Bad Accents

But to understand where we are going, let us first consider where we have been. To achieve a position in the pantheon of the immortals, to qualify for the Horst Buchholz Nine Hours to Rama Memorial Cup, it is usually necessary to play a character from an ethnic group so far removed from one's own that the baffled audience either makes the star unbelievably rich and famous or starts throwing things at the screen. Among the most celebrated of these performances are New Yawker Barbra Streisand as a 19th century British aristocrat in the flashback scenes from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, whitebread sitcom fugitive Dick Van Dyke as a cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, pioneer anorexic Frank Sinatra as a Parisian bon vivant in Can-Can, and professional strange human being Tony Curtis as an English medieval knight in The Black Shield of Falworth. Bad as they are, none is the equal of aging child actress Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican chiquita in West Side Story, in which she uses an accent so refreshingly stupid that she also qualifies for the Horst Buchholz Aryan Cowpoke Award in honor of his stultifyingly bad accent in The Magnificent Seven.

Yet if these are the Babe Ruths and Lou Gehrigs of the Golden Age of Bad Accents, it is reassuring to note that there are some exciting Jose Cansecos and Darryl Strawberrys alive and well in the present. Foremost among them is Mickey Rourke, whose Irish brogue in the alarmingly bad film A Prayer for the Dying is so thick that the authentic Irish actors in the film sound like ringers from Berlitz. Rourke--who plays an IRA hitman anxious to get into a new line of work after he accidentally blows up a school bus loaded with little girls-- unleashes an accent so overpowering that both the blustery Bob Hoskins and the energetic Leonid Brezhnev impersonator Alan Bates simply back off. Rourke is so gamey, so slimey, so vile in this film that even his accent seems to be wearing cheap sunglasses. Top o' the mornin' to you, cocksucka. Erin go fuckin' bragh.

A tour de force is also served up by Meg Tilly in the psychosexual thingamajig The Girl in a Swing. Posing similar ethical questions to those raised by A Prayer for the Dying (If you blow up a school bus full of cute girls does it mean you're a bad person?), Girl in a Swing demands: Can a German translator living in Copenhagen find love and happiness with a British antiques dealer without first murdering her own young daughter?

That question would be difficult to answer under the best of circumstances, but Tilly, who always brings her own special brand of zaniness to her roles, rurther complicates things by speaking with a furry thick, furry sexxxy German accent. Frankly, if there's a better film about scantily attired, trilingual infanticides who mumble baby talk in German to twittish British Hummel salesmen out there, we are all in for a real treat.

One of the interesting things about bad accents is the serial-killer component: actors and actresses who have resorted to bad accents in the past will almost certainly use them again. That's what happened with all-purpose, ethnic mother-in-law Olympia Dukakis--we didn't elect Mikey, so we're stuck with her--who gives the performance of a lifetime in Steel Magnolias. Hands-down winner of the 1990 Tony Franciosca The Long, Hot Summer, Least Convincing Southern Accent Award, Dukakis, who looks out of place anywhere south of Manhattan's garment district, literally blows away the competition, thoroughly upstaging Daryl Hannah (generic redneck), Julia Roberts (Dixie peach), and Shirley MacLaine (bayou ballbuster). This film, so strange that it seems to have been dubbed into English, has one truly memorable line, when MacLaine tells Dukakis, "You are a pig from hell." Correct.

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