MovieChat Forums > The Seventh Veil (1946) Discussion > Peter is supposed to be American??

Peter is supposed to be American??

posted 18 years ago by Eva1-1
7 replies | jump to latest

What's the deal with having a Scottish actor play an American when he can't even keep his accent in character? About 30 minutes into the film, after Hugh McDermott's character Peter (who is said to be an American) dances with Francesca at a night club and they're talking, he starts a sentence sounding like he's from New York and then the lovely Scottish brogue kicks in at the end of the sentence. How did the director or assistant director or somebody not miss this, either at the time or during the daily rushes? Was the schedule so tight that they couldn't have him film one scene over again? I haven't finished watching the entire film so I don't know if he does it again, but it IS very noticeable (at least to an American ear -- perhaps that's the answer, since it was a U.K.-made film, no one on the production noticed it).

[–] 18 years ago

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[–] Eva1-1 18 years ago

Well I'm guessing because it was a U.K. film with not a very high budget (James Mason wasn't that famous yet so it probably wasn't much to hire him). I'm not saying an American should have been used because there are so many wonderful British actors who have done and do American accents perfectly all the time. One that comes to mind is _In the Bedroom (2001)_ (qv) actor 'Tom Wilkinson' (qv). I had no idea he was British until reading it on this site. I just think McDermott was not the best choice.

[–] 18 years ago

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[–] 18 years ago

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[–] The_Dying_Flutchman 18 years ago

No one seems to know that this was made during WW II and American actors were in very short supply on the English side of the pond. Even so its only been in the last decade or two that British actors have actually managed to get the American accent down.

Nothing exists more beautifully than nothing.

[–] rexshard93 18 years ago

Maybe because they didn't get an American actor for the role. You should check Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964). Sean Connery plays as an American in this movie.

[–] Midgegirl 8 years ago

As others have said- even for its time, this was a very cheap film to make and made during the war when the pool of choice was smaller, but given all that I've often wondered why make him American at all- why not have him be whatever the actor is? And I suspect it was partly to give the British audience a sense of the romance and excitement that foreigners to any country bring, as well as tapping into the cultural stereotypes that they convey.

Back then, American characters were a symbol of relaxed modernity, and Europeans were often cast as the sophisticated intellectuals: Nicholas is the only Brit in Francesca's immediate circle and clearly the archetypal repressed Englishman still living in the past in his forbidding Victorian home. That Francesca was originally scripted to end up with Peter shows the forward-thinking ending they'd initially intended.

ETA- I think surrounding Francesca with romantic foreigners also befits the heroine of a gothic melodrama; apart from Nicholas and the servants she barely mixes with fellow Brits- it all adds to the ivory tower fantasy setting of the story.