MovieChat Forums > The Blue Max (1966) Discussion > German accent

German accent

posted 16 years ago by filip.cermak
7 replies | jump to latest

I can not help myself - the funniest thing in this otherwise great movie was the "German accent" English everybody speak in the film :-)
Especially Ursula Andress is lovely.

[–] Mickey77 14 years ago

Even SCHLINDERS LIST suffers this problem.

http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=32397724

[–] rlippman-2 14 years ago

At least in Schindler's List all the German accents are the same accent. Here we have some Germans speaking with British accents, some sound roughly French, others like Peppard speak with an American accent (but then again, Peppard doesn't really put much effort into actually "acting" in this movie).

[–] movies789 10 years ago

I agree about the inconsistency. Since all the characters were German, and ostensibly speaking German, they could have employed one of four tools to bring the English-speaking audience into the dialogue: in German with English subtitles (a bore, generally), or in English with American, British or German accents. Here, they had a most distracting mix: English with all three accents. They should have used all American actors, or all Brits, or all English-speaking Germans (or at least actors from wherever who could pull off a German accent). Otherwise, it's too great a distraction. Still, it's one of my favorites.

[–] emuir-1 10 years ago

I found the differing accents very distracting, especially George Peppard with an American accent. I was expecting them to mention that he had been taken to America as a baby but returned to fight for the fatherland. I was somewhat red faced when I saw the credits and found that what I had thought were the phoniest German accents, such as Heidmann's, were by real German actors.

[–] jbaddock 9 years ago

I think the problem is that the British and American actors used the kind of 'cod' German accents that English speaking actors tend to use, while the German actors were speaking English with what were actually genuine German accents. What would have made more sense would be to have the actors speaking in their natural voices (which would have meant not using German actors at all, I suppose).

[–] tomcervo 7 years ago

Vogler and Diffring are German; von Friedl is Austrian; Andress is Swiss. The rest are British actors speaking Cherman. Nearly everyone uses upper class inflections, so Peppard's accent, or lack thereof, may place him as an outsider, which is exactly right. If he'd spoken in a Hessian or Cherman Midlands accent, almost no one would have noticed, except to ask what's wrong with his voice.

[–] panzermeyer44 7 years ago

I get what you're saying but the only other alternative would have been to cast all German speaking actors and that would have limited its Hollywood audience appeal.