Thursday, April 04, 2013

Mstake

I recently watched Love On The Run, a forgettable 1936 comedy starring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone.  It's sort of a warmed over It Happened One Night with a spy caper wedged in.  MGM's grand, stolid style was generally not the place for screwball.  Gable had to go to cheaper, grittier Columbia to truly show his comedy chops.

More memorable than the plot is the closed captioning. Crawford plays a spoiled heiress--there seemed to be an epidemic of them in the 1930s--named Sally Parker.  Throughout the movie she's referred to as Miss Parker. Yet every time someone says that, the CC has it as "MS. PARKER."

Even if you want to believe Joan Crawford was a proto-feminist, it's silly, even jarring, to use a term that wasn't in common parlance until decades later.  Was the CC writer trying to give a retroactive boost to womankind?

2 Comments:

Blogger New England Guy said...

Its amazing there aren't more mistakes in CC. I used to watch a lot of captions when I had to put my infant child to sleep. I regularly saw homophone mistakes- I think I saw "bird of pray" in more than one program- always made me think of a sanctimonious Foghorn Leghorn kneeling in supplication. -Although to be fair I've also seen a headline in the Boston Globe many moons ago with the same mistake quoting if I remember correctly friend to wannabe world destoyers, Dennis Rodman describing his style of play versus the Celtics. But I digress (what are blog comments for after all?)- I saw another Gable movie where the characters referred to the main female lead as "Mizz" all the time- I will check my Turner Classic DVD of Gone With The Wind (in a box set with Ben Hur and Casablanca in 1999 for $24.95 I recall) to see how they spell it.

50 effing 1 today.

1:19 PM, April 04, 2013  
Blogger LAGuy said...

"Mizz" can at least be a phonetic spelling of how certain people pronounce "Miss." "Ms" grabs you by the neck and takes you out of the film.

Anyway, congratulations. You should put up a celebratory post.

2:16 PM, April 04, 2013  

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