but actually the greatest performance of all was a voiceover...

I'm not a giant huge fan of Lawrence Olivier on-screen -- he came from a particular school, with a particular attitude, and I'd rather see his highbrow stuff done other ways, while his pop stuff, well, let's just say he made some pretty bad choices.

But I'm sitting watching the World at War documentary series, a lot of it for the first time since I was a teenager, and honestly, his readings are just so good. It's fabulously written anyway, with a portentous teaser at start and close, and the latter, especially he nails time after time. I could watch it over and over just to listen to the way he speaks: "Nemesis would come from the air: unimaginable, terrifying... mushroom-shaped."

Anyway, this is a thread for undersung voiceovers, narrations, audiotapes and etc, by the kinds of actors who get plenty of (well-deserved) celebration for putting their faces up there, but need a bit of recogntion for their lesser paying gigs.

Herzog (tho not technically an actor) owns this thread.

has herzog ever done voiceovers on anyone else's films?

liev schreiber's had a second career for a long while as HBO's in-house narrator of sports documentaries. he's great at it & i find him comforting to listen to

Susan Tyrell's narration in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards is all-time voiceover territory for me.

Herzog (tho not technically an actor) owns this thread.

― dor Dumbeddownball (Eric H.), Friday, November 4, 2011 2:20 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yes. I only got into him in the last couple months and I love listening to him speak but that could also be because he basically just sounds like my dad.

That Herzog doesn't narrate his latest doc (but is still the omnipresent interviewer) kinda saved it for me. Was sick of the hipster guffaws.

Other MVPs:

Welles in Magnificent Ambersons
Michael Hordern in Barry Lyndon

Is Keith David still narrating everything on PBS?

Huge credit to Grover Gardner for making The Sound and the Fury so easy to follow in audiobook format.

xp David is just doing Montgomery Burns' documentaries, I think.

As problematic as Jazz was as a whole, David's readings weren't too bad. At least there was a tangential connection; he played Charlie Parker's (fictional) rival saxophonist in Bird.

I remember loving Welles's voiceover in The Lady From Shanghai (used to be one of my favourite films/haven't seen/heard it for far too long). He used to do a sherry advert -- "a golden Oloroso" -- when I was a tiny, which I loved at the time; so richly sounding, so vast, so impish, so amused -- you felt there was nothing he didn't know about fine wines, and yet how absurd to find himself on television selling their virtues!

Richard Basehart is Ishmael in Moby Dick: does he do the voiceover, because I like that? (The film's patchy, tho it has terrific moments) (inc.Welles as a preacher).

there were certain readers in burns's "the civil war" i always looked forward to: "mary chesnut" is the one i remember

Michael Hordern in Barry Lyndon

YES.

"There are four great voiceovers in cinema," says Terence Davis -- hadn't seen this when I put the OP, but it's the kind of opinion I'm after!

His four:
William Holden in Sunset Boulevard
Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence
Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman
Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets <-- TD thinks this is the greatest (certainly Dennis Price's performance is stronger than Alec Guinness's multi-role stuntwork, diverting, and indeed distracting, as that is... )

has herzog ever done voiceovers on anyone else's films?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDBtCb61Sd4

Mark Cousins in The History of Film. I know that everyone seems to hate his voice, but I love his accent.

Jean Cayrol in Night and Fog, to such an extent that I found World at War repeats I watched since really hard to follow since. Find Olivier needlessly flamboyant.

Don't know whether I dislike Cousins' voice, it's hard to separate it from the cobblers he frequently spouts.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos is brilliant, and so is Hitchcock whenever he voices over something.

Cousins inflects every single sentence with the same small set of repetitive emphases -- and this is much more what some people are reacting against than his accent. He's actually much more "flamboyant" than Olivier, but in such an unvaried way that it (I guess) seems minimalist and rigorous? It's stopped bothering me, because it's a tic I can tune out -- but I suspect it's of a piece with the intellectual confusion in the scripts. Cousins doesn't really listen to or think about what he's reading (or what he's written): Olivier does nothing but: this is a living, intelligent man commenting on the material he's confronted with, in the only way he's allowed to; by the lithely varying shape of his delivery.

