Say it again Sam

In Roger Ebert’s new book on the movies he says that he misses the great dialogue of past films and finds today’s scripts flat and dull. I was reminded of that recently while watching “Love me tonight” a 1932 musical comedy. Someone gets ill and the butler says to the flirtatious ingénue (played by Myrna Loy), “Could you go for a doctor?” and she replys, ‘Sure, show him right in.”

That’s witty, a commodity in rare supply in Hollywood today. After all, what is a Smurf, or Shrek or a Transformer likely to say that’s memorable. For that you need social observation as practiced by Billy Wilder. In “Lost Weekend” the alcoholic Ray Milland is in a bar begging for a drink and the bartender says, “One is too many and a thousand aren’t enough”. Even in a war movie like “Desperate Journey” you get a line like Ronald Reagan’s answer to a Nazi who says, “What’s your nationality?” and Reagen replys, “Half American, half New Jersey”.

Some of the problem comes from the botched remakes so popular now. The new “Arthur” was such a dud I walked out in the middle. In the original, Dudley Moore says to his manservant: “I’m going to take a bath” and the bored servant says, without looking up from his newspaper, “I’ll alert the media”.

Comedy is hard, I’ll admit, but I do like a scene from “The Doctors” where one doctor says, “My patient has just had a stroke, he slurs his words and nothing he says makes any sense”. And another doctor says, “Well, he can always move to Texas”.

The script that is the mother lode, of course, is “Casablanca”. “We’ll always have Paris”, “I’m shocked, shocked”, “Round up the usual suspects” and many others.

I met a young man in London who told me that there were no good scripts anymore and “Chinatown” was the last decent one. I told him there were always two he could go back to: “All about Eve” and “Double Indemnity”. His answer was, “never heard of them”

We have it all today, 3D, Imax, every special effect known to the computer nerds. Yes, the movies speak but, unfortunately, say nothing.