Word: cockneys
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Three adventurers-a discredited sea captain (Oscar Homolka), a sniveling, cadging, little cockney (Barry Fitzgerald) and an English remittance man (Ray Milland) whose remittances have stopped coming-commandeer a Sydney-bound schooner, deprived of its crew by plague, and set off for South America to sell their stolen cargo and invest in mines. Their fates and that of Frances Farmer (a studio addition to the passenger list) are determined by a stop-over at an uncharted South Pacific island ruled with a rifle by a religious madman (Lloyd Nolan...
Stevenson's story is common knowledge. Suffice it to say that Oscar Homolka, as the liquor beridden skipper who lost his ship and his papers while suffering from overmuch tipping of the bottle, is at times excellent and at times downright boring. Barry Fitzgerald, as the disreputable cockney, almost holds the picture up on his own shoulders only to damp it by horribly overacting. Ray Milland and Miss Farmer supply the love interest, but neither get very excited over their emotion; in fact the former does not know how to walk on the screen, let alone act. As a mugger...
Jessie Matthews does her scampering best throughout this gallimaufry, manages to appear at times an appealing if toothy bit of cockney femininity. What gives Gangway a slightly embarrassing quality is the earnest brightness with which its British characters mimic American parts of speech. Though they are almost letter-perfect and have obviously been coached within an inch of their larynx, their "yeahs" and "flatfoots" and "old battle-axes" induce on the U. S. ear the same faint note of horror as a child's unmeaning blasphemy or an innocent lady's use of an unprintable word...
...scornful of the press, both Right and Left. Even when cornered for an interview, he ignores any questions which he does not choose to answer, punctuates his own points with jerks of his knotted longshoreman's arms. He used to have a pronounced Australian accent (an exaggerated Cockney) but has now lost most of it, speaking in a soft, low, emphatic voice. On the platform he is restrained, though he sometimes stops, tosses back his brown hair, pushing his beak forward as if into the wind at sea on lookout. He demonstrated his spellbinding platform power at a Madison...
...Ohio but of Kentucky where the Briarhopper speech is filled with these and more that are far worse like "nat" for "night" and "hit" for "it." All this is Briarhopper, pure and unadulterated. This peculiar dialect is a mixture of the Southern and strangely enough the Cockney of England. The Cockney is very evident when the speech is heard and the inflection can noted. Many Kentuckians have moved over to Ohio to work its rich farmlands and to find employment in its many factories. The Ohio farmers have fallen into its lazy easy way of speaking and strangers, hearing...