I'm curious as to why Johnson speaks in such a seemingly stilted manner. He sounds as though he speaks English as a second language, or as if his English had been translated from a foreign language. For example, he says something at the beginning like, "Where can I find beaver and bear that when skinned bring good cash money?"
Does anyone know if this is a historically accurate manner of speech?
I've felt that Redford just did a poor job of keeping any accent or inflection in his speech pattern throughout the film. I think the idea of the stilted speech pattern was supposed to reflect that Johnson wasn't exactly a highly educated person. One moment he would do a line-reading sounding pretty normal, another he would give it the stilted manner. Whether what he spoke was authentic frontier jibberish (to use a line from "Blazing Saddles" LOL) I have no clue. I know that Will Geer using "pilgrim" so damn much got old fast.
shareYeah, I think it made him more a 'simple' man with very plain and precise speech.
shareAll this time later, I'm going to answer my own question. After the recent release of "True Grit," some critics mentioned the girl's odd speech patterns (which I think were very similar to Jeremiah Johnson's). Turns out, it was a common speech patter among some parts of America in the 19th Century. The stilted, rather formal speech was a sort of holdover from England, and has been verified by old written documents, apparently.
So Jeremiah Johnson got it right.
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I'm wondering how "old written documents" verify how what's in them is spoken? That's a real head-scratcher to me!
Again, I'm going to say that my issue with the speech pattern by Johnson isn't how odd, authentic and/or formal it is but how poorly a job Redford does trying to keep that speech pattern consistent throughout the movie.
Excellent point. Since we have no recorded record, they can only base speech on written letters and diaries, which are not necessarily the same as spoken conversation.
shareDoesn't current English usage in writing pretty accurately mirror common speech patterns? People today don't realize that uneducated folks in earlier times had little to read but the Bible or other literature using very "stilted" forms of expression. They weren't visiting libraries or watching tv and movies.
shareJJ speech patterns were of a man who did not talk much, as he said it's been a long time since I had so much of the English language spoke at me.
shareWatch the Blu-ray with the commentary by Pollack, Redford and the screen writer John Milius. Milius discusses the formal speech patterns and lack of contractions as correct for that era. That's the way the screenplay was written.
shareAll I can say is that before the Civil War in the west, 'country' dialects were much different than in the eastern cities. Even in the near west like West Virginia and other mountain locals, manners of speaking were very different and this persisted until the 1900s where people from rural areas could hardly be understood by outsiders. So whether 'stilted' is the right word, but 'very different' would come close.
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