The Next Voice You Hear ....

Impressionists were staples of early television variety shows. Stand-up comics almost all began doing impressions of movie stars as part of their routines, repeated so often in night clubs, the Catskills, or on The Ed Sullivan show that the patter became kitchy signatures: Bogart ("Play it again, Sam") and Cagney ("You dirty rat...") and Gable ("Listen, Scarlett...") and Bette Davis ("Petah, Petah..."). Some, like Rich Little and Frank Gorshin, developed the skill into a near art form.
Today, it is nearly a lost art. The few remaining impressionists rely on politicians as in SNL skits or sports figures (Frank Calliendo has made a career of doing John Madden). Some of the best comic performances on SNL were those of Dana Carvey (Bush 42), Daryl Hammond (Bill Clinton and Al Gore), Will Ferrell (Bush 43), Tina Fey (Sarah Palin). But there are few modern impressionists who do vocal caricatures of contemporary actors.

The fact is that, with the notable exception of Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, contemporary actors don’t have distinctive memorable voices. Can anyone get a laugh imitating the the voice of Meryl Streep or Nicole Kidman or Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston? Is there anything about their voices that captures their personas?

Despite the popularity of the horror genre, has any actor in any horror flick of the past thirty years been more memorable than the old timers, Bela Lugosi ("Dracula") or Boris Karloff ("The Mummy")? As funny as Robin Williams can be, is his voice as distinctive or funnier than Groucho’s or Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy? Angelina Jolie has a sexy face and figure, but can you identify her voice as easily as you could Marilyn Monroe’s, whose breathy tones say it all in a rapid heartbeat.

Think about the voice of James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Katherine Hepburn or Henry Fonda. Some of today’s movie stars have the charisma to stop traffic, but once they speak, who cares? 

In the early days when movies began to talk and voice recording technology was primitive, many silent film stars flopped because they had voices that scared the moguls. Some were "too foreign," other voices didn’t match faces.

John Gilbert, a romantic lead in silents, had a decent speaking voice face to face, but rumors spread that in sound tests his voice was laughably high pitched. He panicked, adopted a stilted, overly trained diction that led to ridicule, fatal for a screen lover and his career swooned. In a few years he became an unemployed alcoholic and died.

Others were luckier. Gary Cooper made the transition by emphasizing his Wyoming bred western twang (though he was educated partly in England). MGM was so terrified that Greta Garbo’s thick Swedish accent would doom their meal ticket that they delayed her first talkie for years. After crash diction classes made her sound legible, they put her in Eugene O’Neill’s "Anna Christie," about a prostitute who returns home to her Swedish father, which made her accent appropriate.

Her opening line: "Giff me a viskey, ginger ale on da side, and don’ be stingy, baby," became an instant classic. Breathing relieved sighs, Louis B. Meyer and Irving Thalberg trumpeted their marketing: "Garbo talks." Garbo’s most famous contralto tag line, "I vant to be alone" was part of all stock imitations of the iconoclastic star.

Later, Marlene Dietrich’s success solidified the notion that deep voices and foreign accents could add to the sex appeal of female stars.

The best voice of the era was Ronald Colman’s. He had been an established silent star but with talkies, his mellow English voice was almost poetic. In period epics derived from literature, he spoke the classic lines as audiences heard them in their minds. "A Tale Of Two Cities" ("Its a far, far better thing I do..."), "The Prisoner Of Zenda", "Lost Horizon".

In 1942, George Stevens directed Colman, along with Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, and character actor Edgar Buchanan, a cast that may have had the most interesting voices of the decade in a comedy / drama, "Talk Of The Town".

Talking pictures compelled studio heads to scour the stage for actors who could speak and their ears perked up when they heard voices that could project to the balconies and were impervious to tinny sound systems.

In 1929, James Cagney was signed directly from a Broadway play called "Penny Arcade". Seven pictures and two years later, he shot to stardom when he really found "his voice" as "The Public Enemy," spitting his dialogue into the faces of his enemies as if they were bullets, creating an entirely new style of street-wise acting, that influenced all later tough guys, including De Niro.    

Warners found most of their gangsters on the stage: Muni, Robinson, Bogart. Spencer Tracy made a hit on Broadway in "The Last Mile" and was signed by John Ford to play another convict (with Bogart) in "Up The River" in 1930. 

These great stars were lucky for the timely advent of talkies. None of them had faces that would have made them leads in silents; their voices were their fortune.

Of course, the most famous stage actor of his day was John Barrymore. Considered the best American classical actor of the early 20^th century stage, "the Great Profile" found steady work, then stardom as a silent movie star, playing "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among many other roles.

In 1926, Warner Brothers released the experimental "Don Juan" starring Barrymore. The film included the first fully synchronized sound track. When talkies began (the next year, 1927, "The Jazz Singer" came out), Barrymore continued to thrive.

His performance in the Hecht / MacArthur / Hawks production of "Twentieth Century" is one of the first and best of the screwball genre co-starring Carole Lombard, who exhibited her brilliant comic manner in such dialogue as in "My Man Godfrey," in which she created the persona of a charming, sexy, ditzy but somehow wise woman.

Another important reason for the dominance of voices was that the other mass medium of the era was radio.

By the 1930's, radio had trained audiences to listen — writers who came from the medium were all about the dialogue, and their words told the story as much or even more than the images. They craved actors who could punch the lines, bring them to life. Actors with characteristic voices were listened to and writers loved to write for them. 

That is why Capra’s favorite collaborating writer, Robert Riskin, and the writer / director of great comedies of the 1940's, Preston Sturges, treasured actors like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Fonda, Joel McCrea, Cooper, and Stewart.

