Anybody else bugged by Harvey's terrible American accent?
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stevekaczynski — 9 years ago(September 04, 2016 11:53 AM)
Raymond comes from a wealthy family and probably went to an expensive school that modelled itself on British public schools and turned out people with similar accents. In the 1950s some Americans complained about the presence of people in the State Department and the diplomatic corps with "British accents". They were not British but had often gone to elite schools. Dean Acheson was one of them.
Raymond tends to come across in both film and book as supercilious and definitely not "one of the boys", and the accent in the film plays into that quite effectively. Harvey was in fact a South African of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, and his accent was sometimes more out of place in other films, but here it is OK.
"Chicken soup - with a beep straw." -
movie_nazi — 9 years ago(September 11, 2016 06:05 AM)
Laurence Harvey was badly cast. I have no idea why he was in the movie.
He never even tried to put on an American soldier.
He was playing Laurence Harvey.
Some other posters have pointed out that perhaps the director instructed him to speak in an English accent so that he would stick out as a stuffy, upper crust guy that would be despised by his company. I don't know. I think he should have at least tried to pull off a mid-atlantic accent if that was the case.
My Vote history:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1914996/ratings -
Thomasina — 9 years ago(February 10, 2017 01:29 PM)
I know they hired real Asians in movies back then.
Really? Like who? What I remember from the era are casting decisions like:
Juanita Hall (an African American woman) playing a Chinese character in
Flower Drum Song
and a Tonkinese woman in
South Pacific
Marlon Brando (a white guy with Dutch, English, German, and Irish ancestry but no Asian) playing a Japanese character in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
Rita Moreno (of Puerto Rican origin) playing a Thai character in
The King and I
Alec Guinness (a white Englishman) playing a Japanese person in
A Majority of One
John Wayne played Genghis Khan, for pete's sake!
and probably the worst one ever, Mickey Rooney (a Scottish-descended American white man) playing, I guess, a Japanese person in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
.
In what movies were all these "real Asian" actors you say they were hiring back then?" -
movie_nazi — 9 years ago(February 10, 2017 02:56 PM)
HA! They never played billed roles! Are you kidding me? They played Hop Sing in
Bonanza
or they played waiters or bell boys like in
Have Gun, Will Travel
or gardeners. My point was there were indeed PLENTY of Asian actors around that they could have used for these starring roles but chose white washed actors instead. It still happens today. I saw a commercial for that Great Wall movie starring Matt Damon.
My Vote history:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1914996/ratings -
AnthonySocksss — 3 years ago(October 01, 2022 07:01 PM)
It’s a TRANS-ATLANTIC accent
Melton1 Wanted for Pedophilia:
https://i.ibb.co/6cnPmJVr/IMG-0830.jpg
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/Zjxk307CND0
