MANY GOOFS IN MOVIE AND SONG

Saturday, January 27, 2007 

Friends of ours who joined us for dinner one day last week, were amazed at the number of movie videos I had in my library, but even more startled when I volunteered that we had watched some of these 10 or 12 times. "Especially Deliverance," I added, with a smile."

Whatever else this infamous movie from 1972 had to offer in the way of a questionable storyline, it did, however, present a strong environmental message which was way ahead of its time, reinforced several times throughout the movie by actor Burt Reynolds. Another reason I enjoy watching the movie repeatedly is because of the Fowler’s toads that keep bleating in the background during the night scenes. It is an eery sound from a species we don’t get to hear in Ontario, except along the shores of Lake Erie in the Point Pelee area. Deliverance continues to be one of few films I have ever watched which offered a background of environmental sounds that was accurate for both the location (Georgia) and the time of the year. Movie makers don’t always give a lot of attention to the sounds they insert into the background, often dubbing in sound effects that are quite inappropriate for the location or season.

A series from the 1980s that I have always been very fond of is "Sketches of Our Town", a series of half hour programs focusing on the history of local towns and communities in Ontario, and occasionally, elsewhere in Canada. They are being repeated every morning on the DejaView satellite channel but even they have not escaped the insertion of inappropriate sounds. On a frosty and snowy winter morning in Saskatoon in one episode, a savannah sparrow enthusiastically poured out it spring mating song. However, the most annoying has been a yet unidentified bird that sounds like the result of an extramarital affair gone wrong between a house sparrow and a Tennessee warbler, including possibly some indiscretions with a cardinal somewhere along the way. Whatever the outcome, this same irritating chirping has turned up in fields around the village of Ayre, it was vocal in Tecumseh Park in Chatham, called at least once among the Mennonites in Elgin County, and even vied for attention as it cheeped loudly during an interview with a local resident at a Quaker meeting house in Uxbridge. This annoying bird that sounds almost mechanical, also chirped for attention in some late 1800s archival footage of Ontario Hydro’s beginnings at Niagara Falls. The last time I heard its annoying voice, this bird with no name was behind a church somewhere at Penetanguishene. In all the segments I have watched, not once did it ever appear for positive identification, but it evidently followed the film crew around from town to town. It has sung its heart out behind the original narrator, Barry Penhale, and has on several occasions accompanied Barry’s successor in the series, the late Harvey Kirck in his descriptions of local towns.

As naturalists, we routinely nitpick films and programs, because our finely tuned senses are always concentrated toward the sounds of nature. Birders are very sound oriented and are always trying to add species to their life lists even if they do happen to appear in films. Many years ago, I watched a low budget film which started out with sweeping scenes of a Japanese landscape. A Geisha dressed in her kimono, delicately waved a fan in front of her face while a shamisen tinkled softly in the background. However, other sounds filtered in - nature sounds that I was sure I had heard before, and in that same specific order. These were sound tracks pilfered from Dr. Bill Gunn’s "A Day In Algonquin Park" recording!

Popular songs are not without erroneous lyrics. Remember the little light-hearted song, "An English Country Garden"? The songwriter perhaps should have quit after the first verse, for he lists off quail, tanager and bobolink, species that don’t occur in the wild in England at all, never mind someone’s garden. Remember Kate Smith’s war time song, "There will be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, just you wait and see"? Well, we are still waiting, Kate. There weren’t bluebirds in Dover before the war and there weren’t any during the war, and there aren’t going to be any, because bluebirds are not to be found there.

So, unless you are listening to the raucous and convincing bleating of a Fowler’s toad in Deliverance, take the advice of English novelist Dinah Mulock Craik, "Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see."