Bad German accent - Mrs. Miniver (1942) Discussion

[–] OzarkGrey 14 years ago

The actor, Helmut Dantine was born and raised in Austria. Although certainly not a heavy German accent, it still sounded more German to me. The actor could easily have grown up in Eastern Ausria and had a more Slavic accent.

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[–] Mandyjam 13 years ago

Hitler had an Austrian accent.

"great minds think differently"

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

I don't see how you can call the German accent of someone who's a native speaker "bad". That's ridiculous. Dantine, as has been pointed out, was an Austrian, and a refugee from the Nazis. His accent would have been slightly different from a Low German one but it's certainly "correct". As far as the film goes, by 1940 Austria was part of the Reich and tens of thousands of Austrians served in the German armed forces.

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[–] mikekrit62 11 years ago

Reminds me how "experts" were critical of Maureen O'Hara's accent in The Quiet Man, despite the fact that she was born and raised in Dublin.

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[–] pt100 11 years ago

I lived in Austria for quite a while in the mid 1950s, and I heard many native Austrians speaking English. They sounded just like him. Of course the small amount of German he spoke was also perfect. There are many dialects of German spoken in both Germany and Austria, so it's hard to say one is the correct one, although some would argue that "high German" is better than "low German."

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[–] hobnob53 11 years ago

All languages have regionalisms, dialects, accents, pronunciations, slang, variations (such as minor spelling differences) between different countries, and so on. None of them is "incorrect", though in many languages there are some so-called preferred or "received" pronunciations (e.g., the King's English, Parisian French, and so forth). But as long as a language's dialects are the same tongue and follow the same rules of grammar, all are "correct".

Back to the OP's comment: Interestingly, the year after Mrs. Miniver, in the film Mission to Moscow, actor Helmut Dantine did play a Slav -- a Russian, to be exact -- and spoke with a reasonably convincing Russian-sounding accent!

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[–] pt100 11 years ago

He also has an interesting bio, from which I lifted this:

"The young Dantine was a fervent anti-fascist/anti-Nazi activist in Vienna. As a leader in the anti-Nazi youth movement the 19-year old was summarily rounded up and imprisoned at the Rosserlaende concentration camp. Family influence persuaded a physician to grant him a medical release that June and he was immediately sent to Los Angeles to stay with the only friend they had in America. Dantine joined the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout who was struck by Dantine's dark good looks."

Thus did fate launch his film career. When his star faded, he became a successful producer. Sadly, he died of a heart attack at a relatively early age.

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[–] hobnob53 11 years ago

Yes, it's ironic that most of the German and Austrian refugees from Hitler wound up playing Nazis when they came to Hollywood. But most of them didn't mind doing so, since they felt it was their way to show Americans how evil the Nazis were. At least Helmut Dantine got to play two good-guy wartime roles -- the Russian in Mission to Moscow, and the luckless Bulgarian husband whom Humphrey Bogart helps win his and his wife's passage money in a couple of fixed roulette spins in Casablanca.

Even after his acting career faded (he married producer Joseph M. Schenck's daughter and eventually assumed control of his company), Dantine did act occasionally, in movies such as Operation Crossbow (1965 -- as yet another fanatical Nazi) and the film with my favorite title, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), in which he played the wealthy Mexican (!) landowner who ordered delivery of the titular noggin. However, his most unusual role has to have been playing the stranded space visitor in the low-budget 1954 British film Stranger From Venus, with Patricia Neal in a talky rehash of her superior The Day the Earth Stood Still. Venusian or not, his Austrian accent was on full display!

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[–] jporter-6 11 years ago

You make an excellent remark about German actors who had fled Germany often ended up playing Nazis. In American war films of the era, Japanese soldiers and civilians were often played by Chinese and other Asian actors. It is indeed ironic.

Perhaps one of the most ironic situations was, after the war, Ricardo Montelban playing a highly-regarded Japanese actor in Sayonara.

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[–] hobnob53 11 years ago

At least many of the actors who played Nazis were actually Germans. As you say, during the war Japanese characters were played by Chinese, Koreans and other Orientals, as they were then called -- that is, when they weren't played by whites. The reason, of course, is that most Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camps after being "removed" from the West Coast, in one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

The casting of Ricardo Montalban in Sayonara in 1957 was a bit weird, but this was typical of Hollywood standards of the day. Aside from sometimes having whites play Asians, it was an unspoken but ironclad rule that, while a white male could be shown on screen having a love affair with an Asian girl, it was forbidden to show an Asian man having an affair with a white woman. The first was considered sexy and seductive, the second a racial outrage. You never saw the real thing in Hollywood until, I think, Sam Fuller's 1959 film The Crimson Kimono.

Anyway, even when the audience knew the actor playing the Asian was really white and not actually Chinese or Japanese, the only way it was acceptable to show an interracial romance between an Asian man and a white woman was by having a white actor play the Asian. Sayonara was the perfect example: it was okay for Marlon Brando to have a romance with Miiko Taka, but as far as Patricia Owens was concerned, her "Oriental" lover could only be played by a white guy.

Using a bad Japanese accent!

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[–] Prismark10 10 years ago

I expect a German/Austrian born accent to have a decent stab at it and it was good enough for me.

Its that man again!!

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