Word: cockneyism
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...inferiors. His delivery of the Queen Mab speech is a masterpiece of abstracted art. Teetering on madness, he spouts the words as if emerging from a lifelong nightmare. Zeffirelli, however, seems to have had better luck in casting youth than age. Pat Heywood's Nurse is a cockney caricature. And Milo O'Shea's Friar Laurence is a characterization lost somewhere in the middle distance, not deeply enough involved with the lovers nor sufficiently removed to act as a chorus of comment...
Marriage for young Victor's parents was a lifelong state of war in which the children were hostages. Father was a Yorkshire lad. Mother came from London-a "cheeky cockney girl." Temperamentally they were even farther apart. Father was an optimist, a dandy "walking in and out of jobs with the bumptiousness of a god." By the time Victor was twelve, the cab at the door had moved the Pritchetts 18 times. While Mother wept, Father filled those cabs with his bland bass voice...
Gary Byrne's Launcelot Gobbo, wide-eyed and Cockney, gets his laughs, by never pushing for them. His timing is impeccable. And while Byrne's polish doesn't always extend to the other comedians in the cast, there are no actively annoying performances. Whatever the minor actors lack in ability, they do not make up in pretentiousness. That in itself is a blessing these days...
...odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique...
...establishment of middle-class British values on a boat in the jungle must have interested both Agee and Collier as script-writers; the published screenplay in Agee On Film lavishes detail on Cockney inflection and deliberately tortured syntax. Here, Huston's casting defeats the intent: however much Bogart accentuates his buck teeth, he is largely out of place as a Cockney mechanic; his best moments are asides and wisecracks reminiscent of the two Hawks films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant...