Thinking about dialogue

It occurs to me that with a number of current movies, and I’m particularly thinking of action movies and romantic comedies (odd combination), there is often a dialogue problem. The problem is more or less that it is absent.

I was thinking about this because I just wrote up reviews of two older movies, both of which I like but neither of which I could recommend as sterling examples of cinema as a visual art. I wrote the reviews because I was trying to understand why I liked them when, while liking them, I felt they weren’t particularly good. What explained that apparent contradiction?

The movies I wrote about were The Rainmaker (1956) with Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn and The Rare Breed (1966) with Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Juliet Mills and Brian Keith.

Cinematically, The Rare Breed is the better of the two. It’s visually pleasing but also pretty pedestrian. The “cinema” of the movie is functional. With The Rainmaker, it’s less than pedestrian but there is a reason for this: it’s a play on film.

Yet I liked both movies. Why? The stories and the characters which, in the cases of both films, were largely expressed through dialogue.

Currently, I see movies that want to capture iconic moments visually and verbally. A character is lit and shot in a certain way and delivers a line, the hoped-for memorable line. The problem, however, is that the line’s impact is dependent on the dialogue that has preceded it, and that’s absent. What has preceded it (in the action movie case) has been wordless yet noisy quick cuts of action, close-ups of stern heroes and villains, and dialogue that is often single word statements.

In the case of romantic comedies, there has been dialogue but lousy dialogue because the movie focused on the star and provided a dull stereotype as his or her foil. So the dialogue was boring. And often populated with words and phrases considered obligatory because they are “contemporary.”

The memorable lines, the iconic moments (“We’ll always have Paris,” or “You complete me,”) are the conclusion element of syllogisms. It is like 2 plus 2 equals 4. The number 4 is meaningless if not preceded by 2 plus 2. Those remembered movie lines are perfect because, like the number 4, they are the perfect conclusion to what has preceded them. And like a syllogism, every element is important. Remove even one, and it fails.

Of both the films I watched (Rainmaker, Rare Breed) the story, characters and dialogue were compelling and allowed for characters that were individual – distinct and engaging.

Both of those movies suffered from a lack of distinct visual style (but to be fair, they are forty and fifty years old). Yet both are more interesting, for me, than a great deal of what I encounter in today’s movies.

And I think it has something to do with dialogue. And that means character and story.

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