They also filled out their films with supporting players who had terrific voices: the gravel voiced Lionel Stander ("Mr. Deeds Goes To Town"), Charles Coburn "The Lady Eve"), Roscoe Karns ("It Happened One Night)", Walter Connolly ("Mr. Deeds..."), Eugene Pollard ("Mr. Smith Goes To Washington"), James Gleason ("Arsenic And Old Lace"). You may never remember their names, but their voices can’t be forgotten.

Now, who was that actor who played Ryan Reynolds’ friend in that romcom with what’s-her-name?

HEREAFTER (2010)

Clint Eastwood dedicates his considerable talents as a cinematic storyteller to a script about the possibility of life after death by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) which has (no irony intended) fatal flaws. Premised on the hackneyed notion that the departed hang around in order to assist their grieving loved ones, it presents it as a given fact, but one that it claims the sophisticated, insistently rational world wants to deny and suppress.

These are dubious assumptions, as the lengthy history of afterlife mythology, whether propagated in almost any religious faith or the entirety of movie history, testifies. As recently as last year's "The Lovely Bones" the idea has been such a well worn staple of movies that it constitutes a genre with several sub-genres (Topper, Ghost, The Sixth Sense, Ghost Town, Blithe Spirit, et. al.).

The truth is that as a matter of faith and desperate wishes, the impulse to believe in a hereafter is a universal and insistent human frailty. if an afterlife was convincingly proved, it would be a discovery far more important than finding life on other planets. Any scientist (or psychic) who could prove it would be as famous as Einstein. 

Eastwood has gained a reputation as a thoughtful filmmaker, at his best when he allows his characters and scenarios to tell a simple, moving, and fundamentally honest story. Unforgiven is his best, minimizing sentimentality. He deals well with ambiguous emotions and attitudes, especially about violence, as in A Perfect World, Mystic River, Gran Torino, and his Iwo Jima films. Now that he is 80 years old, the subject matter of this movie is not unexpected and may be forgiven.  But here, he has allowed ambiguity to yield to confusion, sentimentality to rule over coherence.  

In another movie cliché, he chooses a form which is annoyingly popular in recent years. Crash and Babel are two examples. Three stories are told, seeming at first to be disparate, taking place at distant locales, coming together or overlapping in meaningful and unsatisfyingly contrived ways.

Here, Cecile de France is a Parisian tele-journalist whose Indonesian vacation is shortened by her near death in the tsunami. In a masterful terrifying and lengthy CGI scene, we see her drown, while she sees blurry images of dead people. She returns to life but is haunted by the visions. It takes Eastwood a long time to get her on the road we know she's going to follow, the one that teaches her about the "truth" of her experience. Her producer and her publisher both think her batty and sentimental. But she is determined to write a book about it. 

She meets a "scientist," a doctor (played by Marthe Keller) whose 25 years in hospice work has convinced her that there is an afterlife. The evidence the doctor asserts as proof, that all of her patients describe similar visions which she concludes cannot be coincidental, seems unscientific and illogical, easily answerable by rudimentary knowledge of how the human brain works when deprived of oxygen and when the mind becomes aware of its impending death.

The doctor asserts that the truth she has found has been suppressed. By whom, is not clear. Of course, that is nonsense. By setting this part of the film in Europe Eastwood strives for an ironic credibility. He seems to imply that the secularized and cultured continentals  are far less believing than we naive Americans.

The ultra American actor Matt Damon is the second main character, a reluctant San Francisco psychic who really possesses the gift of " connection" with the dead. By touching the hand of his subject, he can hear the dead speak to him. The mechanics of this are not questioned. It is a gift which was presented to him as a result of illness and some medical malpractice, and he has used to make a good living by exploiting it. But it caused him grief by denying to him any connection with living women.

We see an example when he meets a sweet girl in an Italian cooking class (played by Bryce Dallas Howard as if she signed on for a rom- com, but hadn't read the last page of her role). When she discovers his gift, she insists that he do her and when her dead father begs her forgiveness for abusing her, it chills the date and we get why our guy calls the gift "a curse."

It has been suggested by other reviewers that the movie permits an alternate explanation for the afterlife explanation. Maybe Damon’s character is telepathic, reading the emotions of his grieving subject – as if that would be more “realistic.” But the plot and dialogue detail really does not permit that apologetic interpretation. It is presented in the film as fact, as shown in the climactic scenes when the third plot thread weaves together.

The third main character’s arc is the most painful story to sit through. Twin twelve year old sons of an English heroin addicted mum are separated when one dies after being taunted by street bullies while on an errand to get medicine for mummy. The surviving twin is the quiet one, who idolized his protective older ( by minutes) brother. When mum goes into rehab, boy is sent to foster parents by the social workers. The adults are so understanding and forgiving of the little shit's neuroses that you want to slap them, especially when he steals money to seek out psychics to contact his brother.

In another startling episode, the boy’s cap falls off his head preventing his entry into a subway car which is soon blown up in a London terrorist attack that really did happen. Later, Damon’s psychic reveals that the twin brother knocked the cap to save his brother.  It is another proof of that we are meant to take the notion of ghostly assistance as literal.

Contrary to the views of some reviewers that the movie avoids a religious POV, the movie gives a foggy spiritual explanation for coincidences as well as loss of loved ones.

By tying the supernatural with current events like the tsunami and terrorist attacks, Eastwood seems to be saying that there is meaning to the randomness of natural and man-made violence in our world.