Realise I should have excluded -- or at least secluded in a separate category -- people reading words they themselves have written: I think it's a rather different craft (like poets reading their own poetry -- Eliot's awful, for example). Quite like the idea of expanding it to voiceover and narration in languages you the listener don't know (or don't know well), because then you're ONLY hearing the technique of the reading.

Also: readings and readers that immediately put you off. I'm not entirely a Stephen Fry h8a, tho a little goes a very long way, but I couldn't bear the idea of any audio-book he'd done. Ditto (probably) Alan Bennett, though I actually really like his writing; he rams the self-deprecating pedal to the metal EVERY FKN TIME, and it's exhausting and annoying.

As a kid I had an LP of Bing Crosby reading Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" -- which I totally loved, and can still quote sections of: "where the pygmies are at war with the budderflies"

john hurt does well/is ubiquitous in this arena, though i can imagine it started to cloy, for some. he has a v rich, traditionally storybookish voice, though.

i think the texture & flatness of like early winona ryder was super appealing to me w/this, also, like in how to make an american quilt, &c - like almost this phoneline intimacy as she narrated. both emotional and emotionally flat.

Stephen Fry did an absolutely awful documentary on Wagner, although it was hilarious when he interviewed the woman who runs Bayreuth, her awkwardness not to give anything on H!tler was amplified w/Fry (who is a very awkward presence) being all enthusiastic about it.

Think its much harder to compare Cousins to Olivier as they are delivering very different kinds of history. I think his delivery goes really well w/the manner in which he shoots locations for the different eps, so yeah rigour and minimalism are words you can apply again and again. I think he has thought about the content, I'd guess he's happy to compromise and sound fkn stupid -- but not probably as often as I (and many?) think he does -- if it gets him the cash to make this in the first place, and get much of what he wants to get across.

I was just listening to Cayrol's delivery w/out subtitles on youtube...xp

aw cmon that's how many mentions of that preening oaf now

Huston in 'The Bible' lends the appropriate gravitas

Leonard Nimoy in Civilization 4 is great, even if he doesn't know what "kine" means

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/12/09/article-1093070-02BE4C8D000005DC-798_468x375.jpg

god yeah i wd love Postgate to read me to sleep every night

best postgate is noggin the nog imo: "the men of the northlands, as they sat by their great log fires, telling tales of..."

"aw cmon that's how many mentions of that preening oaf now"

Good thins rafa hasn't done a classico voiceover yet for us to talk about huh?

heh

xxp

Yes Noggin is his masterpiece, painfully, tear-inducingly beautiful.

tho i'd prefer his history of film tbh

"The tales from the Lands of the North, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale of Noggin the Nog...." <-- correct acc. the internet

Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets <-- TD thinks this is the greatest

Awesomenessness

ok, this is totally going to end up with "the way my mam read where the wild things are, but not my granma when she came to stay, because she said it ALL WRONG"

I was going to say that I admire the brand management of Matt Damon, where he has become the go-to guy for well meaning documentaries (American Teacher, Plan B, and of course Inside Job) where he beats up The Man with his voice much as he did with his fists in the Bourne films.

Then I checked, and he's really only done four or five of those.

So now I really admire his brand management.

james woods played hades in disney's hercules, but he's gone on to do the voice in tv shows, video games, all kinds of crap, just because he digs the role a lot. i think thats kinda cool

presumably there are professional audio-only casting directors who have rolodexes* full of handy typecasting tips for actors/actresses w/great voices

*or whatever young people of today use: i am bagging up defunct junk at my parents' house; it is a melancholy trip through the labour-saving technologies of yesteryear...

ive heard that jeremy' irons book-on-tape of lolita is very fine, unlike i guess the movie he was in

