could phoneticians solve a film mystery?

[Steven Hill]

Dear colleagues:

Showing my students this week the elaborate Hollywood tribute to our one-time
Soviet allies, "Song of Russia" (1944, Robt. Taylor, Michael Chekhov),  I realized
an old mystery about that controversial WW2 film might now be solvable by certain
phoneticians.  Unless, of course, that's already been done?

The mystery.  In the middle of the film, a minor MGM actor (probably Michael
Visaroff), made up as Comrade Stalin, gives a radio speech about Russia's war
effort, listened to by the entire nation.  Since this is an American film, the
speech is articulated (dubbed) in English, by an actor's dubbed voice speaking
with a strong Russian accent that sounds familiar, although it is uncredited in
the film's lengthy list of performers.

For a long time, some people have suspected the voice which dubbed Stalin's
speech without any credit was that of the great Russian supporting actor, Akim
Mikhailovich Tamiroff (1899-1972), twice nominated for the Oscar and probably
Hollywood's greatest specialist in playing "ethnic villains" of all nationalities.
I was impressed recently to learn that my suspicion was shared by none other than
Mr. Tamiroff's own nephew, who is still living.   But Akim Tamiroff & his wife
Tamara Shayne Tamiroff died without leaving any memoirs, and we seemed to have no
way to prove that suspicion.

Are there any university speech laboratories or sound laboratories which
SPECIALIZE IN IDENTIFYING the particular speech patterns of particular
individuals?  I.e., could some sort of graphic or other chart, created by such a
laboratory like fingerprints, be put to use, to match the voice that dubbed
Stalin's speech in "Song of Russia," on the one hand, with charts of the speech
patterns of already-identified Russian-accented actors from other films, on the
other hand?

Or would such an undertaking be too ambitious and too costly to be worth it?

Yours truly,
Steven P Hill,
University of Illinois.
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