When we first encounter Pachacutec, he sounds like he is really trying to talk in an educated, very posh English, way. He never talks "so English" ever again in the movie - so what on earth was the reason he talked in that strange way in the first place for?
shareHe thought he was playing a Druid?
shareYes Haddock, just looked at the scene again and Michael Pate sounds nothing like a Peruvian.
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
Well Nicole Maurey doesn't sound anything like a Romanian, but that is beside the point. Strangely, Michael Pate is deliberately trying to talk like an upper-class Englishman, which baffles me. Nicole just had to sound "slightly foreign" for her role, which is acceptable, I suppose. Pate is doing the opposite - he couldn't be further away from his character's dialect if he chose to speak fluent eskimo!
shareYeah, he kept saying things like "Sy, seenyour" and stuff. No aptitude for Spanish.
Now, his Comanche and Apache accents in westerns, they were spot on. Hearing those, I'd have sworn he'd just ridden his horse across the Rio Bravo from Melbou-- I mean, El Paso.
"¡Sí sí!"
hob, my learned friend, I take it you were joking with your last remark in which you state that Pate says things like "Sy, seenyour" and stuff. Pate doesn't talk like that at all in Secret of the Incas, my whole point is he is trying to sound like an educated Englishman, which is very strange considering that his character, Pachacutec, is a native Peruvian.
shareNo, of course I was joking, HCH, but while your point is absolutely correct I'm just surprised Pate's accent causes any surprise.
Knowing the unchanging Hollywood mindset, a character such as Pachacutec, supposedly more educated and erudite than the average Peruvian Indian of the time, would have to speak in some recognizably (to western ears) "cultured" tones, some speech pattern or effect that would immediately convey to the audience that this is a learned and civilized man of wisdom as well as schooling.
With that in mind, what better way to do so than by having him affect an "English" accent? And not just any of the myriad accents found in England -- no Cockney or Geordie or Black Country or Glaswegian or other such regionalism, impenetrable even to some of your fellow citizens. No, Pachacutec would speak the Queen's English (in a King's tones, of course: a high-pitched voice would rather undermine his authority). Yes, Pate would place a thin layer of some generalized, indistinct and probably inaccurate "Latin American" pronunciation atop this Englishness, but his essential accent would be the one that would represent those concepts of learning and sophistication that to most western, and particularly American, audiences are ideally realized and really idealized in the speech of the well-born Brit.
This is why, in Biblical pictures for instance, Hollywood has usually cast Brits in the upper crust roles and Americans in the more common, dirty roles. (People made a big deal of this in Gladiator as if they had never seen Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis and God knows how many other such films...which they probably hadn't.) Brits are usually chosen to play elegant villains in movies as well, and as you know there are other examples of this casting cliché. American movies set in America with strictly American characters often use British actors to play upper-class lawyers, business leaders, media people and the like, and have done for many decades. Aussie Errol Flynn always spoke in a sort-of English accent, even when he played a western marshal or General Custer. Cary Grant never disguised his accent, which whatever it was was decidedly not an American one.
See, as far as Americans are concerned, you lot (or at least those residing in a small but elect section of the southern portion of your island) are the epitome of eloquence, erudition, learning and sophistication: not because this is true, but because you make it sound as thought it's true. More than that, deserved -- the natural order of things. Under your influence an American will even use a phrase like "you lot", which we never say over here. You make our language sound not only elegant but appropriately snooty: the politely disdainful yet ever tactful Englishman, looking down his nose at the rest of the world with a detached air of self-bemused indulgence, figuratively patting the ordinary run of mankind on the head with the sympathetic condescension of a principal of an academy for backward children, comforted in the certain knowledge that God is an Englishman -- all that post-imperial yet still-imperious rubbish.
On a personal note, this is also the reason I encouraged my English wife to go into voice work, at which she is now excelling, on the grounds that Americans will, literally, buy anything anyone with any sort of pleasant-sounding English accent will sell or tell us. Verbally, she too is now regularly patting her new-found New World compatriots on their rather dull and pointy heads.
