I just watched the movie “Guys and Dolls” for the first time. Two questions:
Some of the characters often didn’t use contractions, when it would be normal to use them. Especially Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) and some of his friends. But none of this had any consistency. Sometimes a character would use a contraction and then not use one in the same sentence. This all resulted in dialogue that sounded very strange. The only thing I could think of was that the original book was written that way.
Why on earth didn’t they get someone to dub Marlon Brando’s songs. The guy might have been a great actor, and he was otherwise excellent in this role, but he was rarely singing in tune. It was embarrassing to listen to.
I am thinking that you do not read Mister Damon Runyon, or at any rate not much, in which case it is high time that you burned leather to a purveyor of tomes and mended this deficiency. He is a scribe who has a prose style which I will not say is unique, but it will do until a unique prose style is coming along, and there is no stage show that can fully do it justice, although stage shows do offer certain compensations such as dames who show off their shape or screechers whose high notes are apt to cause bats to fly in circles. The characters in his stories, much as in the stage show whereof you speak, are continually finding themselves caught up in the oddest of circumstances, and if they do not cause you to grin more than somewhat then I suggest you may consider booking yourself in with a phrenologist.
This is undoubtedly the case. Perhaps Marlon is thinking that he can sing, at that, and there is no-one with the moxie to be gainsaying him, as I understand that he is a tricksy customer when gainsaid and may leave them in the lurch with forty thousand feet of celluloid in the can and no film to show for it.
My take on your second question that as a method actor Brando embraced authenticity. Sky Masterson would not likely speak like Brando and suddenly inexplicably sing like (whoever was the male equivalent of Marni Nixon) and so Brando either refused or never was asked to have Sky’s songs dubbed.
I like the choice, and don’t find Brando’s singing painful. In musicals where the lead’s singing voice is dubbed it typically yanks me out of the story.
I’m with gwendee. Sky Masterson is going to sing like Sky Marsterson. Guys and Dolls is one of the few musicals I like. In part because it didn’t seem as polished-to-a-fine -sheen as some others. I think he did a good job. Just not as polished as, well someone who was not a gangster.
The last stage production I saw of Guys and Dolls starred Maurice Hines (Gregory Hines’) brother, and had a mixed-ethnicity cast. In this particular production, they eliminated that speech pattern, and the cast spoke more naturally, to fit their individual ethnicities. It was a really well-done production, but kind of weird to hear them talking like regular people!
I have always thought that the reason Runyan had his characters talking that way is because they were trying to emulate how they think that high-class people talk.
As to the second question…I love that Sky Masterson isn’t the best singer…I actually think that Sinatra comes right out of his character in most of his movies. The characters he plays tend to be nothing like his real persona, so you go from, for example, him being Nathan Detroit, to suddenly him on stage being Sinatra, and then him being Nathan Detroit again, in one 5-mintue stretch of film. Very disorienting. If Sky suddenly started singing like an angel, I don’t think it would fit the character very well.
So I am looking at the answer that Malacandra is giving to this question, and there is no doubt that it is, at that, a most excellent answer and one that commands a good deal of respect around these parts. It is as clear as winter in Vermont that Malacandra is certainly knowing his Damon Runyon stories and, I am thinking, knows them so well that he can write things in just the way that Mr. Runyon will most likely write them, although this is strictly a matter of personal opinion because Mr. Runyon is not here to express much of a verdict the one way or the other on account of he is dead these many long years. However, I am noticing that in his otherwise very good answer, which I like very much and do not disrespect in any way, Malacandra is including what the smart guys call a verb in what they call the past tense, this being the sort of thing that smart guys often talk about although personally I feel they are wasting a lot of time talking about such things when they can be out talking to dolls and going to the track and in general having more of a good time than they often seem to have. And this is strictly not allowed, for Mr. Runyon does many things in his very good stories, but as everyone from here to the Brooklyn Bridge can tell you, he is never using the verbs in the past tense.
I am thinking you are some sort of educated wise-guy who talks like a person with a gun in his pocket who knows the other guy only has a knife (and not a sharp one at that :eek: ).
You can talk as much as you want because I know I am learning a lot. Let me just get my cheesecake…
…OK, that’s fine and I appreciate the manners what you show.
Wait a minute!
