Hollywood films get credit for “authenticity” when they have foreign characters speaking in their own language, with onscreen subtitles, instead of using English with a bad accent. For example, all the World War II films from the 1960s and 1970s where the German officers dialogue in German instead of saying “Ve vill sturm the Ardennes and crush die Amerikanz” generally hold up better.
Anyway, knowing Spanish, I am less than impressed when I see things such as the supposedly Bolivian soldiers in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” sound all too Mexican.
Are there any other examples in films with “authentic” foreign dialogue where an accent is totally misplaced…for example a Prussian Field Marshall who sounds like a Viennese baker? A Russian grunt soldier who sounds like an elite emigré? A Japanese geisha who does not use extremely polite word forms?
Spanish accents are usually bad.
In many cases they think that because the actress has a Latin surname a can speak Spanish, she can speak it well. In a large number of cases, Spanish is their second language it shows. It’s even worse they they have to fake a Latino accent when speaking English.
Mexicans and Puerto Rican accents all over South America.
Of course, having the people of the Cape Verde islands speaking Mexican spanish or Perfect English without even a hint of Portuguese (White Collar) was a bit too much.
When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out, a couple of my Mandarin speaking coworkers were quick to point out how atrocious Michele Yeoh’s Mandarin was (she spoke it phonetically, as she’s Malaysian). They said Chow-Yun Fat was a little better, but not much. (He spoke Mandarin but his native language was Cantonese). The other main actors had serious regional accents, like Zhang Ziyi’s Beijing accent and her boyfriend’s Taiwanese accent.
They equated it with a movie that was set in Alabama where one guy spoke broken English, the other guy was British and tried to sound southern, and the other two main actors were from New York and Boston and didn’t try to change that.
Neither Walter Koening nor James Doohan did authentic accents in ST: TOS, the former being a Jew from New York and the latter being Canadian.
What amazes me is when the translator in a documentary tries to do the accent of the person being interviewed (usually Russian or German). The resulting voiceover is usually laughably bad.
After 300 years, who knows what the accents will be like in Russia and Scotland. There is some evidence that if you want to hear Shakespeare in a close-to-authentic accent, you should watch Hamlet in West Virginia.
No, they’re almost always native English-speakers reading from a script prepared by a translator. They’re obviously directed to imitate the accent of the interviewee to the best of their ability.
The worst example of this I’ve ever heard was a young British woman trying to do the accent of an elderly Russian émigrée. It sounded horrible!
When Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ came out- which was filmed in Aramiac and Latin- I saw an interview with classical scholars who hated that not only did Pilate speak Latin when he would more likely have spoken Koine Greek when addressing the Israelites, but he spoke basically medieval “Catholic Latin” rather than Latin that any 1st century Roman would have understood (etch-ay homo instead of *eck-kay homo *was the example used- or perhaps that’s reversed).
A bit off-topic but I’ll mention anyway since it took me out of the scene: Sasha Baron Cohen used a fairly generic French accent in Les Miserables. What bothered me about this is that every character in the movie is French, but he’s the only one using an accent; it made him seem like a foreigner.
Do francophone Belgian actors count? IME Belgian accent doesn’t sound Parisian French.
OK, since franco-Belgians probably don’t count (although IME franco-Belgians have an odd accent to my ears), how about Lemmy Constantine (you know, Alphaville and stuff or Richard Crenna (Crenna might have been dubbed – probably was – but he could have learned his lines phonetically).
I thought the 2000 version of Bedazzled was a hilarious film. One sequence featured the Brendan Fraser character converted into a Colombian drug lord – with he and his office mates (acquaintances and the young woman he had a crush on) all converted into personages in the scenario. And, they all suddenly could speak Spanish. They actors pulled this off well, and the dialogue was funny, but it was a bit odd (for those in the audience who speak enough Spanish to distinguish accents) to hear the actors use very different regional accents. It was evident that the actress Frances O’Connor was already quite fluent in Spanish, and had learned it in Spain (I’m guessing she spent a college year abroad there or something), while Brendan Fraser had to pretty much learn what he needed to on the spot, and it came out with more of a Mexican accent.
ETA: Turns out Frances O’Connor is Australian/British. Pretty impressive – for the rest of Bedazzled, she sports an excellent American English accent.
I understand those Native Americans who actually spoke Lakota had a great laugh over “Dances With Wolves”, because the woman who taught the actors to speak Lakota taught them the version a woman would speak.
There was a crappy Bruce Willis movie called “The Whole Nine Yards” that was set in Montreal, and features truly atrocious “French” accents that are obviously attempts at doing something Parisian which is completely unlike a Montreal accent.
With regards to geishas, a lot has been written about the casting of “Memoirs of a Geisha” but it was really truly awful. Imagine shooting a movie set in literary scene of 19th century Paris but featuring actors speaking English with thick German and Swedish accents. (Although re-reading the OP, I don’t think this one counts as the dialogue was in English and not Japanese.)
I heard it was just the opposite - that Mary Mcdonnell’s Lakota was actually a “male” dialect.
In John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, many of the extras and minor roles were played by Navajos. When given lines, they said things like “You have a small penis”. In Navajo, of course. And I’m sure, with great outer solemnity and inner hilarity.
I noticed that as well and it bothered me too, but then later on in the film he spoke with an English accent, which made me think the French accent was just a put on by the character for the “Master of the House” scene. I’m not sure *why *that would be, but at least it did appear deliberate.
Something similar occurred in A Distant Trumpet (with Troy Donahue, Suzanne Pleshette, and Diane McBain). The subtitles for the Indians were things like “We shall have peace from now until the rivers cease to flow,” while they were actually saying. e.g., “You goddamned lying white bastards are stealing all our lands!” Whenever Native Americans were in the audience, they laughed uproariously.
Wouldn’t the translator actually be Russian or German, so you’re hearing their accented English translation?