So, even when the character is about as far removed from a Brit as imaginable, it's still an easy out for a filmmaker to put those dulcet BBC tones into the mouths of Peruvians, Polynesians, Panamanians, Pennsylvanians, and, if it comes to that, Plutonians. It's similar to the way the studios used to portray Nazi or Communist spies: with the doleful reality usually too banal, they fell back onto that hoary old Hollywood stock character, The Gangster, with the same old concerns as their gangsters always had -- dough, babes and the rest -- only with atom-bomb secrets thrown into the mix.
Using that same tried-and-true approach, the "Englishman", even in thick ethnic disguise, serves well as an all-purpose stock character contrived to insinuate into the minds of the viewers the intuitively-understood and -accepted image of someone haughty, well-born and all-knowing. In other words, in the admittedly unlikely but still serviceable case of this film, Pachacutec -- with Englishisms. A character he fits to a T.
High tea, no doubt.
For Secret of the Incas, I'm hobnob53.
Great post hob, really enjoyed it.
Haddock, what I find strange is that Michael Pate is supposed to be Yma Sumac's brother, and Rosa Rey is their mother. Well, dear old Rosa was Spanish, Pate was an Aussie, and Yma Sumac was Peruvian (despite what Winchell and all the other clowns claim about her birthplace).
What a United Nations Family Tree!
Come to think of it, Yma Sumac is the only Peruvian with a speaking role in SOTI, and the movie is set in Cusco, Peru!
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
It is explained in the movie when Harry and Elena first meet him. He learned to speak English at the University. I did not did not find his English "very posh" or different than he speaks it in a dozen or more TV shows and movies I have seen Michael Pate in when he is not playing Indians.
share"Diosprometheus" is correct, Pachacutec explains his accent immediately to Harry and Elena, he supposedly learnt to speak such good English at Cuzco University, of which the rector was Albert A. Giesecke, who worked on the background of the movie with Heston in Cuzco in June 1953.
Just before Michael Pate played the Quechua, Pachacutec, in SECRET OF THE INCAS, he played an English reporter with an Irish surname, Dooley, in HOUDINI, but spoke in exactly the same manner in both films! Pate was set up by Tony Curtis to challenge him (Houdini) to escape from a supposedly escape-proof Scotland Yard prison, and Pate shouts out at the end of Houdini's act that he is a fake, etc. Pate's accent is exactly the same as when he is playing Pachacutec a few months later.
An interesting article about Pate filming SECRET OF THE INCAS appeared in the Austalian newspaper "Sydney Morning Herald" on 7 January 1954, in which Pate discusses accents in movies.
Australians who hope to make good in Hollywood should get rid completely of their Australian accent, says the former Sydney actor, Michael Pate. Pate, after three years in Hollywood, should be in a position to know. Last month he began working on his 20th film since he arrived from Australia. It is called "The Legend of the Incas," and Pate for the first time will be one of the stars. Paramount is paying him about 3,000 dollars a week for the role. Three years in the film capital has taught this 33 year old Australian some of the pitfalls there. Now he is one of the most succesful Australia-trained actors working in Hollywood. "Possibly the worst drawback to Australians in Hollywood is any vestige of an Australian accent," says Pate. "To American ears there is no difference between the Australian and Cockney mode of speech. American directors won't even listen to you, no matter how good your acting, if the Australian drawl shows. I don't mean you must have an American accent. It's better to eliminate any trace of accent if that is possible." His own professional accent has developed into a cross between Mayfair English and mid-Western drawl. In his current film he is supposed to speak like a Peruvian.
I wrote to Michael Pate about his accent in the film, and he answered my letter, enclosing a signed photo, by telling me that "S#@J=0K#'R" advised him to speak in that way. Pate's handwriting was atrocious and for the life of me I cannot work out what name those bits of scribble represent. Its another Secret of the Incas, I'm afraid.
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
I did not did not find his English "very posh" or different than he speaks it in a dozen or more TV shows and movies I have seen Michael Pate in when he is not playing Indians.
James Byrne says that Pate sounded the same when he was playing a London reporter in "Houdini" as he did in SOTI when he was playing the noble Pachacutec, a Peruvian living in Machu Picchu.
Well, I find that bloody ridiculous!
