The original post: /r/movies by /u/Blirup on 2024-06-21 19:57:34.

I’ve just seen L. A. Confidential for the first time. Having never read the novels I don’t know much about the backstories of the characters, and Google wasn’t very helpful in this regard.

Dudley Smith (played by James Cromwell) has this peculiar manner of speaking; almost as if reading lines from a book. Why is that? James Cromwell doesn’t talk this way in his other films, so I reckon it must be attributed to the character of Dudley Smith instead. Was this part of the book as well, was it based on a real person or was it meant as a certain type of dialect?