Here is a great scene featuring a preaching teetotaler (Reverend Wainscott) from Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant The Wild Bunch —definitely in my top five, maybe top three films of all time.
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Man I love the way this reverend talks. It is such a melodic, syncopated idiom, almost song-like. I will do a presentation with this accent and intonation at some point soon. I love the way this reverend preacheth. The transcript is below if you couldn’t make it out, it’s a bit hard because it seems so antiquated.
Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou nor thy sons with thee least ye shall die. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red and when it bringeth his color in the cup when it moveth itself aright. At the last, it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Now folks, that’s from the Good Book. But in this here town, it’s 5 cents a glass. Five cents a glass. Does anyone really think that that is the price of a drink?
Wild Bunch is good. But then I actually like The Osterman Weekend too, so I can’t be trusted (it’s the firefight in the pool that gets me).
Deadwood had a great cadence to it too, a sort of David Mamet writes The Wild Bunch vibe. Some of the best dialogue I’ve seen on TV, at least the first two seasons.