Post by marianne48 on Aug 5, 2019 0:59:17 GMT
Watching this again, after many years of not seeing it, on TCM last week, I was both entertained and irritated. Entertained because of the great cast--Jack Lemmon, William Powell, Henry Fonda, and especially James Cagney, with a brief but charming appearance by Martin Milner. And irritated because
of the odd, off-kilter overdubbing of some of the dialogue. I know this was a troubled production, with John Ford being inebriated at times and Ward Bond stepping in to take his place before other directors were assigned to the project. But whose idea was it to have so much of the crew's dialogue dubbed
so awkwardly? A lot of their lines sound like Jerry Lewis in full manic mode in his comedies--the sailor who repeats "WHA HAPPENED?" during the general alarm, the other sailor who mentions watching the nurses through his binoculars and says, "We could see all of them!" in such a goofy way (the line is obviously dubbed since his mouth doesn't exactly match the words). Jack Lemmon's singing "If I Could Be With You" is funny at one point, but when it's
repeated while he's wading through an explosion of soap suds, it makes no sense. The music playing on the radio when Fonda marches up to the palm tree and rips it out of its planter was not "Stars and Stripes Forever" when this movie was shown on TV decades ago (I'm sure of this because when I was a kid in the pre-home video mid-'70s, I recorded the audio of this movie on cassette (because of my childhood crush on James Cagney, I loved listening to his tirades in this film), but a different patriotic tune, and there was no idiotic "TA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA!!" added to this sequence as Fonda climbs the steps to the tree. Can anyone explain why this was changed in later versions of this film? Is anyone else annoyed by the dubbing of the dialogue?
of the odd, off-kilter overdubbing of some of the dialogue. I know this was a troubled production, with John Ford being inebriated at times and Ward Bond stepping in to take his place before other directors were assigned to the project. But whose idea was it to have so much of the crew's dialogue dubbed
so awkwardly? A lot of their lines sound like Jerry Lewis in full manic mode in his comedies--the sailor who repeats "WHA HAPPENED?" during the general alarm, the other sailor who mentions watching the nurses through his binoculars and says, "We could see all of them!" in such a goofy way (the line is obviously dubbed since his mouth doesn't exactly match the words). Jack Lemmon's singing "If I Could Be With You" is funny at one point, but when it's
repeated while he's wading through an explosion of soap suds, it makes no sense. The music playing on the radio when Fonda marches up to the palm tree and rips it out of its planter was not "Stars and Stripes Forever" when this movie was shown on TV decades ago (I'm sure of this because when I was a kid in the pre-home video mid-'70s, I recorded the audio of this movie on cassette (because of my childhood crush on James Cagney, I loved listening to his tirades in this film), but a different patriotic tune, and there was no idiotic "TA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA!!" added to this sequence as Fonda climbs the steps to the tree. Can anyone explain why this was changed in later versions of this film? Is anyone else annoyed by the dubbing of the dialogue?
