Before we were townies, we were snobs.
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Before Hollywood regarded “Bostonian” as a synonym for “townie” – see Mystic River (2003), The Departed (2006), Gone Baby Gone (2007), and so on – the word stood for a specific type of New Englander: classy, educated, and loaded. I suspect that the change in the meaning of Bostonian began when grit-and-realism-courting New Hollywood started ousting Old Hollywood in 1967, which saw the release of the Hollywood-endingless movies Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. New Hollywood was here, and soon it was out with the swells and in with The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).
Having been raised just outside Boston by a WASP – a single working mother who had inherited not a mint but impeccable manners and a lot of antiques – I have an abiding interest in the way Old Hollywood’s Bostonians were so often characterized by their risible pride of lineage and their buffoonish sense of importance. I’ve tracked down four Old Hollywood vehicles for the Old Boston archetype; here are my thoughts on these films and their essential, well, Bostonness.
Now, Voyager (1942)
This elegant if psychologically overcooked black-and-white drama from Irving Rapper is probably most famous for the way Paul Henreid’s character lights two cigarettes in his mouth at once so he can give one to his lady: Bette Davis’s Charlotte Vale, whose quavery mental health is the movie’s focus. Charlotte first appears in the Vales’ pillared Marlborough Street manse wearing utilitarian eyeglasses, a librarian’s bun, and what seem to be Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Before too long, Charlotte manages to shed her dowdiness and inhibitions despite a lifetime’s worth of emotional cruelty ladled out by her Brahmin mom, Mrs. Henry Vale, who is the quintessence of Boston upper-crustiness, and perhaps cinema’s first Masshole.
Mrs. Vale is a hideous snob, consumed by the notion that her daughter should behave only in ways that are, as Charlotte puts it, “suitable for a Vale of Boston.” Mrs. Vale speaks like the Queen of England, which isn’t preposterous as she’s played by an Englishwoman: Gladys Cooper. Mrs. Vale’s English accent doesn’t seem wholly out of place: not only does the Boston accent largely belong to the working class, but this was the period when actors cultivated the transatlantic accent in order to sound refined, or at least unlike nails on a chalkboard, to a casting director. Like her mother, Charlotte drops her share of rs – she disparagingly calls her scrapbook “the intimate jouhnal of Miss Chahlotte Vale: spinstah” – but Davis could have done a convincing Boston accent if she’d wanted to: she was a Lowell, Massachusetts, girl, not to mention a damned good actress.
No scenes from Now, Voyager were ultimately shot in Boston, to Davis’s rumored disappointment. Viewers get occasional glimpses out the Vales’ open front door at what looks like a set impersonating Marlborough Street. At one point, a car chugs up the Vales’ recessed driveway – a feature that no one will spot while zooming up Marlborough Street anytime soon. Notes Charlotte’s future psychiatrist, played by Claude Rains, during a visit to the Vale house, “You know, there’s nothing like these old Boston homes anywhere.… You see them standing … like bastions. Firm, proud, resisting the new … hugging their pride.” That pretty much sums up Charlotte’s mom.
Mystery Street (1950)
My people continue to behave badly in this sturdy little black-and-white noir-slash-police procedural, in which a young Boston woman is murdered on Cape Cod.
Mystery Street was groundbreaking for the way it showed how forensics can root out bad guys, but it was ahead of its time in another way as well. Playing Lieutenant Peter Moralas, the Massachusetts cop out for justice, is Mexico City–born Ricardo Montalban, whose accent here was a preview of the one Desi Arnaz would introduce to television viewers the following year, when I Love Lucy premiered. (Of course, a quarter-century later, Montalban’s accent would keep him employed as Mr. Roarke on TV’s Fantasy Island.)
Hiring Montalban to play Lieutenant Moralas wasn’t an early example of colorblind casting: The character’s ethnicity is baked into the story. At one point, a blue blood named James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan) says to Moralas, “There was a Harkley around these parts long before there was a USA – you can ask anybody. But from the way you talk, you haven’t been around here long.” Moralas can’t argue with that. But later, after Harkley says, “You know, I’m used to respect. People looking up to me,” Moralas has a rejoinder: “So am I, Mr. Harkley. And my family hasn’t been in this country for even one hundred years.”
Mystery Street was a B movie, but it had a future A-list director, John Sturges, and it had grade-A cinematography, courtesy of camera legend John Alton. I watched the movie on DVD, and in a special feature, the American Film Institute’s Patricia King Hanson conjectures that Mystery Street was the first Hollywood picture to be shot entirely in Boston (and thereabouts). What’s certain is that that’s the real Cape Cod you see, the real Charlestown, the real Harvard Square, and, of course, the real Harvard University; where else were those forensic breakthroughs supposed to happen?
