Tonight's Movie
Jul. 5th, 2012 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowTonight I watched my tape of "The Kennel Murder Case", a 1933 mystery starring William Powell as Philo Vance. It's a pretty good movie, but the audio on the tape was in bad shape; I had to crank up the volume twice, the second time to the max. If I want to keep the movie in my collection, I'll probably have to buy the DVD.
One thing struck me. Towards the end of the movie, several people used the word "suspect" - the noun, that is. All of them pronounced it with stress on the second syllable; in my experience, the noun is stressed on the first syllable, and the verb on the second. (This isn't an unusual pattern; cf. "project", "object", and - a variation - "defend/defense".) Was the word regularly pronounced that way in the '30s, or was it simply not yet familiar enough, so that the director (or whoever) thought it was pronounced that way? (Compare its memorable pronunciation in "Casablanca", less than a decade later.)
Is a puzzlement.
One thing struck me. Towards the end of the movie, several people used the word "suspect" - the noun, that is. All of them pronounced it with stress on the second syllable; in my experience, the noun is stressed on the first syllable, and the verb on the second. (This isn't an unusual pattern; cf. "project", "object", and - a variation - "defend/defense".) Was the word regularly pronounced that way in the '30s, or was it simply not yet familiar enough, so that the director (or whoever) thought it was pronounced that way? (Compare its memorable pronunciation in "Casablanca", less than a decade later.)
Is a puzzlement.