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
I tend to side with James on this one.
Pate really didn't vary his accent very much from film to film. To me it isn't that his accent in SOTI sounds "Peruvian" (whatever that is). It's more his mode of speaking -- stolid, deliberate, like a combination of someone whose first language isn't English and who is a high-born person who speaks with inherent formality and dignity. It was similar to his Indian accents, though in SOTI he's given a wider vocabulary.
But overall Pate's accent always sounded pretty much the same to me, no matter what the role or film.
But has it occurred to anyone that, as we come from different nations and particular sections of each of those nations, we hear an accent differently from one another? As an American my ear isn't nearly as attuned to the many nuances and variations of an "English" accent (including its Aussie, Enzedder and other offshoots) as you Os, or James, or Haddock. On the other hand, I could probably differentiate between a Canadian and an American accent better than you fellows, or between various U.S. accents.
In Pate's case, as he said he had to obliterate his Australian accent in order to get work in Hollywood. I'm currently reading a biography of Rod Taylor (someone I've always liked) and he had to do the same thing. (Before he left Australia in 1954 he had a reputation for being adept at squelching his Aussie accent for different roles.) Also at that time Australians had a tremendous inferiority complex about themselves and their country and this included the way they spoke. When they relocated abroad they were intent on losing their Strine accent and mostly did. Actors especially reshaped their speech to be something closer to an English or American accent, depending on where they settled.
I can almost always tell when a Brit or Aussie or someone is attempting an American accent, as I'm sure you can when an American or Aussie tries to imitate some form of British accent. But once in a while I get stumped. I remember when I first saw one of my favorite movies, L.A. Confidential, and had no idea who these new guys Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were. I was stunned when I learned later that they were Australians. Even today I can't find a trace of non-Americanisms in their enunciation, perhaps the best fake American accents I've ever heard. Neither Pate nor Taylor ever sounded quite that good.
I never liked Rod Taylor since I read Kenneth More's autobiography, and his strange accent in WORLD WITHOUT END was quite ridiculous.
But you are right about Pate in SECRET OF THE INCAS, hob. He actually did sound like someone whose first language wasn't English, but he also sounded very dignified, as befits someone named after the great Inca warrior, Pachacutec.
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
Is Rod Taylor a boozer?
He looks just like one of my Irish uncles, who could drink anyone under the table.
Haha James, Rod Taylor's weird accent in WWE, how could the director let him get away with talking like that?
Has anybody seen that "Frasier" episode when those yank actors are trying to be brits? They even made Dick Van Dyke sound like a Cockney!
Has anybody seen Michael Pate in one of his movies before he went to Hollywood and turned into an injun?
Did he speak in a broad Aussie accent in those?
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
Yes indeed, Os, Rod Taylor was very definitely a boozer...and a notorious womanizer to boot. I mean, he is an Aussie, for Pete's (or is that Pate's?) sake. They are not known as reluctant pub patrons.
About his accent in WWE, please see my reply to James above. (Amended: that reply came out below!)
I think the Frasier episode (which I vaguely remember seeing in the 90s) was meant to be a joke, wasn't it -- with deliberately bad accents? My wife is always making fun of Dick Van Dyke's over-the-top "Cockney" accent in Mary Poppins. Even most Americans found it ridiculous, loud and inauthentic, but here too from what I understand it was supposed to be that way, overdone and artificial. Not that I think Van Dyke, a talented performer, would have been much better had he tried to play it straight, or straighter. Anyway, I don't like the movie and haven't seen it in decades, and his fake Cockney is one of the off-putting reasons for me. The biggest is Julie Andrews.
Michael Pate made only a couple of movies in Australia before coming to America in the early 50s. I doubt his films have had much if any circulation outside Australia. Like most Aussie actors of his day he made his money mainly in radio, which was huge in Australia before television came in in 1956. Rod Taylor basically had a parallel career pattern. I think once he returned home for good his Aussie accent resumed its language-ravaging march, so you could probably get a good idea of his pre-Hollywood speech by seeing him from the late 60s onward.