*jeremy irons'

it's really quite bland, i assure you

yeah, irons is a pretty good call: as with olivier, i am mainly allergic to him onscreen -- too stage-actorly for my tastes

interesting though that i'm drawn -- in this particular game -- to actors with classical theatre chops, when i'm so offput by the way they approach film-work

irons is great in Reversal of Fortune, i think the style suits the character in that case

and i like him in dead ringers also, he tries on a kind of desperate luny playfulness, even tho it's basically prizewinning stuntwork: this kind of technique is always interesting (cf guinness in kind hearts and coronets)

Think Robinson's pal might be Paul Scofield's best screen role.

the michael herr-written voiceover for apocalypse now still works, imho

i'm not a big audiobook listener, but christopher lee doing dr jekyll and mr hyde (complete w dodgy edinburgh accents) is a treat and a half

It doesn't have to be a documentary, right? If not, I'd put Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity near the top of the list.

has herzog ever done voiceovers on anyone else's films?

A whole episode of Boondocks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=pKO9j2us2fk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4f9HNknKTU

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8OpXFtr3sIo/TKULhzTe8QI/AAAAAAAAAJk/zPDVaUtpRHo/s400/DoH_143.jpg

“Me and my brother, it just used to be me and my brother.
We used to do things together.
We used to have fun.
We used to roam the streets.
There was people suffering of pain and hunger.
Some people, their tongues were hanging out of their mouth.
He used to juggle apples.
He was—he used to amuse us.
He used to entertain us.”

“I met this guy named Ding-Dong.
He tell me the whole earth is going up in flames.
Flames will come out of here and there, and it’ll just rise up.
The mountains are going to go up in big flames.
The water’s going to rise in flames.
There’s going to be creatures running every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burnin.
People are going to be screaming and howling for help.
They—The people that’s been good, they’re going to go to heaven and escape all that fire.
But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear you talking.”

“Just as things were about to blow, this flying circus came in
After six months on this sweet patch, I needed a breath of fresh air.
They was screaming and yelling and bopping each other.
He, the big one, pushed the little one and said come on, I started, you start.
The little one just started in.
If they couldn’t think of a good one to come back with, they’d start fighting.
The little one said, no, I didn’t do this.
The big one said, yes, you did do this.
You couldn’t sort it out.
The devil’s just sitting there laughing.
He’s glad when people does bad.
Then he sends them to the snake house.
He’s just sits there and laughs and watch
while you’re sitting there all tied up with snakes and eating your eyes out.
They go down your throat and eat all your systems out.

“I think the devil was on the farm.”

haha when I googled this line from Badlands the only hit I got was this ancient ilx post of mine:

"He shot a football because he considered it excess baggage" - one of my all-time favourite voiceover lines.

― Andrew L, Monday, March 18, 2002 1:00 AM (9 years ago) Bookmark

also the voiceover from the english language mashup of shogun assassin, used to smooth over some of the narrative gaps, sampled on loads of wu-tang recs

oh yeah, i should've mentioned Jim Caviezel in the thin red line. have very little use for the rest of his career, but i love his voice-over in that movie

Had to look it up, but Art Gilmore in Kubrick's The Killing--not art, but he suits the movie perfectly.

http://www.learningally.org/SiteData/images/ArtG/45704d67cd196a0c/ArtG.jpg

What about a great dubbing job- Michel Piccoli in That Obscure Object of Desire? Although he's turned in plenty of good performances otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wskBIhKxLjY

haha mark i bet one of the reasons you're drawn to the voiceover is that it's the one moment when WRITTEN language is given free rein in the movies, to glide and swoop where it pleases

the great thing about voiceover, and i think what gives it its immense power (which leads to the the familiar claim that VO is "too easy" or "cheapens" a movie) is that it's divorced from the picture. relatively speaking it's almost purely "negative" - we can't see it, it's not literalized in front of us - so it has this huge authority. cinema is the dominion of the eye, yet here's this voice not beholden it, not subject to it, a voice that can completely alter the way we see what we see. and because it's not dependent on the rhythms of realistic speech or the, say, levels of education or wit or extemporaneous abilities of the characters, it can be as dense or curlicued or sinuous as the writer wants it to be, which is maybe why actors like olivier, who have such a rich experience in pre-chekhov i.e. pre-realistic drama, are so good at it

(i suspect the VO's authority in cinema naturally lends itself to being done by people we're predisposed to think of as being authoritative (i.e. old white men) and it's always interesting to see this deliberately undermined or cast against type)

I developed a theory with former-ilxor Pete Baran that there are NO movie voiceovers that aren't (in some sense) unreliable narrators (the ones that really seem not to fit this thesis we decided to treat as prima facie evidence of an unreliable director).

