best way to see what the real world looked like in the Era is Kodachrome slides and home movies. Even that process tends to exaggerate certain colors, but it doesn't fade with time and the colors are still accurate to the process when you view them today.

As for cars, the thing that always gets me is that the cars in movies are always too clean. There was a lot more road dust in the air in the Era than there is today -- there were more dirt roads, for one thing, even in cities -- and the modern drive-thru car wash didn't become common until the 1950s. Cars in the 1940s and earlier were usually quite dirty and road-worn, and during the war, especially, were quite banged up. But you wouldn't know that from the glistening shiny Concourse d'Elegance collectors' specials that roll around on the movie screen.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ There is also the issue of what is the director trying to accomplish. For example, it makes no logical sense that Germans speaking in English to other Germans in a English/American-made WWII movie - say in their own headquarters - are speaking English with a German accent. They should either speak German and have subtitles or speak clear English with the "understanding" between the director and audience being that this is done for the audience's convenience.

I saw a movie or show once (don't remember which one) where the Germans spoke in clear, not-accented English and it doesn't work. It is much more effective - even if stupidly unrealistic and contrived - for the Germans to speak in English with a German accent. It just "feels" right. As the audience, you "get" they are the Germans. And, of course, I assume, this applies to Americans in German movies, French in American movies, etc. Or maybe, American audiences are just "trained" to expect this, so it feels wrong if we don't get it.

My belabored point is that the muted colors of shows like "Manhattan" or "Foyle's War" have nothing to do with reality, but with audiences impressions and feelings. It "feels" more period if the colors have a muted, stylized feel even though they didn't look that way back in the '40s. I don't have a problem with that, because there is no perfect solution, but sloppy verbal anachronisms or wrong clothes, cars, etc. make the work feel inauthentic and cheap.

 

[BlueTrain]

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. Nobody spoke British English, either. But one relative in the family now is from Serbia and she has the most beautiful Hollywood Russian accent, yet she speaks no Russian. So I guess, technically, it's just a Slavic accent.

In the movie Cross of Iron, if I remember correctly, no one speaks with a German accent, except for James Mason, who speaks with a proper German officer's accent, which is to say, British English. He makes it seem so easy, too.

Speech changes over the years, of course, and I don't think anyone sounds like the fellows in the Bowery Boys these days.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I always thought the use of accents in "Hogan's Heroes" was just right -- nobody did any kind of exaggerated Katzenjammer Kids accent, but there was just enough of a difference in the way the German characters spoke to give a hint of not-Englishness to their speech. The fact that several of the regular actors playing Germans actually were from Germany or Austria and had learned English as a second language helped to accomplish this.

Radio actors in the Era were taught the importance of accents -- even if those accents were stereotyped and exaggerated, it was considered important to use them in order to quickly communicate the nationality of the character without the aid of any visual cues and without filling the script with unnecessary exposition. A real German doesn't always go around saying "Ach! Himmel! Ve must kepture der Amerikaner schweinhund," and a real Frenchman doesn't go around saying "Come weez me to zee Casbah," and a real Englishman doesn't always say "By jove, old chap!" But American radio listeners came to understand that this kind of talk was a convenient bit of storytelling shorthand and accepted the unreality.

 

[BlueTrain]

I agree completely but I think there's more to it than that. I think some of it carried over from the stage and was sort of a convention regarding speech mannerisms aside from any ethnic accent. But to some extent, some of that was "real life," too, in that some people had a more formal way of speaking in everyday conversation. It was as if being in front of an audience or a camera compelled them to use a different way of speaking. It still does to some extent in public speaking.

Even in everyday speaking, I think some people will vary their speech to suit both the audience (even if it's an audience of one) or the occasion. Nothing special about that but it's something that is so well learned, you barely realize you're doing it.

As far as British English speakers, meaning the way they speak in the U.K., I have had difficulty understanding them, both from television shows and from travelling in the U.K. But I also have had trouble understand my mother-in-law's accent and her sister, too, those being old Virginia accents.

Verrückt, nicht wahr?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Re the stage -- absolutely. Comedy ethnic accents were a staple of minstrel and vaudeville shows going well back into the 19th century, and with the explosion of immigration at the turn of the 20th century they became inescapable. Sometimes the difference between a real ethnic dialect and a comedy dialect was exceedingly fine -- you could find real-life Mrs. Nussbaums, for example, in any good-sized northeastern city well into the Era, and the only real difference between them and the radio character was that Fred Allen was writing the latter's lines. It was just that slight twist of exaggeration that pushed a real-life accent into the direction of comedy.