Pate was so dark and swarthy-looking that it's not surprising he played many ethnic (mostly Indian) roles, or villainous whites. But he was pretty talented and did a lot of writing and directing behind the scenes, in Hollywood and later back in Australia. His film career was clearly secondary. I guess he returned to Australia in the late 60s after something like 17 years in America because the TV and film industry was maturing Down Under and he felt he could succeed better in a smaller venue, especially given his extensive Hollywood experience. He seems to have been right, but he never did have any sort of real film career back home, concentrating on television and plays. He was obviously very versatile and respected within the profession but was never widely recognized by the public, except probably in Australia.
I wonder how much notice any of us would have paid him had he not happened to be cast in Secret of the Incas.
Look at this stupid site, the ten best Michael Pate films, it has "Secret of the Incas" at number 5, two below a tv show called "Casino Royale"!
http://www.flickchart.com/Charts.aspx?actor=Michael+Pate&perpage=1 0
and how about this, 540 minutes of Pate talking about his career
http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/13638451?selectedversion=NBD5653649
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
It's actually a list of the 13 best Michael Pate films, which if nothing else is a curious number. (To be precise, it's 13 films and TV shows.) One look and you can see that Pate did not have a particularly distinguished career, at least in terms of the films he appeared in.
SOTI may have been a bit low at number 5, but in fact the number 4 film, The Killer is Loose, is quite a good thriller. The problem is this, like almost all these selections, is hardly a "Michael Pate film". Sure, he's in them, but mostly in secondary roles, and in none of them is his performance really outstanding. Nor is he so good as to be irreplaceable.
Hondo is a decent western though not one of my favorites, but Pate's role is notable. The Maze is just downright weird, enjoyable in its bizarre way, but here too Pate is incidental. The Oklahoman and Tower of London are both kind of second-rate, and Pate is still secondary. The Australian stuff (all of it post-1968) is unfamiliar to me so I can't judge its quality. These films may feature more of Pate than the Hollywood films did but while they might for that reason loom larger on his resumé that's no indication of how good they are.
I'm just amazed anybody bothered to compile a Michael Pate Top Ten (or Thirteen) Best Films list. This guy was hardly a major actor. To put it mildly, it requires a lot of dredging to find enough candidates, and most of them are still unimpressive.
I didn't bother to click on to the link of Pate talking about his career for 540 minutes. I just wonder what they talked about during the remaining 520.
I think you are a bit hard on Michael Pate, hob. Admittedly, his biggest role up to 1954 was in SOTI, but I liked some of his tv appearences, especially the Adam West "Batman" shows. I wish they were available on dvd!
Pate was in some bad movies, but the most disappointing to me was "The Great Sioux Massacre" and "PT 109." What a total snore-fest that was, Cliff Robertson as the young Kennedy.
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
Well, I wasn't knocking Pate's abilities, but he wasn't an important star. Even in his prime most people didn't know his name. I think he was respected within the industry but as a public face he kind of melded into the background.
One neat role he had was in the 1957 drama Something of Value with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Pate played a viciously racist planter and was relentlessly nasty and scary. He gets his in the end. That was actually a much bigger and better part than Pachacutec, which I don't at all agree was his biggest or most important role. He had bigger parts elsewhere, though the "size" of the films varied.
PT 109 was way too long but was very much of its time, extremely typical of the early 60s. I'm just surprised Jack Warner hired a third-rate director (Leslie H. "Who?" Martinson) to helm the thing and didn't spring for a better script. But it was a big hit.
Two minor bits of trivia: Ty Hardin, who played JFK's second in command, in real life wound up in Europe for several years, getting what acting jobs he could while running various private enterprises, such as a chain of landromats (laundrettes to you) in Spain, thereby putting the country's beating-the-clothes-on-rocks-in-the-river industry out of business. He later moved back to the States and settled in Arizona among other places, where he became involved in right-wing militia groups planning for the overthrow of, I don't know, somebody, holding fake military maneuvers and generally alarming people with their display of weaponry against The Day. He also once famously said something like, "Every morning I look in the mirror and thank God He made me so perfect." Yep, indeed He did.
