Four curious cases of voice replacement

Maybe the title of this blog post strikes you as a bit strange. Replacing an actor’s voice with that of another is, after all, what dubbing is all about. In this case, however, we’re talking about those strange occasions on which an actor goes from having one voice to suddenly having another one in the very same film! Yes, that does happen sometimes, and here are four curious examples with video clips to illustrate:

The first example is from Umberto Lenzi’s all-star cast WW2 film The Greatest Battle (1978), in a scene featuring Guy Doleman in the role of General Whitmore. Listen carefully to when he says the sentence “You know, Sean here used to be one of the finest war correspondents in the world” in the clip below. If you pay very close attention, you’ll notice that after he says “Sean here”, there’s a little pause, and then the words “used to be one of the finest” are spoken by a different voice. And not just any voice. It’s the legendary character dubber Tony La Penna (eternally famous as the voice of Mickey Hargitay in Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) and Feodor Chaliapin in Inferno (1980)) who speaks these seven words before the voice changes back again.

 

 

It's very odd to have Tony La Penna’s voice appear out of nowhere right in the middle of a sentence, only to disappear again as quickly as it had appeared. We can only guess at the reason, of course, and my guess would be that there was some sort of damage to the original recording so that La Penna had to step in and add in those few words. They probably figured no one would ever notice. If you know La Penna’s voice well, however, it is quite noticeable.

 

The next example comes from the great comedy-giallo Atrocious Tales of Love and Death (1979) and is even more bizarre. In this film, French actor Michel Piccoli plays the prominent part of composer Victor Navarro, and his voice is dubbed in the English version with a British accent by the excellent long-time voice actor Ken Belton. In the middle of a pivotal scene, however, Belton’s voice suddenly disappears and is replaced by a completely different, French-accented voice that speaks for quite a while before it suddenly switches back to Belton again.

 

So… what on earth was that!? Where did that accented voice come from? Was that the voice they originally used for Piccoli, or possibly even Piccoli’s real voice? I can imagine them originally going with an accented voice and to then have it decided at some point that a cleaner re-voice was necessary, and that Ken Belton was brought in to re-do the part from scratch. But if that was the case, then how did they manage to omit to re-dub this little piece of dialogue? It’s right in the middle of a scene! How could they possibly miss it!? It really doesn’t make any sense.

The video clip above is taken from the Greek VHS release, and I’d be curious to know if this is a glitch that only occurs on that release, or if it’s like that on all English dubbed prints. Does anyone have any other release of the English dub and can say whether this same voice change occurs there too...?

 

The next example is from Piranha Part II: The Spawning (1982), the infamous directorial debut of James Cameron, produced by Italian filmmaker Ovidio G. Assonitis. In the clip below, you’ll see that lead actors Steve Marachuk and Tricia O’Neil had to be dubbed for two short scenes. The first scene is when the two of them break into the morgue. At the start of the clip, you can hear their real voices, but after O’Neil says “follow me” and it cuts to the two of them outside the morgue, you can hear the voices changing, with Marachuk now being over-dubbed by Ted Rusoff, and O’Neil by Penny Brown. Once they enter the morgue, you can hear it change back to their real voices. The second scene is a brief bit with Marachuk and O’Neil getting out of the water, and the first two lines they exchange are again dubbed by Rusoff and Brown before it changes back to actors’ real voices.

In this case, the reason for this brief re-voicing seems fairly clear. They probably didn’t have good, clear audio for these parts, and with post-production on the film being done in Rome, Marachuk and O’Neil were presumably not available to re-do their own voices for these bits. A few other parts in the film were actually completely re-voiced, most notably the prominent role of Jai played by Carole Davis, who was dubbed by Carolyn de Fonseca.

 

Finally, the last curious case is from the trashy jungle adventure film Invaders of the Lost Gold (1982). Stuart Whitman stars, alongside the likes of Edmund Purdom, Woody Strode and Laura Gemser, and while he uses his own voice for much of the film, he is dubbed with the deep and masculine tones of prolific voice actor Marc Smith for various other scenes.

The dubbing of Whitman happens mainly in various location scenes for which there probably wasn’t any usable live sound recordings, and Whitman was presumably not available to re-dub himself for these scenes. Clearly, the producers wanted to keep as much of Whitman’s real voice as they could, so Marc Smith was brought in only to re-voice the parts for which there was no usable audio. An understandable choice in many ways, but it feels very strange and jarring to have Whitman’s voice change from scene to scene – especially as Smith doesn’t even try to make an effort to imitate Whitman’s voice.

It should be noted that Invaders of the Lost Gold was probably not dubbed in Rome, but in London, which is where Marc Smith did most (but not all) of his dubbing work during the 1980s. Due to Smith’s extensive voice work in Rome throughout the years, however, I decided to include it here anyway.

© 2023 Johan Melle