German Accent--Native Londoner?
The main character Mark lived all his life in London, so why does he have a German accent? Good film anyway.
Play the game existence 'til the end...of the beginning...
How do you know he lived in London all of his life? Maybe he spent a substantial part of it, especially when he was young, in Germany.
Steve
Well, he says he lived in the house most of his life:
Helen: "How long have you lived here?"
Mark: "Nearly all my life. I was born in this house."
His accent didn't make sense to me either. Plus his name isn't German and there's no indication his parents were German. I found it odd, but I just ignored it I guess.
No, it's a fair point. Of course the real answer is that the actor was German and hadn't done many films in English. But can we justify it for the character?
His father was a psychiatrist/psychologist and they (in the 1960s) were often German/Austrian. The family name of Lewis could have been anglicised from a German name (but I can't think of any German names like that). We hear Prof Lewis speak, on the tape at the end when he tells Mark not to be a silly boy. He doesn't have a German accent (it's Michael Powell of course). But we don't know what accent Mark's mother had or if she was German.
Many children growing up in non-English households in London (and the rest of the UK) have one accent for home with their parents and a more "local" accent when they're at school or with their friends.
Maybe Mark's mother was German and didn't speak much English so they mainly spoke German at home. Maybe Prof. Lewis managed to adopt an English accent. Maybe Mark settled on a more German accent, especially after his mother died so that he would remember her.
A lot of maybes
Steve
Yeah, I noticed the trivia mentions Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey were first considered for the role, so that makes me think again it was simply "accidental" he had a German accent. An odd choice by Powell, I thought.
As far as explaining it for the character as you have, well anything's possible and I guess I'd say I'm willing to buy it. Or more accurately, it didn't really matter to me.
As has been said, in the context it is odd that Mark has a German (or Austro-German) accent. Presumably, if Bogarde and Harvey were prior choices, the original idea was that Mark would straightforwardly sound English. So it appears that either (i) Powell subsequently decided, a little strangely, that he'd prefer a German-sounding actor and chose Karlheinz Boehm, or (ii) he chose Boehm for other reasons and then decided his accent, though maybe not ideal, would be acceptable. I wonder if we know much about other actors who were evaluated but never used - were there others who were German? In any event, it must be conceded that the script should really have afforded some explanation, however brief, for the incongruity.
I note that the Wikipedia entry for the late Karlheinz Boehm says
The director Michael Powell cast him in the role because he felt Boehm might understand the character's experience of an overbearing father. [His father being the famous conductor Karl Boehm.]I am not quick to assume the accuracy of this, as it sounds a bit thin. Many years after the event, Powell claimed that Boehm "spoke English with hardly any accent, it was more like an intonation", but the evidence from the film is that his recollection was imperfect.
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