Obviously this^^^ doesn't apply to documentaries. And it is the overlooked stuff -- documentaries, audiobooks -- I was interested in people's opinions about, because I've never seen it discussed.

Richard Basehart is Ishmael in Moby Dick: does he do the voiceover, because I like that? (The film's patchy, tho it has terrific moments) (inc.Welles as a preacher).

yeah, it's one of those intermittent voiceovers, as i recall -- opening and closing, then a bit of exposition here and there. the film is an underrated favorite; i've always heard basehart's glum tone in the back of my head when reading the novel.

mason in kubrick's lolita is an even more on-and-off voiceover (at one point it turns into 'diary entry' exposition, then it's back to straight looking-back voiceover, which is rather confusing). (that said i'd happily listen to mason read the entire novel).

ralph richardson in 'chimes at midnight' is a good one: his tone is somehow appropriate for holinshed's narrative voice, and feels appropriately removed from the action and emotion of the film itself.

this is a great thread!

Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence

Grrr -- I'm sorry Terence Davies beat me. This was the first to come to mind.

Another:

Celeste Holm in A Letter to Three Wives.

Peter Coyote, a more convincing voice than actor, was very fine in Ken Burns' Prohibition doc: he sounded like he knew exactly what a great gin and tonic tastes like.

This is a super-dumm and ignorant question but is radio drama still a thing in the US? In the UK, we get quite a lot, courtesy BBC Radio 3 and 4 -- I am actually not a fan of the dominant style, and anyway hardly listen to the radio at all, but it's an outlet for lots of British actors.

haha mark i bet one of the reasons you're drawn to the voiceover is that it's the one moment when WRITTEN language is given free rein in the movies, to glide and swoop where it pleases

the great thing about voiceover, and i think what gives it its immense power (which leads to the the familiar claim that VO is "too easy" or "cheapens" a movie) is that it's divorced from the picture. relatively speaking it's almost purely "negative" - we can't see it, it's not literalized in front of us - so it has this huge authority. cinema is the dominion of the eye, yet here's this voice not beholden it, not subject to it, a voice that can completely alter the way we see what we see. and because it's not dependent on the rhythms of realistic speech or the, say, levels of education or wit or extemporaneous abilities of the characters, it can be as dense or curlicued or sinuous as the writer wants it to be, which is maybe why actors like olivier, who have such a rich experience in pre-chekhov i.e. pre-realistic drama, are so good at it

Terence Davies on this subject, briefly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/13/terence-davis-kind-hearts-coronets
(Note misspelling of name in url)

There are four great voiceovers in cinema: William Holden in Sunset Boulevard; Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence; Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman; and, to my mind the greatest of them all, Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets. It's utterly perfect; there isn't a flaw in it. The way Price delivers it is quite extraordinary. The truth is, without Dennis Price there wouldn't be a film. He holds it all together with the most elegant diction. It's quite wonderful, even just to listen to.

If we’re (quite rightly) going to salute Oliver Postgate then we cannot overlook this master:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/threecounties/content/images/2005/11/07/brian_cant_203_203x152.jpg

Obviously this^^^ doesn't apply to documentaries.

i dont know about that!

This is a super-dumm and ignorant question but is radio drama still a thing in the US? In the UK, we get quite a lot, courtesy BBC Radio 3 and 4 -- I am actually not a fan of the dominant style, and anyway hardly listen to the radio at all, but it's an outlet for lots of British actors.

― mark s, Sunday, November 6, 2011 6:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

not really, at least not in a commercial sense. there's probably enthusiasts keeping it alive in some fashion - like community theater type things, maybe broadcast over the internet

There are unreliable-narrator documentaries, but the thesis was that ALL voiceovers are to be treated as unreliable. We were not (at that point) prepared to claim this for all documentaries with voiceovers.

Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski.

I'm a sucker for that trick where you find out at the end of the movie that the crusty old narrator is actually the young hero all growed up and telling you the story way after the fact, cf Matewan and some terrible Winona Ryder movie

speaking of unreliable, mark have you seen this Welles outtake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5LkDNu8bVU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Has anyone mentioned Paul Scofield's voiceover for the Patrick Keillor films?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ufuciYoHA

Vanessa Redgrave replaced him in the latest film, and is pretty good too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgCbMv6jH1c

Also (and related) James Mason on The London Nobody Knows (although, of course, it's more than a voiceover as he always wanders about.
You can see the whole glorious thing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZVabi3FCj0

xp The Feral Kid in Mad Max 2! Narrated by Harold Baigent (this isn't a recommendation, I forget how it sounds...)

Will check all these when I get back from the town dump (<--trufax)

Yes Stevie T mentioned Scofield / Keiller

I generally hear that Redgrave is not so good in her film, which I have not seen.

Terence Davies may be a good judge of voiceovers, but his own voiceover on his atrocious film OF TIME AND THE CITY was one of many reasons, some of which I happily no longer remember, for its awfulness.

I generally hear that Redgrave is not so good in her film

She's not very good at anything though

conrad roberts on live evil!!

Good grief, the tags on the YouTube presentation of... "London Nobody Knows".

I won't reproduce them here lest we attract loonies to this spectacularly unloony thread.

Good grief, the tags on the YouTube presentation of... "London Nobody Knows".

I won't reproduce them here lest we attract loonies to this spectacularly unloony thread.

Which I have now spoiled.

lol @ the way olivier pronounces soviet and stalin (impeccable russian accent suddenly)

It's really typical of Mike to spoil everything.

Daniel Stern in The Wonder Years.

Obviously this^^^ doesn't apply to documentaries.

good for a sidebar though - March Of The Penguins eg

or those old Disney nature docs

I think the thread's already thrown up the beginnings of an ecology -- might make a stab at the categories emerging this evening.

haha yes THE LIE OF THE LEMMINGS omg! Tho "unreliable narrator" doesn't really mean documentary-maker telling total porkies.

In a sense, there is nothing that is not an unreliable narrator.

Here's one for our younger readers and American cousins:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radioscotland/60s/img/events/animal_magic.jpg

no comma ledge

haha my dad (the naturalist) hated johnny morris with the fire of a trillion supernovas

I can believe it

I actually started a thread on this eons ago!
"Voiceover is the crutch of a poor screenwriter"

before my time

A big overlooked genre of voiceover so far itt - and probably the most popular by some distance - is sports commentary!

There are a few overlaps w/documentary, skills-wise: for instance, the immense breath control and energy needed to commentate both golf and the mating of wild animals - intense and urgent yet whisper-quiet

But there are vast disparities in style even just in, say, baseball: Joe Buck's foghorn bray vs Howard Cosell's Runyonesque staccato vs Vin Scully's twinkling, burbling brook

but... those guys arent known for anything other than calling games

correct (i hope)

and yeah mark, no tradition of radio drama at all anymore in the US. as Princess TamTam says there are amateur enthusiasts out there doing things - a surprising number of them, actually - but all the accumulated wisdom of the 30s and 40s was funnelled into television, and the parts that didn't fit were shattered and scattered to the winds

Do you guys know about these radio play versions of films that were done in the 40s with almost the same script and cast?

happened to watch The World At War recently and yeah, olivier is quite good. he does seem to put extra care into the russian and german pronunciation, i love hearing him say zhukov and ukraine. he seems to come alive when they give him anything requiring a dramatic reading, like poems and shit. funny thing i never noticed before: how alike he and ron perlman often sound!

robb webb in john lurie's fishing w/ john is incredible

"Both fishermen are covered with sores and boners"

linda hunt

i mean there a million things

Looking forward to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xivQ6_gu3W8