How Now, Voyager?
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eternally “Ronald Colman.” Anglo-American intonations aside, the
screenplay—taking its cues from the George S. Kaufman and John P. Marquand
stage adaptation—insists on imposing Bostonian lore into speeches and telling
rather than showing what it is to live on Beacon Hill. In particular, the catalogue
of calumny hurled at Apley by his future son-in-law, a native New Yorker who
encounters the Brahmin in New York City, is merely a list of gustatory and
cultural cliches: he makes the hub of the universe spin, eats baked beans for
breakfast, and keeps improper books out of the hands of the young. Overall,
Joseph Mankiewicz’s direction gives the film a strangely detached aura. There is
a goldfish bowl quality to the proceedings, as though it were some sort of
anthropological study. This is not to say it has a trace of the documentary about
it, or even cinema verite. It is strictly a Hollywood soundstage and back lot
affair lacking the slightest trace of Bostonian ambience. For example one of the
novel’s most humorous passages is so garbled in the film that it is reduced to a
labored exemplum delivered to a servant by the master, that is then explained to
the audience to make sure they get the joke (Recall Geertz’s sociological
metaphorical explanation of our “getting the joke” as a way of understanding
another culture). Apley merely recounts his discomposure on seeing a man at his
front door in shirtsleeves on Marlborough St. In the novel, Marquand uses the
shirtsleeve sighting to make a comic point about the failure of the South End to
become another Back Bay: the Apleys move back to Beacon Hill when their
patriarch spotted a man in his shirtsleeves on the front steps of his South End
townhouse.1
There may be something more than local vocalization to the performance of
Proper Bostonianism. Lucius Beebe, in what remains the best book on the
subject, Boston and the Boston Legend, speaks with unimpe X