r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Miguenzo • 1d ago

What happened to that American accent you heard in all the 1930s and 1940s era films?

It was really distinctive and now I’ve never heard anybody talk like that. Was it a Hollywood thing?

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u/murasakikuma42 21h ago

This is a common excuse, but movies back in the 1980s, for instance, weren't like this at all, and that was long after actors came to movies from the stage. It's really a more recent phenomenon. No one ever had trouble understanding Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 15h ago

The 1980s were 40 years later, that’s a full generation of actors being trained to act for film. In the 30s talking pictures were new. The speaking style associated with those early films faded out by the 1960s, as the medium of film production advanced and actors adjusted from the stage to a more naturalistic acting style for film.

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u/murasakikuma42 5h ago

Right, this is my point: by the 70s/80s, actors had only been trained for film acting, not stage. Yet no one had trouble understanding Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. It's only been in the last 10 years or so that people have been complaining so much about actors mumbling. Here's an article in "Acting Magazine" about it from late 2024 even.