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Popular Culture Review
Bostonians: Leo G. Carroll or Ronald Colman as George Apley, in the stage and
screen versions respectively, of The Late George Apley; Basil Rathbone as
Norman Cass, Sr. in The Last Hurrah; Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle
Vale in Now Voyager; Ray Milland as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story; and
James Mason as Edward J. Concannon in The Verdict.
There are of course historical, social, and cultural explanations, but when
one considers the “Hollywood” version of the Proper Bostonian, the idea of the
Proper Bostonian and its attendant issues become troublesome in a society that
supposedly rejects elitism. So the Proper Bostonian is easily mocked, and the
character serves as either villain or clown but is almost never “normal.”
Let us return to Now, Voyager. The Charlotte Vale of Bette Davis versus
Gladys Cooper as her mother in this 1942 film is most interesting. (Worth
noting, as well, is the fact that Davis was bom in Massachusetts, spent a great
deal of time in Maine, and was quite proud of her Yankee roots.) Viewers of the
film today are probably influenced by Pauline Kael’s ironic view of it as “a
campy teaijerker.” Kael highlights a sequence in the film that is pertinent here:
Charlotte “dismisses priggish Elliot Livingston” with the words, “Let’s not
linger over it.” This immediately demonstrates Charlotte’s reasserted sang-froid,
a characteristic crucial to her class.
To give Livingston his due (and John Loder’s performance), he does take
Charlotte to a concert at which Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 6 (the
Pathetique),” is performed—although it is no doubt music chosen to heighten
Charlotte’s anguish rather than Livingston’s romantic aspirations. Not to
mention the fact that she is sitting between her allegedly erstwhile lover and her
fiance. While the romance between Charlotte and Elliot is regarded by Mrs.
Vale as though it were a noble dynastic linkage, what is more significant is the
way that the Vale family relations are depicted and how they sound. They are
either “Britishized” or they just speak like typical stage actors of the period,
which means they use mid-Atlantic stage English. Of course, John Loder was
yet another English actor playing a Bostonian, and an ignoramus could be
excused for thinking that even Bette Davis was affecting a British accent.
Regarding stage English, it is something that has vanished from our playhouses:
the old-time diction of a theatre that dreaded contractions and dropped “g’s.”
Stage English insisted on the long “i” pronunciation in “neither” and “either,”
the long “e” for “been,” and the long “a” in “again.” How quaint now sounds the
critic of yesteryear, chiding performers for saying “yooman beans” rather than
“human beings.” This style of speaking now sounds so foreign that should one
use it before students they think it is a “British accent.” Indeed, in discussion of
Boston films in the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com), there is a
refrain of “why are they using British accents?”
Finally, consider the cast of The Late George Apley: George Apley, his
wife, his daughter, and both his brothers-in-law are each played by British
actors. It is interesting that the two British-born women sound American, but the
men’s accents are decidedly mid-Atlantic—of course Ronald Colman’s voice is