Listen, see? Myaaaahh. - The Public Enemy (1931) Discussion

[–] Jeynne 18 years ago

There's an easy solution for that. Don't watch them anymore.

reply

[–] dwaynemk23 18 years ago

Just watched the movie yesterday.
I guess I ask the same question,
Is that was really the way people talked back then, see?
And, quite fast. Myaaahhh.

reply

[–] thefiend99 18 years ago

So there are actually people who have NEVER heard anyone talk fast? WOW---you'd hate me.

"Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make!" -- Dracula (1931)

reply

[–] mlraymond 18 years ago

The fast talking is very typical of a lot of Thirties movies that involve gangsters, newspapermen and show business people. For example, Cagney plays a Broadway producer in Footlight Parade, and his energy and fast speech are identical to his gangster roles. This style became typical of Warner Brothers, where most of the classic gangster films were made, as well as many Busby Berkeley musicals. It apparently is derived from Thirties newspapermen's style of slangy, rhythmic, rapid fire talk and writing. Many of the stage and film classics were written by former newspapermen, and they created a type of gangster speech that is instantly recognizable. Twenties and Thirties slang tends to sound odd to us today, and that's part of it. Ben Hecht wrote both The Front Page and Scarface, and W.R.Burnett, another newspaperman, wrote Little Caesar. Read the original Burnett novel, published in 1929, and you'll get an even more stylized, cryptic kind of gangster lingo. This underworld talk must have at least some basis in reality, since newspapermen of the period tended to know plenty of real gangsters and would have borrowed their style when writing these kind of characters.

One aspect of the fast speech is very logical. Gangsters are always arguing, bluffing, trying to intimidate rivals, forcing people to do what they want. Interrupting, cutting off the other guy's remarks, talking fast so no one can cut you off, aggressively pushing your way through life, is all reflected in this gangland style.

One odd contrast, that has the effect of being very humorous, is police detective Flaherty's slow, deliberate, sarcastic delivery in Little Caesar. He says everything with a carefully drawn out, apparently polite manner, that actually makes it clear he's calling his gangster enemies liars. The bit where he leaves the Vettori gang's headquarters after asking about the nightclub holdup, and slowly turns in the doorway to smile at the hoodlums and say, with a sort of humorous melancholy, " Oh...by the way...I almost forgot to wish you boys a Merry Christmas...Well, ...so long." This is just classic.

And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him

reply

[–] loungelizard5000 18 years ago

Thanks mlraymond! Little Ceasar is one of my all time favorites. Interesting take.

reply

[–] wrlord2001 17 years ago

Must be a west coaster. East coast people talk (and think) faster. And the "MMmm-nnyaaaaahhh, sheee" is a poor imitation of Robinson, not Cagney.

reply

[–] emailtom 17 years ago

Not any worse than "duh duh heeeyyy duuuuuude" or "totally awesome" or this or that "rocks" or "rules" or "that's what I'm talkin about". I guess some people REALLY DO talk like that these days. Somehow the super fast talk of the thirties seems immensely more intelligent. You would think mankind would have progressed MORE in 75 years, and sounded at least a litle more intelligent.
But that's all the "education" system has been able to produce lately.

reply

[–] Jane_Doe01 17 years ago

Hah, well said, emailtom.

reply

[–] willjohn 15 years ago

How many times do you watch a sportsman being interviewed and found yourself counting the number of times he says "you know" or '" um..".

In real life people's mouths often go too fast for their memories.

reply

[–] gebegb 15 years ago

Why the fast talk? Why the sound-bite rapid-fire method of delivering lines of dialogue?

Here's why.

Quiz time: What year was the first talkie (commercial success, not experimental)?
It was 1927 - The Jazz Singer.

The year of The Public Enemy was 1931.

What does this imply?

It means that dialogue, and accents, for film purposes, was in its infancy. Talkies were five (5) years old.
Five years isn't enough time for the film industry to establish standards and establish styles regarding how Good Guys and Bad Guys (and Good Girls and Bad Girls) speak in real life.
So, like silent films, the dialogue is very over-the-top, very stereotyped, very one-dimensional.

Let me make an analogy. Do you agree with it?

How good a driver were you between ages of 16 to 20 (a range of five years)?
Pretty bad, right?
How good a driver were you between the ages of 36 to 40 (still a range of five, but 20 years later)?
Significantly improved, right?

Similarly for the film industry, the first few years of 3-D, of CGI (computer generated images), and any other technique of film.

The films of 20+ years later (namely, 1951 to 1955, to keep in mind a five-year range) never used that kind of rapid-fire delivery, or monosyllabic monotone, for its villains and crime bosses.
All the dialogue was upgraded to normal speech for crime films of the 1950s.

The level of sophistication for dialogue was great in the 1950s.
The level of sophistication for dialogue in the 1920s and early 1930s was poor.

Remember, for films of 1927 and before, they used still shots of placards to show (written) dialogue.
The technological jump to recorded sound implied that screenwriters ("photoplay" writers, actually, was the technical term back then) had to write things which has no model to tap into for style. Without a style to copy, they had to think up, or guess, what "worked" on screen. And what worked was short copy, with little or few pauses.
In other words, they didn't know any better. They were making it up as they go along. They didn't yet have 1,000 films completed to absorb what works, dialogue-wise, and what doesn't work.

That is why 1931's "Little Caesar" dialogue is so unbelievably corny, stilted and unrealistic. -- They were inventing a new style. And they often got it wrong!

It would get better in the 1940s. And better still in the 1950s.
Like anything else. - Practice makes perfect.

_________
"The Shadow knows." -- Lamont Cranston

reply