The other thing is that Kennedy's real commander in the Pacific wasn't the character played by James Gregory, who is fictitious, but a man who in later years belittled Kennedy for political reasons, ostentatiously claiming in a studied offhand manner that he never had anything to do with him since "he was just another PT boat skipper under my command." That man was John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's law partner, 1968 campaign manager and Attorney General, who later went to prison over Watergate-related crimes...admittedly hardly a distinction among Nixon staffers.
Maybe Pate could have played him in All the President's Men. But by then he was back home, involved with Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Better the marsupial.
What did Kenneth More write about Taylor in his autobiography? I assume it came from the time they worked together on Dark of the Sun (1968).
Pages 207-208 from the Kenneth More autobiography MORE OR LESS describes the tensions during the filming of THE MERCENARIES.
Then quite unexpectedly I was offered a role in the film, THE MERCENARIES, with Rod Taylor and James Brown. This was about white mercenaries fighting in Africa, and I was to play a drunken doctor. It would largely be shot in location in Jamaica. I read the script, and mine was a 'nothing' part. Anyone who could remember his lines and pretend to be drunk could have played it, but anyone wasn't being offered the chance. I was. I had nothing else, so I signed up for this. It was one of my less happy acting experiences.
Rod Taylor was the star opposite Yvette Mimieux. Jimmy Brown, a once famous American football player was playing second fiddle to him and not greatly relishing this situation. I was fourth on the totem pole, a long way beneath both of them. Rod Taylor told me proudly: 'I had Johnny Mills in my last film,' not, as someone might have said, 'I have been filming with Johnny Mills.' After THE MERCENARIES I had a feeling he would tell the cast of his next picture, 'I had Kenneth More in my last film.' I felt I just didn't belong.
Jack Cardiff, the director, was rather lax about starting each day. If Rod or James weren't quite ready, we would all wait until they were. This meant that some mornings we started at eight or nine, or even ten o'clock. This sort of casual indiscipline spread through the whole unit. It was not a good atmosphere in which to work, and encouraged tensions.
Rod Taylor had been an amateur boxing champion before he became an actor, and he and James Brown threatened to settle disputes with their fists. Taylor fancied his chance of knocking out Brown, which was more than I did, because Brown was six foot four inches, and built like a solid brick privy. They appeared to hate each other. Maybe they were only acting. If so, they must have been better actors than I thought. And all the time the rain teemed down like something out of a Somerset Maugham short story. We were soaked all day on location, and at night we only had each other's company in the hotel.
Everyone's opinion was asked about different shots, except mine. And yet I had appeared in more films than the rest of the cast put together. If I had a good line in the script, it was cut down, and then pruned, and finally it would disappear altogether. But I consoled myself with the fact that I was being paid. This was a job. I had to accept that the wheel of fortune turns, and whereas I had been lucky in being at the top for years, now I was underneath.
hob, if you like I can send you the book as a little gift. What does it say about THE MERCENARIES in the Rod Taylor biography?
I will have to stop typing now as I have slipped my disc again and I'm in total agony.
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
The Taylor bio quotes several of the passages you reproduced above from More's book. It also confirms that Taylor was being obnoxious at that point in his career and that the film was a very difficult one to make. Cardiff and the producer (I forget his name) got along with Taylor but did find him hard to deal with. He did keep monkeying with the script. Supposedly when he heard he would be re-teamed with his Time Machine leading lady, Yvette Mimieux, Taylor asked, "Has she learned to act yet?" The producer says he doesn't specifically recall that exchange but that it would have been a typical Taylor comment at that time.
He also said Taylor's mellowed a lot since but was very much the big-shot star in the late 60s. Even so, Taylor was dedicated to making the film. For one scene he jumped out of a second-story window (first story to you) into a jeep and tore ligaments in his foot and ankle. He was rushed to a hospital in Kingston where he was treated and told to lay off for six weeks. Three days later he was back on the set, loaded with painkillers and doing his own stunts. The crew couldn't fault him on that score, but he was too self-centered for most people then.
The book also reports that, once back in the States, Taylor and Brown finally did come to blows in the parking lot of the Playboy Mansion! Guess what? Taylor knocked Brown out!
How does that strike you, former pugilist?
