Bad Accents

Though hardly the equal of Dukakis, Rourke, and Tilly, there are many other young actors and actresses on the scene whose bad accents bear watching. Well, listening. Daphne Zuniga is impressively unconvincing as a Mexican slut in Last Rites; her accent is so bad that when she speaks, guitar music occasionally swells up in the background to lend an air of authenticity to her hot tamale delivery. Dennis Quaid, who scored big with his Levis 501 patois in The Big Easy, also wins points for his loony accent in Great Balls of Fire!, in which he plays Jerry Lee Lewis as if the Killer were a complete moron. Goodness gracious. And though it is late in the game for the man in the poncho, Clint Eastwood comes through with a top-shelf bad John Huston accent in White Hunter, Black Heart, conjuring up memories of another male lead who once came down off his horse opera to ham it up: the Duke as the Khan in The Conqueror.

Many of the worst accents in history involve persons--or portraying persons--of Italian origin: Al Pacino as a Scottish Yankee Doodle Dandy in Revolution; John Travolta as a Texas-based asshole in Urban Cowboy; Jack Nicholson as a Mafia hitman in Prizzi's Honor; Robert De Niro as a Spanish slave trader-turned-Jesuit in The Mission; Mia Farrow as a Michelle Pfeiffer prototype in Broadway Danny Rose; Emily Lloyd and Peter Falk as likable thugs in Cookie, a Desperately Seeking Carmine that features dueling bad accents.

In virtually all of these films, actors were recruited to play characters from ethnic groups to which they obviously did not, and could not, ever belong: Pacino and Travolta because they do not look or sound like people whose last name is Dobb or whose first name is Bud; Nicholson because he does not look or sound like someone named Charley Partanna; Mia Farrow because she hangs around with Woody Allen; Emily Lloyd because she is English. As for De Niro in The Mission, okay, he could have passed as a Spanish conquistador, if he had given up the Mott Street accent. He didn't, so what we get is Travis Bickle in the Amazon. That's our Bobby.

All of this leads us to one of the Crowning Rules of Bad Accents: the actor or actress with the bad accent must always be surrounded by dozens of people who are perfectly capable of doing the accent the way it should be done, so that everyone in the audience will notice the accent and say things like, "Boy, you'd think she was a native Lapp, she's so much more natural than the rest of these clowns." Which is precisely how things turned out for the current occupant of the Michael Caine Hurry Sundown Chair, a fine actress and snappy dresser who has also won the coveted award from the Ben Kingsley Foundation, the Golden Gandhi. Yes, the peerless Cher.

Cher's work in Moonstruck is an example of bad accents at their very best. Surrounded by real Italians (Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia), people who could pass for Italians (Olympia Dukakis), and people who don't seem totally, completely unlike Italians (Nicolas Cage), Cher logs in with an accent so fulsome, so corny, so idiotic that it almost seems self-parodying when she says--yes, she actually says it--"Whatsa matta with you?" An act of cultural genocide every bit as odious as Olivier's Jewish accent in The Jazz Singer, Cher's accent in Moonstruck inflicts more damage on proud Italian-Americans than a thousand bad Mafia movies. A million bad Mafia movies. 137,876,546 Joe Garagiola commercials. A life's supply of stale canollis. Etc.

Obviously, in an essay of this length it is impossible to cite every truly deserving bad accent: cockney-turned-gent Cary Grant unbelievable as a cockney in None But the Lonely Heart; Nastassia Kinski as a fully-clad, American virgin in Boarding School; Uma Thurman's colossally bad New Yoik street accent in Henry and June, made all the worse because she delivers it at slow-w-w John Wayne speed; Joan Plowright as a Yugoslavian immigrant hell-bent on murdering her son-in-law, Kevin Kline, in I Love You to Death, in part because of his horrible (Italian) accent. It is hardly surprising to learn that Plowright--whose thick, improbable oi vey! accent brings Avalon to a standstill every time she appears--is, of course, the Widow Olivier. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when these two hams were at home, practicing bad accents together. While we're on the topic, let's not overlook promising newcomers such as Amber O'Shea, the star of Intimate Power, who proclaims to her not entirely convinced fellow harem denizens: "My name is Aimee Debucq DeRivery." Right, and my name is Napoleon Bonaparte.

Happily, as the foregoing makes clear, we as a people are in no danger of seeing bad accents vanish from our celluloid culture. This is largely because bad accents seem to be contagious. It was doubtless Nicholson's exposure to Brando's bad accent in The Missouri Breaks that inspired his own dire cowboy accent in Goin' South, which then paved the way for his ludicrous mobster accent in Prizzi's Honor. Had Dukakis been stopped earlier in her career, her Maud-Does-Memphis turn in Steel Magnolias would not have been possible. And it was almost certainly Frankie Sinatra's bizarre Spanish accent in The Pride and the Passion that inspired his ludicrous French accent in Can-Can. N'est-ce pas?

In the final analysis though, it all comes back to Olivier. It was Lord Larry's demented Nazi orthodontist in Marathon Man that laid the groundwork for his Austrian Nazi-hunter in The Boys From Brazil. And it was Olivier's bad German accent in The Boys From Brazil that made Gregory Peck's bad German accent in the same film seem all the more horrible. Finally, it was being close to Peck, who had just played Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the not-so-good 128-minute movie MacArthur that inspired Olivier to play MacArthur in the atrocious 140-minute Moonie movie Inchon (also known as Mooniestruck). There is something almost mystical in these intertwining paths--Peck and Olivier, Brando and Nicholson, Dukakis and Cher--that assures us that many bad movies with many bad accents lie ahead of us, movies at which millions of Americans from all walks of life will stand up and say, "Two thumbs up, surely one of the year's 10 best, when was the last time you saw a movie that made you want to stand up and cheer?" They will say that, and you will say it, too. Vee hef vays of making yoo tawk.

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Joe Queenan, a frequent contributor to these pages, wrote our October cover story on Melanie Griffith.

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