"What watch?" "Ten watch", "Such watch!" OR "Such much". Opinions?

The full line is:

"What watch?" (What time is it?)

"Ten watch" (Ten o'clock)

"Such much?" (So late?)

It's less a matter of "uber realism" than what, at the time, were current events.

It's both ironic and sad that, with so many more media and sources of information at their fingertips today than were available 70+ years ago, Americans are more poorly-informed than they were when all they had were newspapers, weekly magazines and radio.

But especially in those early days of the war, those on the home front devoured news from where their loved ones were fighting, and of those in power here and abroad who were making decisions affecting them and knew, to borrow a phrase, who was who. And for screenwriters like the Epstein brothers and Koch, crafting words that would be heard by millions of these well-informed citizens, the responsibility for accuracy and credibility where it concerned real-world matters was even more acute.

Dismissing such a detail as simply not "going for uber-realism" would be rather like writing for a current-day movie a passing reference to, say, "Hillary Clinton's keynote address to the Republican convention." To even the roughly half of Americans who don't vote or know who their reps in Congress are, such an error would stick out as a glaring faux pas.

I've written several times in other threads about hearing, with my own ears, Julius Epstein state that the name Lorre speaks is "Weygand," so I won't repeat the story and circumstances here.

Instead, I'll furnish a link to the script of the 1940 play, "Everybody Comes To Rick's," upon which the film is based:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Everybody_Comes_to_Rick%27s.pdf

On page 9 of that script can be seen Ugarte's line, "Letters of transit signed by Marshall Weygand." The screenwriters had good reason to change it to "General" to reflect his position at the time of filming, Delegate General To the North African Colonies, but it's hard to imagine one for changing it to "de Gaulle."

It may sound silly to pick nits about a purely fictional device like "letters of transit," but one of the ways in which such devices are lent dramatic credibility is connecting them to that which isn't fictional.



Poe! You are...avenged!

yep, a good joke.



🎄Season's Greetings!🎄

Vielen Dank. Since, as I recall, this exchange was in English in the movie, I take it that you've provided the German by back-formation. I assume that you mean to say that "such much" would be a comic, though incorrect English translation from a likely, and accurate, German response. That would do much to dissuade me from what my ears always tell me when I hear it: "Such watch?" However, is it correct German to say "So Uhr? in this context? That would yield what I hear.

As an aside, I shouldn't trust my ears so much since, for years, I always heard Ugarte saying that the letters of transit were improbably signed by General De Gaulle (others have suggested a more likely alternative as General Weygand). To your ear, do you hear "much" or "watch"? I felt that the joke was more comedically effective my way since it carries through the "watch" used in the first two lines.