MovieChat Forums > Smiley's People (1982) Discussion > Appalling voice acting

Appalling voice acting

posted 12 years ago by Lukeg100
3 replies | jump to latest

I enjoyed the series overall, for it's subtlety, dreary realism and of course, outstanding acting performances. For the most part.

What more than tarnishes an otherwise very good piece of work for me is the consistently atrocious voice acting in SP. Now maybe this just a sign of the times, but even by the standards of the 1980's, the 'accents' on offer from many of the characters are at times laughably bad.

Bernard Hepton's turn as the shifty Esterhase is engaging and almost believable, but even his voice work was apparently practiced in lunch hours in the BBC canteen. Eileen Atkins' Ostrakova regularly slips between English pronunciation and a hammy Russian stereotype. Her voice is often OK, but the inflections are all wrong, giving her dialog a false, affected delivery.

But special mention must go to the winner of the wooden spoon, Paul Herzberg for his 'effort' as Villem. To label his performance 'amateur hour' would frankly be an insult to the amateur productions taking place the length of the country. I came within an inch of switching off. He only just outstrips Dudley Sutton as Kirov. Was that Greek/public schoolboy/Russian that he was going for? Blissfully, he was limited to just one speaking scene.

A real shame, as although SP pales next to the altogether superior TTSS, it was nonetheless entertaining and occasionally brilliant. But my my, how much we owe today to modern standards of voice coaching.

[–] bon22 12 years ago

Agreed. I loved SP, but smirked at some of the lousy accents.

As much as I enjoyed Hepton's performance, I thought I heard a Scottish brogue emanating from the alleged Magyar. At times, his Hungarian accent was laughable.
Also thought Atkins's Russian accent was, at times, clipped with upper class British pronunciations. Villem's accent was a mess, he sounded like Welsh to me.

The accents could have been much better, but did enjoy the giggle. Reminds me of reading Penguin Classics's English translations of Russian classics, in which a character often addresses another as "chap". "Chap"? Isn't this 19th century Russia? Oh yeah, the translator is British!

[–] benzin 12 years ago

As I am not English, I was not so much bothered by the accents, but more that everyone in the world spoke English in the first place. Now, I understand why this is, it would be unpractical and distracting to use French, Russian and German for most of the mini series, but there were a few scenes where there really is no excuse.

First the meeting between Ostrakova and Kirov, no reason whatsoever why they would use English. When Smiley knocks Kretzschmar's office door he replies "Ja, enter" why why WHY would he use English? And later he calls downstairs, and says not to be disturbed, he again uses English for absolutely no reason. Third, the burning of Grigoryev, the book makes a special point that they do not use English. Okay, it's such a long and important scene, they pretty much had to speak English, but when Grigoryev phones his wife, for crying out loud, he should have spoken Russian!

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[–] dylanw1 12 years ago

WHY would he use English?

For the same reason that conversation is rendered in English in the book.

It’s a convention of television and film that, in situations where characters are agreed to be speaking another language, it is permissible to have it performed in a language that both the audience and actors understand, rather than have the actors learn their lines phonetically just so that they can have subtitles put over them so that the audience can understand them.