Phony English accent.
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franzkabuki — 13 years ago(June 19, 2012 05:49 PM)
Yeah, Harveys otherwise brilliant work in the film is hopelessly undermined by his accent being a few beats off - to the point they should have gotten someone else to play the part. For crying out loud.
And Im very much of the school of thought according to which people should actually watch the movies theyre criticising.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan -
EllisFowler — 12 years ago(July 20, 2013 02:36 PM)
They and John McGiver affect a Mid-Atlantic accent which is appropriate since they're playing upper-class Easterners (don't forget that Raymond's father willed him the obviously expensive summer estate). None sound actually British.
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Pinky_the-Fluffy — 12 years ago(January 30, 2014 08:15 AM)
Everyone seems to forget that Lansbury is English and has the faintest smattering of an English accent in this role. Listen carefully. Her upper-class W.A.S.P. accent favors a slight English aristocracy tinge to it.
Why do you care? -
shoobe01-1 — 9 years ago(January 07, 2017 05:47 PM)
Exactly. Every look this up, as it's interestingly relevant to lots of old timey movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
I think they even discuss that Raymond was off at boarding schools, and so on. This was the proper way to speak at the time to a small sector of the upper class for a few decades there. -
osmundbullock — 12 years ago(February 23, 2014 06:49 AM)
Neither is nearly as 'off' as you think.
I suspect you haven't listened to the accents of many people born before WWII from East Coast, old-money families - or at least how they used to be. Many prided themselves on how quasi-English their accents were (a few still do), it was a sign of refinement; and in their lives, too, they often sought to emulate the English 'Landed Gentry'.
But just as the last of traditional English aristocratic country life largely died out between the end of WWII and the late 1960s/70s, so the mimicking of it by American East Coast aristocrats also gradually faded. In the early 60s, though, when this movie was made, it was still alive and well.
P.S. Who is 'Lawrence' Harvey? If you're going to write the name so often you ought to check the spelling. -
llanwydd — 12 years ago(February 23, 2014 08:59 AM)
Moviegoers are usually aware that they are not watching reality. This has been going on for a long time. Mickey Rooney played an Irish kid in National Velvet. No Irish accent. English actors played Germans in the original Frankenstein. No German accent. How do we know the Shaw family weren't immigrants? Maybe Raymond's father had been transferred from a British army base. Script writers always depend on a phenomenon called "suspension of disbelief". By the way, William F. Buckley was American.
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Huggo — 9 years ago(November 09, 2016 06:36 PM)
I totally agree with llanwydd. If reality was a key in movie of that era, many of them wouldn't even be int he English language.
The whole issue of proper accents didn't really come into vogue until "Meryl", which would have been the 1980s. I still remember reading an interview with Sydney Pollack about Out of Africa, where Meryl's Danish character was sporting a Danish accent, whereas Redford's British character spoke with an American accent. Despite Redford apparently working hard on perfecting that British accent, Pollack thought that most movie going audiences would find all-American Redford with a British accent distracting, hence the decision! -
NewCliches — 11 years ago(May 27, 2014 12:21 PM)
why did they give the part to Lawrence harvey.?? You mean they couldn't find someone with an American accent.
Apparently not. Angela Lansbury has a pretty dubious accent as well. Then again, Dick Van Dyke has a famously bad cockney accent in Mary Poppins, made a couple of years later. And Jodie Foster plays an english girl in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, made a few years later, with a Southern American accent.
Accent coaches have clearly come a long way in the last forty or fifty years. -
mike-848 — 11 years ago(September 15, 2014 09:47 PM)
Raymond obviously came from a privileged background. People from the upper classes sometimes send their sons and daughters to schools in Great Britain. many movies in the 30's and 40's show upper class Americans with a slight British accent. If Raymond's mom and dad were working class Americans, his accent would not have made sense.