Film Speech

We tend to prefer “down to earth” or “plain” speech here in the US, rather than anything that sounds privileged, haughty, artificial — or “foreign.” That is why we now have a President who cannot pronounce the word “nuclear.” Children who speak like Frasier and Niles will tend to be dealt with by their peers as the Kriezel (sp?) kids dealt with F. and N.

I also think that one or two fantastic phenomena inevitably engender millions of crappy imitators. In the fifties, Marlon Brando and James Dean opened the floodgates with their naturalistic approach, and
diction, voice quality and production started mattering even less in the movies than they did before. Hey, they’re getting miked, anyway.

A lot of African American actors are notable for exceptionally beautiful speech– I was just reminded of that because I happened to switch on PBS, where Joe Morton is narrating a documentary.

Brideshead Revisited

Wooohoooo! My local PBS is re-running “Brideshead Revisited”– IMO, the best filmed version of a literary work I’ve every seen, and truly awesome in its own right. I haven’t seen it in almost twenty years, but it made a deep impression. Especially memorable were Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain, whose steely Catholic rectitude is the terror of her weak son, Sebastian; and as Charles’s father, an impossibly dry, wry Gielgud. It was, of course, my first look at the then-young Jeremy Irons and
Anthony Andrews. Andrews had the flashier part as the fatally charming, self-destructive Sebastian. Irons’s character was suppsed to be only twenty at the beginning– how could he have such a deep, gorgeous, bone-vibrating voice? Jeremy Irons’s narration was absolutely mesmerizing — the way he said “Sebastian” was almost shockingly sensuous.

Although I haven’t seen it in so long, little bits and pieces from Irons’s narration stayed with me over the years and echoed in my ears– when he lamented the younger sister, Cordelia — “all that burning love” “grown up plain”– and most terribly, when he finally returns to Brideshead during the war– “Vanity of vanities, quomodo sedet sola civitas”– Biblical quotations that came sharply back to me in Irons’s mournful, world-weary voice after Sepember 11.

It was also my first acquaintance with the wonderful Simon Jones, who is best known and loved as the video incarnation of the bathrobe-clad galactic voyager, Arthur Dent.