Now, I’m not going to go see the movie just for this, but back when it was released I saw trailers for K-19: the Widowmaker.
Now, I don’t know from slavic accents (despite the SD moniker and the fact I’m genetically German-Polish, I hail far from mitteleuropa.)
His accent seemed like a genuine Slavic accent. However, it seemed like a horrible Russian accent. Just remembering from the trailers from all those years back it seemed too understated, more Yugoslavian.
What’s everyone else’s opinion on this?
My recollection from the interviews he did at the time was that he wasn’t trying for a Russian accent. He just wanted to give a “slavic” impression, so that viewers would accept him as a Soviet commander, not Indiana Jones, but wasn’t trying to go into Meryl Streep territory, or worse yet, sound like something out of Hogan’s Heroes. I’ll try to find a cite for this, but I don’t know how much luck I’ll have with a movie this old.
ETA: And all the cites I can find seem to indicate that he was trying for a Russian accent and failed, so I’ll shut up now.
I think he did a good job of making the accent generic enough that it wasn’t distracting. It was weird enough to see Ford attempting it, but after a few minutes I forgot about it.
Widowmaker is a very underrated film, IMHO. I rented it warily, but later bought the DVD. The scene in the reactor was really intense, and I thought the whole film had a great cold war tone.