One reason why you don't hear actual German accents much in latter day WW2 movies is that they fell out of fashion due to the wildly-exaggerated comic Germans that were all over popular culture during the war itself. You can pick up a wartime comic book and see Germany's WWII-era leader himself carrying on like so --

Or you can hear Bobby Watson flouncing around mit der zame eksent as a comedy Germany's WWII-era leader in all sorts of mid-forties movies, many of which were shown ad infinitum on television during the fifties and sixties.

Avoiding this kind of self-parody drove serious moviemakers away from simulated-German and toward a more dignfied/menacing British English way of speaking.

 

[F. J.]

I always thought the use of accents in "Hogan's Heroes" was just right -- nobody did any kind of exaggerated Katzenjammer Kids accent, but there was just enough of a difference in the way the German characters spoke to give a hint of not-Englishness to their speech. The fact that several of the regular actors playing Germans actually were from Germany or Austria and had learned English as a second language helped to accomplish this. [...]

Which is why I’ve never understood why some people make fun of the “Colonel Klink accent”: Werner Klemperer was German.

[...] For example, it makes no logical sense that Germans speaking in English to other Germans in a English/American-made WWII movie - say in their own headquarters - are speaking English with a German accent. They should either speak German and have subtitles or speak clear English with the "understanding" between the director and audience being that this is done for the audience's convenience. [...]

Hogan’s Heroes had a rare logical excuse for the accents as it was set in a prison camp, where the Germans would logically speak in accented English to the prisoners. A bonus, as LizzieMaine has pointed out, is that at least three actors were native German-speakers, so the accents were—for the most part—real. Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink) was German, and John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) were Austrian.

(If you watch the 1951 film Go for Broke! about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, you’ll recognise John Banner playing a German officer. Before you even see him, you’ll hear his distinctive voice as he is shouting orders in German.
The best part:
German officer: “What kind of troops are these, Chinese?”
Lt. Grayson: “Japanese. Didn’t Germany's WWII-era leader tell ya? Japan surrendered and they’re fighting on our side now.”)

 

[Fading Fast]

...
(If you watch the 1951 film Go for Broke! about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, you’ll recognise John Banner playing a German officer. Before you even see him, you’ll hear his distinctive voice as he is shouting orders in German.
The best part:
German officer: “What kind of troops are these, Chinese?”
Lt. Grayson: “Japanese. Didn’t Germany's WWII-era leader tell ya? Japan surrendered and they’re fighting on our side now.”)

Banner also plays a German soldier in "36 Hours -" a pretty decent movie, with a neat premise, that gets almost no film-buff talk - in a role that feels similar to Shultz (when he played Shultz a bit more seriously).

 

[EngProf]

Banner also plays a German soldier in "36 Hours -" a pretty decent movie, with a neat premise, that gets almost no film-buff talk - in a role that feels similar to Shultz (when he played Shultz a bit more seriously).

An irony is that John Banner was actually a sergeant in the *US Army* during WWII. He supposedly was on a recruiting poster but I have not been able to find an example of that.

 

[F. J.]

An irony is that John Banner was actually a sergeant in the *US Army* during WWII. He supposedly was on a recruiting poster but I have not been able to find an example of that.

Would you believe I found it on Wikipedia? It’s linked at the bottom of Banner’s page:

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

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-Germany's WWII-era leaderships affect the skinhead look, and we now project that back on the geniuine Germany's WWII-era leaderships of the '40s.

 

[EngProf]

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.

 

[2jakes]

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.

I’ve heard the term “vamoose” used by cowboys to mean to “depart" or “leave”.

It’s believed to derive from Spanish “vamos” (let’s go) used by vaqueros &
loosely adopted by English speaking cowpokes.

 

[SurfGent]

• Oh, please, monsieur. It is a little game we play. They put it on the bill, I tear up the bill. It is very convenient.

Casablanca

 

[KayEn78]

I saw the film 36 Hours with James Garner awhile back. Thought it was a fascinating plot. I'll have to dig that one out and watch it again soon.

I did see the 1979 made-for-TV movie, All Quiet on the Western Front (with Richard Thomas) and thought it was odd that the Germans spoke perfect, fluent English without the hint of a German accent even.

I enjoyed The Longest Day from 1962. Seeing all sides of it and hearing each speak their own language made it more believable.