Are all these people supposed to be French?!

David Niven and Jean Seberg are clearly supposed to be French, but casting an Englishman and an American and having them call each other Ce-CILE and Ray-MOND sounds truly ridiculous, especially when they're speaking with the servants who are played by actors who are actually French and speaking English with thick French accents. I know that this was a convention that didn't bother most audiences at the time, but it's hard for me to believe that it didn't always sound ridiculous.


"Please! You're not at home!"

hamletbb,

This is not the first American or British movie or play I have seen with English-speaking actors playing non-English-speaking characters, so you really really really do not need to explain the convention to me.

Really.

And I would have thought that my OP makes it clear that I know they are supposed to be French, but that I am just not buying it.

Not merely because they are speaking English, but because there is such an impossible array of thoughtlessly assembled accents all pretending to be French. Even father and daughter do not sound like they are from the same country, let alone the same family.

It is a difficult thing to pull off, but some effort ought to be made to find some common ground among the actors. For instance, Siobhan McKenna suppressing her own Irish accent in Doctor Zhivago and using a British accent to more closely match husband Ralph Richardson—not that DZ doesn't have its own jarring moments as well. Even in The Reader, which has many many ridiculous aspects, there was a decision to have the English-speaking actors match the young German man's accent.

I don't question the reality of a good production of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, say, because the ability to speak the verse well provides a certain commonality among everyone's speech, but when Seberg, with her impossibly flat mid-western American accent, is chatting with British Daddy and the thickly-accented French servants, I just have to guffaw. That no one seems to have given it a thought at the time made me wonder whether it sounded less jarring fifty years ago.



"Oh look, the neighbors are recording us."

I agree they don't seem to be very french but then again it is harder to believe Ms. Kerr or Mr. Niven are anything but English.

"It's the system, Lara. People will be different after the Revolution."