The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than t

The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than the "BBC English" sort of accent - largely developed/taught in expensive fee-paying schools, but nevertheless not 'phony' as such, because it was the genuine accent of the people that spoke that way. They didn't speak differently at home. Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying. I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).