please to note - - - the actors in SPELLBOUND do NOT - - - repeat: do NOT - - - speak with British accents. . . they speak with Hollywood accents . . . almost no one in Hollywood spoke anything remotely like American English until the breakdown of the studio system - - - remember the comical elocution lesson in SINGIN IN THE RAIN - - - or think about the way Kim Novak spoke in almost all her roles . . . a certain Britishness was simply considered classy and common in movies through the forties and fifties, and only actresses and actors whose stock in trade was a kind of tough American quality (John Wayne, Glen Ford, Barbara Stanwyck) or a kind of AMerican plain spoken honesty (Jimmy Stewart is the classic example) could be counted on to speak anything like a real human language. Think for a minute of Myrna Loy and WIlliam Powell, or Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn; they were clearly American characters but their language was something no human ear ever heard outside of a movie house. The issue of race remains a confounded and confounding one (as is the whole ugly bag of what is now called the politics of personal identity), but this peciliarity of Hollywood's perpetual concern for respectability, reflected for years in a kind of Britsh toniness in speech, is at best a minor side-bar to the real issue. Mike Frank <[log in to unmask]> ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]