Youse have to sit down now, because the aquatic vessel is wobbling a lot! :
ianzin has me bang to rights, for it is indeed the case that Mister Runyon himself never uses a past participle as I use in my erstwhile post, and I do not know where to put my face. If only I spend some time at college I never commit such a fatuosity as this, although the kind of college that guys go to in Runyon stories are by no means educational institutions of the kind that teach about past participles, but are more such places as men are apt to be sent to when the great-seizer is apprehending them with their fingers in someone else’s dough or maybe applying the unfunny end of a sap to the noggin of some poor citizen. Which is not to say that they come out of such places with no more learning than they go in, for there is often many an instructor to be found there who must fill his days with some activity or go spare, and many of these know a deal of useful knowledge, which I leave to the imagination of the reader, except that it seldom involves past participles.
I am having some trouble with your most excellent example of writing, for it is a fine sentence indeed. However, and I mean this with all the respect due to a fine poster such as yourself, I believe the quotation in question in fact can be found in Mr. Ring Lardner’s “The Young Immigrants”, and anyone who claims otherwise is a dirty rat.
It seems to me, Malacandra, that while it is true that a past participle would never be found in any of Mister Runyon’s institutions of higher learning, I must respectfully disagree that his colleges are only such institutions as you describe. To state but two examples of which I have personal knowledge, I consider the time that I spend in such of his colleges as horse race tracks and crap games to consist of a most valuable education indeed. As you will agree for sure, it is undoubtedly part of any guy’s education to know how to read a morning line or to fade a shooter, especially when you also know how to arrange things such that the shooter is playing with your dice. But it remains true that while these places of learning provide far more pleasurable educations than you describe, they are similar to yours on account of lacking such subjects as past participles.
I took part in the last thread too, but I don’t think I mentioned this there: Brando’s a flippin’ Pavarotti compared to his co-star! Jean Simmons’s horrific butchery of “I’ll Know” always makes me cringe, it’s just awful, weak and offpitch the whole time.
(Although she does better in “If I Were a Bell,” I must admit.)
I know that this word, to which I am applying the big ‘bold’ here such as it leaps out of the page and will smack a guy between the eyes, is such a word as some smart guys would call ‘past tense’ but other smart guys would call ‘passive voice’, and personally I am not too keen on the splitting of hairs like this for it can take up much of a slice of the day, not that I or many other citizens around here are getting a lot of business done during the daylight hours so much as resting up from the sinning of the night before so as to be ready for a little more sinning later on. Be this as it may, I would suggest with respect to Spoons that he can be writing it this way, and then there is no argument and all concerned can lay off the disputation, which I am always finding most disagreeable: “It seems to me, Malacandra, that while it is true that no one is ever finding a past participle in any of Mister Runyon’s institutions…”
[Runyonese /off] Wouldn’t it be fun if we were all to post in Runyonese for a while? Or maybe for all posts in one day? Of course it would look weird to anyone who didn’t know what we were doing or why. But that’s probably just another good reason to do it.
There is much in what Spoons says here, and I am as certain as I am that there go six bits and a quarter to one honest simoleon that there will be much agreement with all that is stated above by such respected thinkers as Harry the Horse, Spanish John and The Brain to name but three. However, in Mister Runyon’s own writings, when it is said of a joe that he is “at college” it is generally to be understood that the institution where he spends a little of his time, say six months to twenty-four without the option, is one where the student is guaranteed three hots and a cot, but where slipping over the wall is strongly discouraged, especially by hard-faced guys who are apt to offer such discouragement by way of nightsticks, John Roscoes, and the promise of a special room all to the individual’s own self where he can hammer on the door to his heart’s content. Which is not to deny that the student will find much opportunity both for practical lessons and for philosophising, especially about the error of his ways, or at any rate such errors as lead him to getting caught; but seldom, as is already alluded, to parts of speech or the forms of verbs.
I am finding that you are correct and I most certainly deserve to :smack: myself. But being as I am soon heading for the track, where as you know, I conduct my affairs; and the mark that such a smack leaves on my forehead undoubtedly shows the chumps there that I am somewhat clumsy and therefore unworthy of holding their money while the horses run, I am not smacking myself at this time. Still, I am thanking you for your suggestion, ianzin, and I plan to work at improving my Runyonese.
I am thinking this is another most excellent suggestion.
My bad.