FILM ENGLISH

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21323, 16 November 1934, Page 5

FILM ENGLISH

yOGUE OF FOREIGN ACCENT ACTORS A full cycle has been completed. Four or five years ago the elder statesmen of the screen were struggling with all thtir herculean might to find ways of curing Greta Garbo and Maurice Chevalier of their accents. A spoken English that had the flavour of far-away Sweden or France stood in the way of success in the newly audible shadows.

A miracle happened. .The producers discovered that audiences liked the husky, hesitant, queerly over-toned accents of Miss Garbo. And when half the population of Hollywood joined in the unsuccessful effort to imitate Chevalier saying "Right now!" the film overlords changed heart. The problem became not how to lose an accent, but how to keep an accent. But not always. Samuel Goldwyn spent two years and a fortune cultivating Anna Sten's English to the point where it had only enough flaw to give it character. But, since she comes under the heading of "Foreign Exotics," her pictures seem to attract the entire foreign colony. Being a newcomer, with an imperfect command of a new language, the impression has been general that an international tone would flavour an Anna Sten picture. ■ Enough Russians to start a Berlitz class in English reported for duty in "We Live Again," confident, since Mr Goldwyn was filming a story so Russian as the renamed "Resurrection" of Leo Tolstoy and with a player so Russian as Anna Sten, that Russian names, Russian faces and Russian accents would be at a premium. They offered themselves as bargain, no less, on the

altars of Mr Goldwyn's cinematic art. But, with all the emphasis he could muster, Mr Goldwyn said "No!" Perhaps Mr Goldwyn remembered the whimsy of Sir James Barrie who, in casting his plays of the heatncrcovered Highlands, would never assign an important part to a player wjth a heavy Scots accent. "A Scotch player with a Scotcli accent in a Scotch role in a Scotch play is too much—even for Scotsmen," he said. Accent and Nationality On the screen * and on the stage accents often have little or nothing to do with nationality. J. Carroll Naish, the boldest Italian and the baddest Mexican of them all, can speak neither Italian nor Mexican. He is Irish, and so is Jimmie Hussey, one of the most inspired of the Jewish dialect raconteurs. Broadway still talks affectionately of the young actor in "Coquette" who was so strongly criticised for his "imperfectly mastered and thoroughly unconvincing" Southern accent. Yet that very accent had been the reason he had not been able to get a job for yoars, so heavy did he carry the lin-' guistic marks of the Gco'gia in which he was born and raised. And they tell of Somerset Maugham, who rejected one of Gilbert Miller's candidates for an English gentleman's role because the aspirant was too English!

Maurice Chevalier, who is now completing work with Jeanette Mac Donald in "The Merry Widow," has signed a new long-term Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract. He will go abroad when the present picture is and will make one picture abroad be» fore resuming work at the Culver City studios. Ernst Lubitsch is directing "The Merry Widow," under Irving Thalberg's supervision.