Here Comes the Groom (1951)
This serviceably entertaining black-and-white Frank Capra rom-com with scattered-songs – it probably falls short of the legal definition of a musical – finds Bing Crosby playing newspaperman Pete Garvey, who works for Boston’s Morning Express. As the movie begins, Pete is on assignment in Paris, where he’s writing about war orphans. He decides to adopt a pair. The trio fly to “Boston” (those look like sets to me), where an officious gent informs Pete that his “permit” is good for only five days, and “if you’re not married within that time, the children will have to go back to France.”
Pete is unfazed: when he went to France, he left behind Gloucester girl Emmadel Jones (Jane Wyman), who was hell-bent on marrying him. But it turns out that Emmadel tired of waiting for Pete and hooked Wilbur Stanley (Franchot Tone), head of the Stanley Investment Company. As the Morning Express puts it, “Fisherman’s Daughter to Marry $40,000,000” – in other words, Boston’s finest.
Here Comes the Groom, like Now, Voyager and Mystery Street, is about social class, but anyone expecting a stick-it-to-the-elites picture, as I was – this is a comedy, after all – will be surprised: The Stanleys of Boston may have sterling pedigrees and dress sense, but they haven’t much objection to Wilbur’s commoner fiancée; it’s her parents who want to scuttle the nuptials. As I was mulling over the film’s reluctance to take the rich down a peg, as occurs in Now, Voyager and Mystery Street, I remembered that Capra was a conservative Republican who probably didn’t want to stick it to the man. He probably liked the man just fine.
Here Comes the Groom lavishes as much attention on the Joneses of Gloucester as on the Stanleys of Boston, and it’s time for me to bestow the Best Boston Accent prize on an Old Hollywood player. While Emmadel’s fisherman father’s accent is what I’ll call transatlantic Irish (he’s played by James Barton, an American vaudevillian), Emmadel’s mother not only drops her rs throughout the film but, in an exquisite touch, buries the double ts in “rattlesnakes” when she says to her daughter, whom she’s trying to dissuade from marrying Wilbur, “Watch yahself, Emmy: rah-ul-snakes can look pretty hahmless sometimes.” If you catch a whiff of New York in the character’s delivery, that’s perfectly reasonable: the actress, Connie Gilchrist, was born in Brooklyn.
Incidentally, the only Boston accent I’ve come across in an Old Hollywood production that’s better than Gilchrist’s is the one belonging to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Unfortunately, Boston-born Jack Haley is ineligible for my Best Boston Accent prize because the Tin Man’s accent seems to have been not something Haley cultivated for the role but the actor’s own obstinate way of speaking.
If a Man Answers (1962)
Directed by Henry Levin as a vehicle for real-life then-marrieds Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, If a Man Answers is one of those daffy, innuendo-laden mid-century Eastman Color spectacles of wonderfully eye-splitting brightness – picture the Doris Day movies of the era. The film begins with Chantal Stacy (Dee) explaining in voice-over that she’s the product of a “soufflé and beans romance”: Mom is from France and Dad is from Boston. The movie proceeds with the idea that this (i.e., sexpot mom meets straight-arrow dad) explains everything about Chantal’s existential crisis: Which one is she supposed to be?
Chantal attends (the fictional) Boston Junior College and dates a lot of boys; as her Boston Globe–reading dad, played by John Lund, tells her, “I haven’t had a decent night’s rest since you turned fifteen,” meaning that he would like her to hurry up and pick a guy and get hitched. Hey, it’s not as if she’s going to be doing anything with that Boston Junior College degree.
About twelve minutes into If a Man Answers, Dad moves the family to New York City for work – he’s an antiques dealer – and while that’s the end of any hope that the movie camera will capture mid-century Boston, it’s not the end of the film’s Bostonness. At one point, Lund, who seems to be signaling his feelings about his character – disgust, I think it is – throughout the movie, is holding a magnifying glass and inspecting a chair, presumably one of his antiques, in his New York living room. Antiques are everywhere in the Stacy apartment, and I get it – I’m not even an antiques dealer and I have, through inheritance, enough end tables to seal off the Ted Williams Tunnel – but it amuses me that people assume that in our downtime, we Bostonians turn to our old furniture.
Like her husband, Chantal’s French-born mother, played by Micheline Presle, doesn’t let the Boston stuff die when the Stacys get to New York; as she tells her daughter, “I always thought your combination perfect, especially for an American: French in the boudoir, Boston in the parlor. But for heaven’s sake, chouchou: never confuse them.” Well, at least Mr. Stacy is good with furniture.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
