I have difficulty with British accents in movies from the 30’s. All the British Hitchcock movies are only comprehended when seen with “closed captioning” subtitles to fill in the difficult words.
The smoothed over Midwestern accent, sometimes called General American.
Is the word we’re looking for “stentorian?” (named after the minor hero of the Illiad who had the voice of 50 men)
Known as the “God Voice,” it wasn’t required that one be upper-class English, or East Coast American, or even American Southern, just that the speaker thinks himself to be God
The most consistent thing I see in those clips has nothing to do with accent or pronunciation and everything to do with piss-poor audio quality. Seriously, that FDR bit and the King George and Mary bits are hard to parse because of the static and stuff.
That is one of those skits that people parody or tribute or whatever over the years, and you realize it is very clever. But then you see the real deal after about 20 years of first seeing it, and you realize it is comedy GOLD!
Even so, as a Midwesterner myself, the pronunciation various quite a bit. In Wisconsin (not WES-consin, as I’ve heard as far north as IL… there’s no E in WISCONSIN), we pronounce “bag” “baeg” not “bahg” … and it’s not a sack. I’m not talking about the way northern Yooperdialect or the Scandanavian dialects that pepper the Midwest.
Queen Elizabeth II must be one of the last people who still speak with that 1930’s accent:- Christmas message
Northeastern US educated-sounding speech used to be privileged over all others, because educated Northeasterners were our de facto ruling class, and modernity itself flowed from the urban Northeast. The center of US population itself was somewhere in Pennsylvania, and the center of literacy, electrification, autos, radios and picture houses was probably further east still.
New York and New Yorkers, especially, had near total control over the culture - high and low alike. In early radio, the Midwest or other “interior” accents, with their more pronounced r sounds, were not considered fit for big time announcers or actors. Even “coastal Southern” voices, with their soft r’s, were preferred to the harsh nasal clarity of the central states.
This began to change in the years leading up to WW2, when program formats in general began to become more informal and the sources of creative content began to scatter. By the mid 40s, places like Chicago and Los Angeles began to originate more radio programming. A newer generation of on-air talent came on, and the acceptable range of radio (and in turn, TV) speech moved west.
I don’t know if the OP is referring to these accents, but I have long wondered if sounds like #8 & #12 on this playlist on the SoundBoard website are due to an accent shift or limitations of the audio recording technology of the time.
I know the accent you are referring to, and it certainly does seem to date older films, but I like hearing it.
I also like when old movies have that sort of blaring, loud, single speaker quality. Even with all of the new technology in sound, there is still something dramatic about hearing those police sirens, that “reporter voice” and background noises from those old mono speakers. Maybe it is a throwback to the old days when I would go to drive in movies and have that box attached to my car window, or when I would see those Saturday morning movies in the theater, especially those trailers that were always 100% better than the actual films.
Ahh, those trailers…
Years ago, I recall attending a Saturday afternoon showing of nothing but trailers at an old theatre in Berkeley (can’t recall the name). It organized by was genre, with a few by director and one of just Oscar winners.
Took hours, but the time flew by… one of those cinematic experiences I’ll never forget.
IIRC, the owner of the theatre at that time (late 70’s) had pioneered inexpensive double bills of related films and did a masterful job at it. When asked about all the imitators springing up, he said that they had no idea of how to create meaningful double feature. He went on to say that he expected to open the paper someday and see a competitor offering National Velvet and Equus as a double feature - after all, they are both about horses…
Oddly enough when I think of FDR’s speaking cadences, it always sounds as if he’s simply struggling to be audible, as in "The ONLY thing we have to FEAR is FEAR ITSELF.
I think there are a few different mechanisms at work here. First, the “patrician accent” as noted. However, working class accents could also befuddle modern ears. Given the heavy Eastern metropolitan cultural bias of the era, news reporters, cabbies, and other salt-of-the-earth types, not to mention thugs and criminals, generally had East Coast working-class accents, usually New York. A lot of the comics who came into films from vaudeville, like the Three Stooges and the Marxes came from working-class immigrant neighborhoods on Manhattan Island (where their way of speaking was no doubt also influenced heavily by their immigrant, non-native speaker parents and others in their neighborhoods).
I love that style of speaking. It’s good preaching voice.
Ah, but there’s even a more interesting contrast of the three different voices Vivien Leigh uses: her everyday Blanche voice, drawling and flirtatious; her bitter voice (such as when talking about the loss of Belle Reve), lower and unaffected; and her going-around-the-bend of insanity voice, high and flute-like.
All of the Hollywood studios employed vocal coaches from the late 1920s to the late 1950s (parodied in Singin’ in the Rain), and actors were expected to take lessons and speak as taught. A good example is Marilyn Monroe. In most of her pictures of the 1950s into the early 1960s she uses an overly careful diction, which makes her vocal style easy to parody (it’s not just a breathy voice). But that wasn’t her natural speech, and in unedited takes from her uncompleted film Something’s Got to Five (1962), you can see her switch from that speaking style to her normal voice as soon as the director calls “cut”. One film in which she used a natural speaking style throughout was as a disillusioned divorcée in her last completed film, The Misfits (1961), a film that itself is directed in a modern, naturalistic style.
Ah the good old days, when everyone spoke clearly and enunciated everything.
You need to watch more reality TV. You can hear every accent in the country eventually.