Dark of the Sun (yes, it was called The Mercenaries in the UK, same title as the book) didn't do too well in 1968 but has since become very highly regarded, both as a film and for Taylor's performance, widely considered one of his best. It's quite good and bloody, very tense and unsettling. More was good in it, and while I can't say how much his role really was cut, it's still a good part and he was fine in it. Obviously he disliked the experience of making the film and clearly that colored his opinion and his memory of it, but his wasn't a role that required as little as he says, nor one just anyone could do. He's unjustly harsh about the movie, perhaps understandably, but nevertheless unfairly.
James, I have always wanted to read More's autobiography. I would like to take you up on your offer but fear it'd be much more than "a little gift". May we discuss this privately?
First, get that disc well! Everything else can wait its turn. Take a positive attitude. Hey! Think of Rod Taylor jumping out a window and punching Jim Brown!
hob, I like the sound of that Rock Hudson movie about the Mau Mau, hope its on dvd. Thanks for the info on Ty Hardin, I thought he had found religion after his movie career finished, I seem to remember reading that in a newspaper years ago. From what you wrote, he doesn't sound all that religious to me.
Rod Taylor sounds like a real obnoxious berk, even for an Australian. I suppose Michael Pate can be classified as a cultured Australian. He wasn't a boozer and he could read and write!
Get better soon Jimbo!
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
Thanks Os!
Yes, that Hudson - Michael Pate jungle movie sounds interesting, and I'm certainly thinking of buying the Italian dvd. Is it a good movie, hob?
hob, can you pm your email address please, and I'll forward the Kenneth More autobiography to you as soon as possible. I think you'll enjoy it.
I have just realised that Michael Pate made a movie set in Australia for Ealing Studios. I'm going to HMV tomorrow to see if they have it in - I'll check out his Australian accent in that one.
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
James, first -- how are you feeling?
Second, there's still an HMV? I thought they closed.
Third, the Hudson film Something of Value is a good one. I just told Os it happened to be on here late last night and I watched a little of it before going to bed. But to be precise, it isn't a "jungle movie" except insofar as it takes place in Kenya. It's no Secret of the Incas, The Naked Jungle, Jivaro or anything of that sort. It's a very good and rather brutal drama (with a few melodramatics) set during the Mau Mau uprising. It's somewhat similar to the 1955 Dirk Bogarde film Simba.
I also told Os that the only R2 DVD I've seen is a Spanish (not Italian) one. Of course it's the same Region as yours in the UK but the US DVD might be better if you have an R0 player, which I assume you do. Either way the DVD's inexpensive.
You know, when I read of Pate's early Australian films it crossed my mind that one or more might have been released by Ealing, the way The Overlanders was in 1946. Virtually none of the Ealing films is available in the US (outside of the comedies), but I have quite a number of the UK DVDs from the studio (my favorites are The Night My Number Came Up and The Man in the Sky), so would like to know what you find out.
I'll PM you re "More or Less". By the way, who was Less? I understand More really didn't like him and lost no opportunity to knock Less.
hob
I have just this minute sent you two books on Kenneth More: "More or Less" and "Happy go Lucky," hope you enjoy them, mate.
Enclosed in the package is a 6 or 7 page hand written letter containing the facts of the recent dispute that happened regarding my website on SECRET OF THE INCAS. Please excuse my handwriting - I have slipped my disc and was in total agony when I was writing it. Still, my handwriting is much better than Michael Pate's, even under that handicap. The lady at the Post Office said the parcel would arrive in New York in about 5-6 working days, so with luck, you might be reading Kenneth More's autobiographies this time next week.
Let me know when you get the books, will you please hob?
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
James -- I'll PM you re the books and other things. You're extraordinarily kind, mate!
Meanwhile, have you ordered Something of Value yet?
Thanks hob, and you too, are kind for sending me those Heston stamps.
SOMETHING OF VALUE has just been ordered from Amazon.com.
It's much more expensive than the foreign one, but I seem to have too many American movies with foreign titles on my shelves now. So I'll stick with the good old USA from now on. America won last night in the World Cup, which is more than our lot did the other night, hob!
http://www.secretoftheincas.co.ukhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
Yes, movies is about all we can do well these days. I'll be interested in what you think of the film.
