False Movie Syndrome

[supergee]

Play it again, Sam.

Come wiz me to ze casbah

Judy, Judy, Judy

Beam me up, Scotty

Why do we remember so many movie and TV lines that weren't actually said? Tony Curtis just died, and I expect at least half the obituaries to quote, "Yonda lies da castle a my fodda." He did not say that in a movie. In his autobiography, American Prince, he reports that the quote was made up by an actress (name justly lost to history, or at least he mentioned it and I didn't recognize it) to mock the inherently ridiculous idea of a Jewish sex idol.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

The NY Times obit mentions that he didn't say it (" ...but did not utter the line, 'Yondah lies da castle of my foddah,' that legend has attributed to him."), although without the bit about the actress, but I remember my mother quoting that at me sometime in the '70s. (I suspect it was less the Jewishness--Kirk Douglas, after all--and more the ineradicable Bronxness of his accent [obvious urban accents being a **shhhhhh!** class marker], and I can remember costume dramas and comedies dropping in period slang and obviously American speech patterns.) (Which may also speak to the business about characters in historical pics of, oh, the last 20 or so years speaking in British accents.)