We just watched an old Katherine Hepburn movie where she played some multilingual reporter. My wife’s comment…
“Wow, even her German has a Connecticut accent!”
Nah, if he wasn’t fooled he wouldn’t have bothered with the whole gun ruse. I always thought he didn’t catch on.
A number of things made him suspicious:
- His voice sounds very similar, regardless of the accent.
- Seems unlikely one lone hostage would get onto the roof, as professional as the rest of the job has been
- He actually saw Hans and Karl in that scene on top of the elevator (though it wasn’t a good look)
So he had to hand the guy a gun & find out right away - friend or foe? But he hadn’t counted on Hans having the radio handy and pretty much got himself into deep doo-doo.
It’s not impossible to have no trace of your mother tongue in a foreign language. Quebec premier Jean Charest is my gold-standard for this - when he’s speaking English, you’d have no idea he grew up speaking French.
Hans: Bubie. The Untold Story.
- He holds his smoke like a European…
Maybe - but being a red-blooded (formerly) chain-smoking & occasionally gun-totin’ American myself, I must confess I have no idea how Europeans hold their cigarettes. I wouldn’t have picked up on that, so I assume McClane didn’t either. 
I guess I don’t have a problem with it. Hans Gruber was a master criminal; if he could do a passable American accent, then it seems natural that he’d attack an American corporation, where that skill (and his knowledge of FBI procedures) would be of use.
I think the subtitle will be His Rise and Fall at Nakatomi Plaza.
But you get the award for spelling “McClane” correctly.
You forget John’s saying to Al, "They’re mostly European judging by their cigarettes and …
…
…
… clothing labels."
Notwithstanding that I have no idea why he threw in that incredibly pregnant pause … he knew what was what on them fuzzy foreigners.
There’s actually a line in Die Hard With A Vengeance that provides an explanation for the whole accent thing. As you say, Simon was Special Forces, but they make a point of mentioning that the specific unit was trained in faking accents in order to blend in with the enemy. It’s the basis for how Simon’s small army was able to function relatively invisibly in New York, and would also explain Hans’s accent shift if he had been in the same unit.
I thought he stopped because he heard the elevator moving.
I vaguely recall it was the other way around:“clothing labels and … cigarettes”.
Now I’ll have to go find a clip.
I was just thinking I got that backwards. Pretty sure you’re right.
I have watched only a few episodes of House I admit, but Hugh Laurie’s accent never sounds right to me. But that’s probably because I first saw him in Fry and Laurie and Blackadder. Anyway, I can’t watch the show because I keep hearing through the accent. But I’m not an American so if it fools a native it must be good.
This makes me think, was it how it was held, or the brand? If they weren’t in the US that long, they’d probably have foreign-made cigs, maybe with distinctive scents and/or appearances, and that would be one problem with Gruber’s “Joe American” routine.
I believe they had European cigarettes, but as I recall McClane offers Gruber a smoke. I don’t temember if he is smoking cigarettes from the guy he killed at that point or not. A clue may be that Gruber does not react to the stronger European smokes. At any rate, Gruber holds it between thumb and forefinger, the other fingers cupped around it rather than between the first two fingers.
They were cigs from one of the offed bad guys … it was a short little blue package; they made a point of showing him lift from the corpse.
I always wondered if there was something in the fact that after Gruber accepts the cigarette, he stuffs the pack in his pocket. Like, John was noting that he was treating the pack as his own, and why would an American do that, or something, I’m not sure.
It just seems like such an odd detail to throw into the scene that it must *mean *something.
Don’t you mean Gruber’s “Clay, Bill Clay” routine.
Not interesting or meaningful trivia: I considered using Bill Clay as my username when I first signed up for the boards, but sadly I hadn’t lurked long enough yet and thought it might be too obscure.