(bolding mine)
Then the question comes up as often as 10% of the time.
I seem to recall a miniseries produced in Sweden about a family that came to America in the 1840s. Anyone remember that? Can anyone identify how they portrayed the American speakers, in terms of the Swedish language?
Do French language films (or German or Swedish or whatever) ever feature “American” characters whose ethnicity is indicated only an American in accent in French (or German or whatever)? I’m not talking about adaptations from English, I’m talking about French works, written in French which feature non-French characters.
For instance, would a French language movie about WWII, with only French actors, use accented French for characters who were “German” or “British” or “American” in the same way that American films use accented English to indicate foreign language characters?
Do you mean to be asking this question about characters who are supposed to be speaking French, or about characters who are supposed to be speaking German but whose actors are actually speaking French?
-FrL-
I think what you’re talking about are the movies The Emigrants and The New Land. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen the first one (which took place mainly in Sweden and on the boat trip to America) so I don’t know how they handled the Swedish/English language contrast in the second film. My guess would be in the scenes where the Swedish characters were interacting with the American characters, the Americans spoke English (which, of course, wouldn’t have to be subtitled for American audiences but would be for Swedish ones).
Either or, I guess, but especially about the latter. If a French film called for an American spy to come to Paris, would he speak with American accented French if he was talking (ostensibly in English) to his superiors over the phone? What if he’s supposed to be speaking French to French characters?
OK I’ll admit I randomly came up with 90%, actually I can’t think of a single instance of a French language film which wasn’t set in a French speaking country but I didn’t dare give an absolute “it doesn’t happen”.
What you’re getting at is something I suspected – that French, Italian, etc. filmmakers don’t do all that many films set outside of their “linguistic zone”.
Is there anything out there like a French/Italian/Spanish/German version of European Vacation? 
Frylock, a good example of what you’re looking for would be The Three Musketeers from the 70s. Most of the movie takes place in France, but everyone speaks English. No one else seems to have seen the Hitler thing.
I am a little suprised to hear that this doesn’t come up, though. Surely there is an occassional film about something that involved Italy or France but didn’t happen in Italy or France? The Balkan Wars? Wolf Tone? The Russian Revolution?
What do you mean by the Hitler thing? The show Hogan’s Heroes. Surely most people in this thread know the show?!
I personally have no idea what Three Musketeers movie you’re talking about. But I assume it exhibits the very characteristic I described–the English is accented French?
-FrL-
Because if there’s any “standard” dialect of the Queen’s English in this world, it’s British English – specifically the BBC’s Received Pronunciation. Makes sense as a default position, you know?
No, this was a biographical miniseries. All the actors spoke in English without foreign accents. Also, all the Prussian military men spoke one dialect of English, all the Austrians spoke another, and so on. This is what my friend objected to. He thought they should speak with German accents. Or perhaps I dreamed it, since no one has seen it but me, apparently.
There was a british TV series called 'Allo 'Allo that had great fun with this. It’s set in France during the Nazi occupation and characters speak with exaggerated French (think Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau), German, and even English accents. Two british airmen are being sheltered in Rene’s cafe, and their attempts to understand anyone have nothing to do with real French and are just English-to-English misunderstandings. Occasionally, Michelle (the leader of the local Resistance) will come by and translate by just switching accents.
I can think of one. It was called Mais qui a tué Pamela Rose? [But who killed Pamela Rose?]. It was supposedly taking place in the southern US and the actors are all French, and all speak French, but are playing Americans - and very stereotypical ‘southern’ Americans at that. They spoke in what I think (but my French is not great so I wouldn’t say for 100% sure) was an attempt at verrrrry broad ‘southern American’ accents. But since the film is a comedy it would be dangerous to generalise this as standard practice.
I admit to assuming the accents, and the film as a whole, were done for pretty much the sole purpose of presenting Americans as stupid idiots…
Don’t forget Arthur Bostrom’s brilliant portrayal of Officer Crabtree, a British agent working undercover in occupied France as a French gendarme. He was supposedly speaking French but extremely badly. Bostrom played this part in English with an English accent but with virtually every other word mispronounced - “Gid Moaning” for “Good Morning”, for instance.
The BBC comedy Allo, Allo! made much of this phenomenon; set in rural France during WWII, the characters all spoke accented English; the accent indicating their actual language or nationality. So you got things like the bilingual French Resistance leader switching between French-accented-English when talking to the French characters, and plummy-English when speaking to the downed English pilots.
Even more clever was the character of the town policeman - he was an English spy that spoke bad French; this was portrayed as French-accented-English, but rendered almost unintelligible by swapping some of the vowel sounds (often so as to create innuendo), so instead of ‘Good morning, I was passing by and I thought I would drop in’, he would say ‘Good moaning, I was pissing by and I thought I would drip in’.
Oddly, the German and French characters could understand each other perfectly.
Oops, I don’t know how I overlooked those posts. :o
No, assuming it was this film (which is quite good BTW).
You beat me to it, Mangetout, and it’s for the best, because you said it much better than I would have.
Does no one even read my posts anymore?
And Mangetout’s description struck me as oddly similar to the wikipedia entry on the same topic.
Since Alive at Both Ends quoted your post, and Mangetout mentioned your post, I’d say, yes, they do read your posts. Do you read theirs? 
-FrL-