If SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is hack work, I should be so lucky as to be such a hack.

Well, you're right. Sweet Smell does have about nine thousand memorable lines. But he did do a lot of crap.

::checks IMDB::

I did like Clash By Night and The Big Knife (though it must be said it is one of the lesser noirs with "Big" in the title. Certainly compared to The Big Sleep or The Big Heat or The Big Combo).

I think Midwestern is sort of the neutral TV and radio-announcer dialect, so it's really more widespread than just the Midwest. Most places in this country hear the dialect I'm thinking of with network news, national commercials, the movie trailer voiceover guy, etc. I don't know how well that translates to Received Pronunciation... it's generally grammatically correct English, but I don't know that it has a connotation of elitism like, say, a proper New England accent does.

I suppose for Diana the ideal would be someone who's a native speaker of Greek but has learned English fluently. Not sure if there are many actresses fitting that description who could do the action hero thing and be familiar enough to US audiences for the studio's sake, though.

Which leads me to wonder--the Midwestern accent you refer to is like Britain's Received Pronunciation, right? Does the entire country have a tacit agreement as to what it sounds like? RP

Really, no, or only an overlapping general idea of what "broadcasterese" is, and no agreement on the details. Like, broadcasterese does not drop Rs; it does not insert Rs into words like wash; it does distinguish between pen and pin; but -- you know. Till recently, the big three broacasters were a Texan, a North Dakotan, and a guy from Canada. They all had noticeably not-broadcasterese accents, if subtle ones.

To bring this back on-topic, I've come to equanimity with the number of actors who cannot control their speech well enough to drop an inappropriate accent sufficiently (or add an appropriate one). I have not yet gotten over the fact that so few actors enunciate well enough for me to understand what they're saying.

I think Midwestern is sort of the neutral TV and radio-announcer dialect, so it's really more widespread than just the Midwest.

Standard American Stage English is closest to urban mid-Atlantic, regionwise. (And supposedly also Idaho, which I've heard nicknamed "the pure-vowel-state" by musical directors.)

the fact that so few actors enunciate well enough for me to understand what they're saying

This particular foreigner has no real problem understanding 98% of what actors say. How much are you not getting?

I had a question about that, too. Are you speaking about American actors?

I never understand what Benecio del Toro is saying.

eta: He may not qualify as an American actor?

cannot control their speech well enough to drop an inappropriate accent

this. Although the example I was going to give was Cary Elwes in Poison Ivy so perhaps I am asking too much of that particular film. Still I wonder why they didn't just make the character british.

I never understand what Benecio del Toro is saying.

Have you just been watching him in Usual Suspects? Because that's what he was supposed to do there.

He's often a bit of a mumblemouth, though.