The problem with long, literary speeches on film is that people don't really talk like that. Except for very stylized movies, film must imitate life more precisely than the stage, where people have already decided to suspend their disbelief. Theater audiences know the scenery is painted canvas on wooden frames, and they don't care.
Movie audiences demand that the scenery look real, even if it is an illusion created by actors performing in front of a projection of the settings. Film technique can make cars look like they are really moving, whether they are or not..Stage audiences don't care that the car is not really moving.
The Fountainhead and Mr. Deeds
Two long speeches by Gary Cooper illustrate the best and worst of long speeches in the movies.
In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Cooper as Longfellow Deeds explains the behavior that his enemies used to prove he was crazy and needed to be committed to an institution. He has funny material to work with, especially when he starts to show that everybody does crazy things, but are not really crazy. He is as relaxed and natural as his character has been through the entire movie.
But in The Fountainhead, a film that is almost funny because it takes itself far too seriously, Roarke's appeal to his jury is taken verbatim from Ayn Rand's novel. He is stiff, humorless, and the words are stilted and unnatural. Mr. Deeds's long speech was written to be delivered on the screen. It sounds like something someone might say.. It does not sound like literature. The Fountainhead speech was written to be read, and the speaker sounds like he is reading it.
Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller
Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, and Arther Miller all wrote for the stage, where an actor could take over and make a beautiful speech. Most of the speeches survived when the stage plays were made into movies.
In the only script Miller wrote specifically for the screen, The Misfits, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter, and Marilyn Monroe each got to break off a great speech that revealed character more than it advanced the plot.. Williams wrote beautiful prose for the stage, much of which survived in the film versions of Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Long Hot Summer.
Marty
Chayefsy wrote the script for Marty for television. There is only one long speech, when Marty talks to his mother about being an ugly man who is condemned to a life of loneliness. It's a very emotional speech, and Rod Steiger and Ernest Borgnine who played Marty on TV and in the movie, were good enough actors to make it work.
In an interview on Turner Classic Movies, Borgnine recalled his audition for the part. The producer and director did not know if he could play a sympathetic character after playing bad guys all his life. "When I finished the scene, they were in tears. I said, 'Bang! I got the part!"
Network
But Chayefsky's other award-winning screenplay, Network, takes a big risk by including so many long speeches that are almost polemics. Howard Beale's [played by Albert Finney] TV sermons are presented as sermons by a guy who is mentally unbalanced.
William Holden's long speech, calling Fay Dunaway,"television incarnate," works because he is giving an unsympathetic character a piece of his and the audience's mind. Both characters are telling the audience things they already believe and love to hear expressed more articulately than they could themselves.
When it comes to long, literary speeches in the moves, the advice for actors and writers is "Handle With Care."
Ken Braiterman - Ken Braiterman writes columns for the Concord (NH) Monitor print and online editions. He also writes and lectures on recovery from ...
