MovieChat Forums > The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Discussion > Phony English accent.

Phony English accent.

posted 13 years ago by deadzombie
10 replies | jump to latest

why did they give the part to Lawrence harvey.?? You mean they couldn't find someone with an American accent. damn, he's in the Korean war leading troops.then he is working for an American Newpaper doing something.OH, I forgot he won the Congressional Medal of Honor.But he hates his father inlaw Islen and his mother.but he finds time to attend parties with them. but he sounds like he came from an English drawing room. Angela Lansbury is his Mother ,who also speaks with English accent. Whats that all about? The casting was all wrong. Frank Sinatra ,I heard bought the rights and wanted these Engilish actors in this movie. Its kind of weird and bizarre watching Frank Sinatra in a fight to the death with Lawrence Harvey's personal assistant Henry Silva.and nothing ever happens ,but he continues to work for Lawrnece Harvey as if nothing happend. Script is totally confusing, Janet Leigh meets Frank Sinatra on the train and promptly leaves her "fiance" for a complete stranger.Next Lawrence Harvey ends up in the Central Park lake because some one on the phone mentions something.Is he Brainwashed? The dialogue doesn't make sense. I remember in the 1950's The big threat was Red Chinese,Communists were infiltrating schools, brainwashing people through the media.etc. I liked this movie but it has these weird things going on .I think Frank Sinatra was more involved with this project because he had his reputation but he had the rights to this project.Frank must have had something to do with executive production but I don't see anything that indicates that. Produced by
George Axelrod .... producer
John Frankenheimer .... producer
Howard W. Koch .... executive producer

I know Nancy Sinatra had Production rights to the Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington version. I like both of these films for different reasons.

[–] franzkabuki 13 years ago

Yeah, Harvey´s otherwise brilliant work in the film is hopelessly undermined by his accent being a few beats off - to the point they should have gotten someone else to play the part. For crying out loud.

And I´m very much of the school of thought according to which people should actually watch the movies they´re criticising.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] EllisFowler 11 years ago

They and John McGiver affect a Mid-Atlantic accent which is appropriate since they're playing upper-class Easterners (don't forget that Raymond's father willed him the obviously expensive summer estate). None sound actually British.

[–] Pinky_the-Fluffy 11 years ago

Everyone seems to forget that Lansbury is English and has the faintest smattering of an English accent in this role. Listen carefully. Her upper-class W.A.S.P. accent favors a slight English aristocracy tinge to it.

Why do you care?

[–] shoobe01-1 8 years ago

Exactly. Every look this up, as it's interestingly relevant to lots of old timey movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

I think they even discuss that Raymond was off at boarding schools, and so on. This was the proper way to speak at the time to a small sector of the upper class for a few decades there.

[–] osmundbullock 11 years ago

Neither is nearly as 'off' as you think.

I suspect you haven't listened to the accents of many people born before WWII from East Coast, old-money families - or at least how they used to be. Many prided themselves on how quasi-English their accents were (a few still do), it was a sign of refinement; and in their lives, too, they often sought to emulate the English 'Landed Gentry'.

But just as the last of traditional English aristocratic country life largely died out between the end of WWII and the late 1960s/70s, so the mimicking of it by American East Coast aristocrats also gradually faded. In the early 60s, though, when this movie was made, it was still alive and well.

P.S. Who is 'Lawrence' Harvey? If you're going to write the name so often you ought to check the spelling.

[–] llanwydd 11 years ago

Moviegoers are usually aware that they are not watching reality. This has been going on for a long time. Mickey Rooney played an Irish kid in National Velvet. No Irish accent. English actors played Germans in the original Frankenstein. No German accent. How do we know the Shaw family weren't immigrants? Maybe Raymond's father had been transferred from a British army base. Script writers always depend on a phenomenon called "suspension of disbelief". By the way, William F. Buckley was American.

[–] Huggo 8 years ago

I totally agree with llanwydd. If reality was a key in movie of that era, many of them wouldn't even be int he English language.

The whole issue of proper accents didn't really come into vogue until "Meryl", which would have been the 1980s. I still remember reading an interview with Sydney Pollack about Out of Africa, where Meryl's Danish character was sporting a Danish accent, whereas Redford's British character spoke with an American accent. Despite Redford apparently working hard on perfecting that British accent, Pollack thought that most movie going audiences would find all-American Redford with a British accent distracting, hence the decision!

[–] NewCliches 11 years ago

why did they give the part to Lawrence harvey.?? You mean they couldn't find someone with an American accent.

Apparently not. Angela Lansbury has a pretty dubious accent as well. Then again, Dick Van Dyke has a famously bad cockney accent in Mary Poppins, made a couple of years later. And Jodie Foster plays an english girl in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, made a few years later, with a Southern American accent.

Accent coaches have clearly come a long way in the last forty or fifty years.

[–] Hippo9 10 years ago

Frakneheimer says that they thought Harvey's accent would be okay since there was another President with a thick accent in John F. Kennedy at the time.

[–] mike-848 10 years ago

Raymond obviously came from a privileged background. People from the upper classes sometimes send their sons and daughters to schools in Great Britain. many movies in the 30's and 40's show upper class Americans with a slight British accent. If Raymond's mom and dad were working class Americans, his accent would not have made sense.