What do Cher, Dennis Quaid, Barbra Streisand, John Travolta, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Meg Tilly, and Mickey Rourke have in common with Laurence Olivier? A time ear for capturing the subtleties of foreign accents.
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In the appalling 1980 remake of the appalling 1953 remake of the appalling 1927 film The Jazz Singer (the first appalling talkie), aspiring rock star Neil Diamond is forced to leave home, ostensibly because of a feud with his father, played by Laurence Olivier. To the unsophisticated moviegoer, the antagonism between father and son might seem to result from the natural desire of the elderly Jewish cantor to see his son follow in his footsteps.
A defter analysis of Neil's insubordination could be ascribed to the normal tensions between the Old World patriarch and the upstart immigrant kid. But each of these readings is wrong. The reason Diamond decides to leave home and abandon his cultural heritage is to escape from Olivier's horrendous accent. "I hef no son!" thunders Lord Larry at a critical moment in the film. Yes, and you probably hef no bananas, either.
Olivier's accent in The Jazz Singer is one of the monumentally bad accents in the history of cinema, an accent so Promethean in its awful-ness that a Jewish friend of mine refers to it as "an act of unintentional yet nonetheless unforgiveable anti-Semitism, virulent beyond all conception." Yet it is a testimony to Olivier, lord of the truly bad accent, that his work in The Jazz Singer was by no means his worst, but was in many ways the final germination of a lifetime spent honing his skills as a practitioner of the truly grotesque accent. Who can forget Olivier's odd squawking in The Betsy, in which his attempts to capture the inflection of an American auto tycoon end up sounding like a cross between Jedd Clampett and Scrooge McDuck?
Similarly noteworthy are his frightful Central European accent in the Frank Langella Dracula, his bizarre Sudanese accent in Khartoum, his terrifying Russian accent in The Shoes of the Fisherman, his Ooh-La-La sub-Chevalier imitation in--how you zay thees?--A Little Romance, and his unjustifiably neglected, yet hilarious, French-Canadian accent in The Forty-Ninth Parallel.
Of course, it is Olivier's legendarily bad German accents (Marathon Man, The Boys From Brazil) for which he is best remembered. Yet what is most fascinating about these accents is not so much that they are bad--how should I know? I don't speak German--as that they fulfill the essential criterion for a truly bad accent: they literally take a film prisoner, making it impossible for the viewer to concentrate on anything else. A bad accent is the cinematic equivalent of a festering limburger cheese planted on a sumptuous dinner table, making it pointless for the gourmand to try thinking about anything other than that peculiar odor.
In the epic scope of his bad accents, Olivier has but one serious rival: the indefatigable Marlon Brando, whose vocal gymnastics have eviscerated films as varied as Burn!, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Viva Zapata!, The Missouri Breaks, and Mutiny on the Bounty, in which he concocts the single worst accent in motion picture history. (It's worth noting that some of the finest bad accents appear in remakes, as if the only way of distinguishing the sequel from the original was by imbuing it with accents too horrendous to ignore.)
What distinguishes Brando from Olivier is the utterly serendipitous nature of his bad accents. Olivier has a bad French-Canadian accent in The Forty-Ninth Parallel and a bad Jewish accent in The Jazz Singer, but in each case he is using a bad accent in keeping with his bad role in a bad film. Not so with Brando, who often adds a bad accent whether the role calls for one or not. Witness his turn in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks, where Brando elects to play the psychopathic bounty hunter Lee Clayton with a brogue so thick and attention-getting that even Victor McLaglen might have demanded Gaelic subtitles--Brando has the dubious distinction of becoming the screen's first Irish cowboy, a path that few have followed. Many critics have faulted Jack Nicholson for his diffident performance in this film, but it is my belief that the Man Who Would Be, But Was Not Yet, Jack, heard the Big Fella's accent during rehearsals, correctly sized this up as a no-win situation, and decided to quietly bank his paycheck and wait for the whole thing to blow over.
To this day, critics debate what Brando was up to in The Missouri Breaks, the conventional wisdom being that the mischievous actor took the measure of Penn, concluded that he was dealing with a creampuff, and simply decided to have himself a bit of fun. I disagree. It is my earnest belief that in using that diabolically wee Irish accent, Brando was attempting nothing short of a linguistic revolution: speaking, not as he imagined a 19th century Irish gunslinger might, but as he imagined a 19th century Irish gunslinger--and, indeed, all Irish people--should. In short, Brando was attempting to redefine the Irish accent right in front of our eyes, hoping that future generations of Irish people would speak with a brogue learned not at the knee of Sweet Mother Mackree or the equally Sweet Rosie O'Grady, but by watching a really bad Arthur Penn film. Of course, I could be wrong about this.
Clearly, one of the great tragedies of the 20th century is that Olivier and Brando--two of the most colossal hamburgers of all time--never had the chance to trade bad accents in a bad film together. It is equally clear that, with Olivier's death and Brando's legal defense problems, there is no one on the scene who can match their innovative-ness. (True, Meryl Streep does many, many accents, but, as is usually the case with this monotonously talented human, she does them rather well.) Yet it is a mistake to think that the movie industry is completely bereft of linguistic marauders. In recent years, Olympia Dukakis, Mickey Rourke, Meg Tilly, Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid and Cher have each indicated a willingness to gather up the torch that has tumbled from Olivier's hand, and in the fullness of time may yet achieve similar immortality. Probably not in a remake of Richard III, though.
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.
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.