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Look, Don't Listen
By HENRY P. RALEIGH
ART TIMES January, 2005
IN
1998 the
American Film Institute elected "The Philadelphia Story" to its list
of the 100 Best American Films. The
Film was first released by MGM in 1940 and proved a popular and critical success. James Stewart won his only Academy Award
for best actor for his role in the film and the writer, Donald Ogden Stewart,
an Oscar for best adaptation of the Broadway play by Philip Barry. Katherine
Hepburn, who had starred in the New York production and had once been labeled
as 'box-office poison', made her film comeback in "Philadelphia Story".
Directed by George Cukor the acting performances of Hepburn, Stewart and Cary
Grant are cited as, "…just perfect" in Halliway's Film Guide,
four-star ratings in all other film references.
Why
lay out this summary here of a film sixty-four years old? Well, one because
it is considered an icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood, as are its stars, and,
two because I ran across a DVD of "Philadelphia Story" in my local
library and could not recall having ever seen it. I learned also, that for a
community with a large proportion of retirees, the film is rarely checked out
while there are long waiting lists for "House of Sand and Fog", "Mystic
River", "Master and Commander" and other recent films transferred
to DVD's.
Ever concerned to add to my film education I plugged
in "Philadelphia Story" and to my surprise recognized the first scene
as one I was totally familiar with. The
second surprise was to discover, upon viewing the following scenes, that, indeed,
I had not seen the film save for that opening. The scene goes like this: Grant
is leaving his mansion, marriage ended, Hepburn appears at the front door, tosses
out his golf bag after him, breaking a club over her knee, Grant turns back
as if to punch her, instead places his hand over her face and pushes her back
through the door. There are no
words spoken. The rest of the film, a romantic comedy, sets a much different
pace — mainly extended scenes of smart repartee among the principals,
the inevitable happy resolution perfectly obvious. I must confess I viewed the
scenes with a growing impatience, checking occasionally to see how much of the
112 minute running time remained.
Films were like this back then — a good deal of
talking, scripted lines written by talented, literate and sophisticated writers
as Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Herman J. Mankiewicz. And gifted actors
gave these lines their individual and unique styles — Grant's urbane teasing,
Hepburn's sharp, classy wit, Stewart's country-boy drawling honesty. We don't
have such actors anymore, we probably wouldn't know how to take them if we did
— they are icons of a much different time in our culture. In 1940 there were audiences that saw and admired this film
and others like it but today, while we honor their position in the history,
viewing them now can make you feel a little guilty that somehow you're not receiving
them as people once did. Not likely that viewers under the age of thirty could
sit through "Philadelphia Story" and not find it slow, archaic and
totally devoid of eye-catching special effects (as it certainly is). For even
older types it is as if we have been now conditioned to pay less attention to
what we hear (which seems to be, for the most part, concussive sound) and merely
passively and mindlessly watch. I realized why that first scene was so familiar
to me, the film itself unknown. Almost any film anthology, whether in film or
book form, paying respects to classic films and their actors, will show a clip
of this single scene although it is least representative of this romantic comedy.
You see, it displays action without words, a man about to hit a woman —
that looks promising doesn't it? — surely meets our expectations of a
good family entertainment in today's terms.
Permit me to digress a moment and refer you to a study
by Professor John McWhorter titled, Doing Our Own Thing (2003, Gotham,
Books, NYC). Professor McWhorter is a linguist teaching at the University of
California at Berkeley. He argues that our language is in decline and makes
a distinction between formal, written English and casual, spoken English, the
former diluted and replaced by the latter. A quote here may give you a sense
of his work: "Modern America…is a country where rigorously polished
language…is considered insincere — a trait only a few decades old…and
it leaves us culturally and intellectually deprived." Fascinating to me,
he sees the decline originating in the counter-culture; anti-Establishment movements
of the 1960's, clearly reflected in the 1969 film, "Easy Rider", where
a shambling, mumbling, fragmented speech became the norm.
I was relieved to know this for it explained why I often missed pieces
of dialogue in contemporary films and not because as my wife would have it —
"You're going deaf, old man." (Note: The speech in "Philadelphia
Story" is articulate, clear as a bell — after all, actors then were
trained in diction.)
So
there you have it, along with the rest of us my hearing, my willingness to hear
language has become blunted. Street talk has been my film fare for so long that
well crafted, well-spoken speech has become almost foreign. It has invaded too,
the visual aspects of film — quick cuts, fragmented scenes, rapid movement
— move away from this to the leisurely pace of older films, add in the
demand to hear and appreciate a studied and scripted dialogue and you and I
are squirming in our seats.
Professor McWhorter makes the same case for music but
apropos of his thesis, "Music isn't my bag, man.” I might suggest,
however, that a similar evolution of form could possibly be applied to painting
and sculpture should anyone have a mind to. The cutting-edge art from the 60's
on has offered less and less reason to linger visually with its forms, a quick
glance to get the punch line is all that is necessary, then on to the next artifice.
I guess there's nothing surprising about the SAT question that is noted in Doing
Our Own Thing. It goes like this:
The
traditional process of producing an oil painting requires so many steps that
is seems __________________ to artists who prefer to work quickly.
The
correct choice from the number of words given is, of course, "Interminable".
