I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tonight for the first time in a while, and Sean Connery as Harrison Ford’s father bugged me more than it has in the past few times I’ve seen this movie.
First of all, the guy only looks and acts a dozen years older than his son, perhaps because that’s the actual age difference between Connery and Ford. And second, he has an outrageous Scottish accent, something Ford doesn’t have except in that brief scene where he’s not so cleverly disguised as a lord in search of castle tapestries.
If Spielberg is going to go to the trouble of showing us where Indiana got that scar on his chin that Ford has in real life, maybe he should have cooked up an elaborate backstory for Connery’s accent. Or maybe he thought that leaving it unexplained would somehow fit the movie convention of characters from non-English-speaking countries that speak English but with a British accent.