Since the film takes place in Russia, why do so many of the actors and actresses speak with upper-class British accents and inflections? Particularly in the Moscow scenes - I expected the actors to speak with Russian accents, but those scenes come across as an upper-class British drama, almost Jane Austin-esqe. What's the deal with that? Everyone should have a Russian accent.
share
The accents I could live with, I just found it hilarious that Sharif and Guinness were supposed to be half-brothers. Sharif/Steiger I could live with or Guinness/Courtenay, but not Omar & Alec.
"We're fighting for this woman's honor, which is more than she ever did."
OP: you're not very bright, are you?
shareI thought it was because a lot of the characters knew they would have to emigrate and they were practicing their "foreign" accents so they could fit in better once they left Russia for other countries.
"The night was sultry."
I'm not sure what the problem is here.
The entire cast other than Steiger and Sharif are British and Sharif usually uses a British accent when he's not playing an Arab. So surley it made sense for the rest of the cast to use their own accents.
Even in such a stellar ensamble, you would have had member's of the cast who just wouldn't have been able to nail the Russian accent and this would have added a touch of farce to proceedings.
There were a number of movies of epic scale like this made in the 1960's and most of them tended to use a predominatly British cast who almost always spoke in British accents.
The entire cast other than Steiger and Sharif are British and Sharif usually uses a British accent when he's not playing an Arab. So surley it made sense for the rest of the cast to use their own accents.
Exactly. C'mon people this stuff is very easy to understand.
Well, perhaps not.
Push the button, Max
[deleted]
Hmmm. Make a deal with ya, OP and everyone else who gets all hung up over "accent correctness." Watch THIS:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036443/
... and then, get back with me and YOU tell ME why the all-German cast, who are portraying mostly British characters and a few Americans, aren't speaking with Brit and Yank accents. If you can do that for me, then I'll explain to you "Why all the British accents?" in "Dr. Zhiviago." Deal?
Whatever you do, DO NOT read this sig--ACKKK!!! TOO LATE!!!
I am not sure why the OP asks this question. The film takes place in a country/culture where English is not spoken, yet the film is in English (the only other option is to have it in Russian with subtitles, but then it really wouldn't be a British film). It's an artificial aspect of the film, so something about which the audience is meant to suspend disbelief. One could also say, how are we supposed to buy this nonsense of watching flat pictures on a screen as representing something real about life, but we do that without worrying about it. So the use of English is an artificial aspect of this film, hence, the actors have to speak English using some accent or dialect. The notion that they should speak English with a Russian accent seems to me highly dubious - the actors are supposed to be playing people speaking their native language, not people with heavy accents (one of the truly grating things about Schindler's list was that some of the Germans spoke very nice English and others took on a phony German accent, while others spoke German, which really didn't make sense). With regard to all films about Rome, is it desirable that the actors should speak English with a "Roman" or Italian accent?
shareAusten, not Austin.
shareIt is a British film.
share