I'm not much interested in sports, including the classic American ones (baseball, our football), but even I heard about the results of our respective nations' performances in the World Cup. I believe the guys at my favorite Italian restaurant, with whom I had had an extensive conversation about the games a few days earlier, are celebrating Italy's win over England, since they told me that Italy always loses to England.
You have to come over here and try American, and specifically New York, pizza some day. Even the Italians adopted this variation and prefer it. There's nothing remotely like it in the UK!
Though even British pizza beats Peruvian hamster. No wonder Yma's voice could reach such a high pitch. Happened every time they set the dish before her.
Incidentally, where is Pachacutec and his "English" accent in all this???
Os, that Hudson Mau Mau film, Something of Value, is available on DVD here in the States. It was originally part of a four-film Sidney Poitier set but can be bought as a separate mow. I checked Amazon UK and as I suspected it's never been released in Britain, though there is a Region 2 disc from (where else?) Spain. Assuming you have a Region 0 player you might do better with the US R1. It's not expensive.
Curiously, it was on here late last night, part of TCM's salute to Rock Hudson, who's their Star of the Month. I watched a few minutes of it before going to bed. I didn't make it to Michael Pate's first scene but they show him and the other major cast members at the beginning and he looked really threatening! Most of the major cast is English, Canadian or Australian: Dana Wynter, Wendy Hiller, Robert Beatty, Pate, etc. I guess they figured this story was best handled by the colonizers and their colonized!
Rod Taylor does sound like a berk (a word I haven't heard since my first visit to Britain in 1974!), but I still always liked him in movies and think he should have gone further. But reading this book gives me a look at more of his personal side than I knew about. I had always heard some of these things but never had so much detail or knew how pervasive or consistent his obnoxious behavior was or how out of control an ego he had. This also played a big part in his career mistakes and helps explain why his career never quite got where it seemed to be heading. Still, his attitude never showed on the screen and I've always found him an appealing screen personality and fine actor. And he does seem to have mellowed in the twilight of his life. We all make mistakes, no?
"I suppose Michael Pate can be classified as a cultured Australian. He wasn't a boozer and he could read and write!"
Now, there's high praise indeed! A literate Aussie. Well, we know Pate wrote plays and shows, so presumably he could spell. Actually, one of the things they said about Rod Taylor was that he was constantly rewriting scripts and even his detractors said he was good at it and usually made his films or TV shows the better for it.
Oh, don't be misled by unhinged militia and gun groups calling themselves "Christian". A great many, even most, do just that. Most of the most violent hate groups armed to the teeth and threatening murder and race war in this country also claim to be ardent Christians. They're white supremacist, anti-Semitic groups who advocate killing and in some cases have done so. Many make the KKK (which is practically non-existent today, and which of course was an ostentatiously "Christian" organization) seem rational and restrained. Quite a few have their own version of what they call Christianity as part of their ideology, masquerading as religion.
You may have heard about that stand-off in Nevada concerning this rancher Cliven Bundy's refusal to obey the law and pay his fees for grazing cattle on federal land. When Fox News called him "a hero standing up for his rights" and many Republican politicians flocked to the microphones to second that label, hundreds of armed men and women descended upon his ranch prepared to murder federal agents enforcing the law. These guys not only trained guns on law enforcement officials and threatened to kill people but put up illegal roadblocks and stopped cars on a nearby state highway, which the Republican Governor refused to have removed. The right had no issue with any of this until after Bundy made overtly racist remarks that the establishment right couldn't be seen publicly defending, so they abruptly backed away and denounced him for his remarks...though not for his law-breaking stance or extremist associations. But had any of them cared to actually investigate anything, they would have found that all these groups were racist, white supremacist organizations with a long history of violence and promoting hatred, and almost all of them advertise themselves as "Christian".
