Seems Filmmakers Could Care Less About Anachronisms

Mary Peate, a reader in Westlake Village, is thoroughly annoyed, she writes, by what she calls “verbal anachronisms” in movies.

An anachronism , of course, is a phrase or an artifact that appears out of its historic time frame. For example, a Toyota van would be out of place as a getaway car in a movie about Al Capone, just as a telephone would be out of place in “Gone With the Wind.”

Also, it would be anachronistic for Mr. Capone to be quoted as saying “I could care less,” a contemporary cliche that means its exact opposite--”I couldn’t care less.” (This strange usage has become so common that I saw it the other day in a New York Times headline: “Gorbachev’s Tux? Moscow Could Care Less,” over a story reporting his countrymen’s indifference to his American tour.)

Peate reports that in “The Babe,” a movie about legendary baseball player Babe Ruth (whose career spanned 1914 to 1935), two contemporary expressions were used within 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, Peate cannot recall the expressions, but it is easy to imagine them. Ruth might have complained, for example, that he couldn’t hit Nolan Ryan. (Ryan goes back a long way, but not that far.) And someone else might have pointed out that Ruth hadn’t hit in as many consecutive games as Joe DiMaggio (56 in 1941).

That should give you the idea.

Peate says “Dances With Wolves” was so full of anachronisms that she gave up watching it after 15 minutes. “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” also committed several, she says. For example, when asked a question he evidently doesn’t understand, or resents, Robin says “Excuse me?” This, Peate insists, is a contemporary substitute for “I beg your pardon,” and would not have been in the vocabulary of a man born in 1160.

I’m not sure “Excuse me?” wasn’t used in the 12th Century, and I’m not sure “I beg your pardon” was. It’s a minor infraction in any case.

More shocking is Peate’s complaint that in a television biography of the actress Thelma Todd, who died in 1935, she asks someone, in reference to sexual intercourse, “Did the earth move for you, too?”

“Did the earth move” is obviously taken from the famous scene in Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” (1943). Robert Jordan and Maria have made love in the heather, and he asks her, “Did thee feel the earth move?” (She did.)

It is possible that Todd could have anticipated Hemingway’s phrase, but not likely. However, the earth moving is such an apt metaphor for sexual ecstasy that it ought not to be limited to one time.

I have recently had a startling experience with this phenomenon. In contemporary movies, the question, “What’s that supposed to mean?” is almost inescapable. It is asked of someone who has just made a suspicious or sarcastic remark, such as “Where were you when the lights went out?” It seems to crop up at least once in every movie, as does its sister cliche “Are you all right?”

It seemed obvious to me that “What’s that supposed to mean?” was a contemporary cliche, like “I could care less.” Much to my surprise, however, it turned up in a 1940 movie starring Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland. Maybe such catch phrases are recycled and come around every few decades.

Peate thinks she understands the cause of this phenomenon and suggests a way of correcting it: “One can’t fault a screenwriter or director for being in his 20s or 30s and unfamiliar with the language of a particular period. But there are people who do keep track of such things, and when so many film budgets exceed $20 million, surely something can be set aside to pay someone who is interested in words and language to read over the finished screenplay before it goes into production and correct such gaffes.”

I suppose it would be possible for producers to employ such experts. While they’re at it, they might also correct lapses of grammar in lines spoken by supposedly cultivated people. Almost everyone, for example, says “for my wife and I.”

However, I’m not sure that expressions from the vernacular can’t travel from one decade to another, literarily, in either direction. It would be startling, for example, to hear a contemporary actress say “Twenty-three skidoo!” an expletive common in the 1920s, but, historically, it would be quite possible.

A reference transplanted from the present to some past era would, of course, be less likely to work. It would be impossible, for example, to have an adviser tell Abraham Lincoln that one of his generals, U. S. Grant, reminds him of Norman Schwarzkopf.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t be too hard to believe if Lincoln were to answer, “You ain’t just a-whistlin’ Dixie.”

Sounds like Old Abe.