Did you subsequently hear about the murders of three people (two of them police officers) in Las Vegas a few days ago? The killers were a married couple who were violent pro-gun anti-government extremists who had been at Bundy's ranch before deciding to ambush two cops having lunch, then killing an innocent bystander who tried to stop them before the wife killed her husband and then herself. (The bystander was on line in a Walmart when the couple burst in and ordered everyone out. Instead he decided to act the hero and pulled the concealed weapon he carried on them, whereupon they shot him dead. So much for the head of the NRA's statement after the Newtown school massacre in 2012 that "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.") The Bundy people claimed they had asked the pair to leave the ranch because they were too extreme even for them, but there's no evidence for that and in fact these people's beliefs and behavior were no different from what most of the Bundys' supporters among these "Christian" militia groups espouse. And despite the fall-off of Republican and establishment conservative support for Bundy these psychos are still sitting around Bundy's place, ready by their own procalamation to kill.
Just like any good, God-fearing Christian.
Conservatives in this country rail against murderous Islamic extremists abroad but seem to have no problem with murderous Christian extremists at home...at least until they become embarrassing from a purely public relations prospective.
What did Kenneth More write about Taylor in his autobiography? I assume it came from the time they worked together on Dark of the Sun (1968).
The bio I'm reading is in many ways surprisingly critical of Taylor. While in general the author seems to like his subject, he writes quite frankly, even brutally, about his many personal and professional peccadilloes and choices and the effects these had on his career and personal life. It's anything but a whitewash. I read about the making of Dark of the Sun and that came at a time when Taylor was riding high, and I gather he was difficult to work with then.
Even so, I like him as a performer. Perhaps as a man, at least back in his prime, not so much, though he seems to have mellowed. Most of his co-workers, even those critical of him, seemed to fundamentally like or at least respect him. And I'm sure Kenneth More, like everyone else, had his less attractive sides.
But it's interesting you found Taylor's accent in WWE "quite ridiculous", James, because that goes to my previous point about how each of us hears accents or speech patterns differently. It's never stated in the movie but I've always assumed Taylor was supposed to be English in that film. From what I read in this book he at first balked at playing a Brit (he had just played one in Giant) but as a newcomer who needed the work basically had to do as he was told. Anyway, to me his accent always sounded a bit overdone and unnatural (I saw the film again just the other week) but I would still identify it as "English". But you guys are of course a lot more attuned to the accents of Great Britain and would spot its artificiality at once. In Hollywood he usually played Americans and while I think his "American" accent (professionally and personally) is pretty good I could always tell that it wasn't quite natural -- even as a kid, before I knew he was Australian.
I gather the director of WWE, Edward Bernds, liked Taylor a lot, found him highly professional, and came to favor him during production. By contrast, Bernds hated Hugh Marlowe, whom he thought very lazy and unprofessional...an assessment that has always surprised me.
My guess would be it's his one "take" that the director forget to reshoot it after yelling at him to drop his Oxford accent.
shareMaybe Pachacutec was just trying to prove a point to the new arrivals on their first meeting. As soon as he let them know that he wasn't an ignorant peasent he then reverted back to his normal speech mode.
"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston
Are you implying that Pachacutec sounded like a peasant after his first sentence? Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion.
shareNo - implying that he suddenly changed from a posh English dialect in his first scene to a strange sounding Indian for the rest of it.
The internet is for lonely people. People should live. Charlton Heston
Pachacutec couldn't possibly be described as a "peasant."
Pate gave him a noble bearing - and he seemed to be in charge of the community at Machu Picchu.
Maybe, like all "natives", he knows that the way to handle gullible western intruders is to pretend he only speaks pidgin English. That way they'll think he's quaint, simple and harmless, someone impressed by trinkets instead of cash. Of course he's careful to stash his Oxford degree behind one of those sunburst replicas he keeps "discovering" for thieves and archeologists.
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Having been to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, you have no idea how right you are, hob!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
Yeah, but I'm still not gonna take that plastic sunburst you got stuck with off your hands, Señor Byrnes!
¡Cincuenta pesos del caballero inglés! ¡Ay, caramba!
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Heck, if one of those tat sellers in Cuzco actually sold a Sunburst, even a plastic one, I'd buy the darned thing, hob. Thats how nutty I am!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
Me, I'd opt for the 7-foot-tall wooden replica of Pachacutec.
shareAnd how would you transport THAT through customs hob?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSPcAyCgwE
With a visitor's visa, natch.
share