The elusive English dub(s) of Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away (1974)

One of the really great advantages of the DVD and Blu-ray era is the possibility of presenting films with different language options, and this is certainly essential for Italian cinema, whose practice of shooting without live sound and extensive use of actors of different nationalities makes it challenging to say which, if any, language version could be considered the definitive one. It’s therefore a good thing that movie fans have the choice of watching their giallo, peplum, western, crime and Eurospy movies in either English or Italian.

Unfortunately, the same is not true of the more prestigious Italian films, since a great many “serious” movie fans turn their noses up at the concept of dubbing and only want to watch films in their original language – thereby ignoring the fact that classic Italian movies were all completely post-synchronized from scratch, and so they’re still watching a dubbed film, only in Italian rather than English. Nevertheless, it has long been a trend now to not include the English dubs on releases of more serious Italian fare.

One of the films whose English dubbed version has all but disappeared due to this practice is Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (usually referred to simply as Swept Away), Lina Wertmüller’s celebrated romantic class warfare comedy about a bitchy upper-class woman (Mariangela Melato) and a brutish communist deckhand (Giancarlo Giannini) who end up stranded alone on a desert island.

 

The film's UK quad poster.

My first encounter with this film was through the 2006 American region 1 DVD release from Koch Lorber, and I immediately fell in love with it. Outrageously funny, provocative and gripping in equal measure, and featuring brilliant performances by Giannini and Melato, Swept Away is, for me, one of the really great classics of Italian cinema. Alas, the Koch Lorber release was presented only in Italian language with English subtitles, and though the film admittedly plays beautifully in Italian, I have nevertheless always been curious about the English dubbed version, especially after I read an anecdote related by the ultra-prolific dubbing actor/director Ted Rusoff in the career-spanning interview he did with Video Watchdog (No. 159, November/December 2010).

In this interview, Rusoff shared several memories of his various dubbing colleagues, among them the great, long-time dubbing actor/director Frank Von Kuegelgen, about whom Rusoff said:

“As in the case of Nick Alexander, you would never take him to be anyone in the performing arts. Everything about him screams ‘accountant’. But he undeniably has talent. He has a strange nasal voice and, when Lina Wertmüller chose him to dub Giancarlo Giannini in Swept Away, it raised the heckles of all the ‘leading men’ of the time: Frank Latimore, Larry Ward, and yes, Ted Rusoff. I still don’t think he was the right choice for Giannini, but that’s ancientry.”

 

Ted Rusoff.

That certainly had me intrigued, and some years later, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that someone had actually uploaded the rare English dub version on YouTube. Presumably sourced from the old US laserdisc on the RCA/Columbia label, this upload was a most welcome opportunity to finally watch Swept Away in English, and while it was very weel-made dub, I was a bit disappointed to note that Giancarlo Giannini’s voice was most definitely not dubbed by Frank Von Kuegelgen, nor were any of the other actors dubbed by any of the usual Rome dubbers. Clearly, this dub was not made in Rome, but actually in New York, with the English version being credited to Paulette Rubenstein, who also directed the English dubs of many of Ingmar Bergman’s films. I thus concluded that Rusoff must have been misremembering for which film it was that Von Kuegelgen’s casting made Rusoff and the other leading men dubbers jealous, and then I more or less forgot about the whole thing.

Until Swept Away made its Blu-ray debut in 2017, that is. Unfortunately, the company behind the release was Kino Lorber, who have proven themselves to be among the worst when it comes to including English dubs of Italian classics, and this release was certainly no exception: Italian dub with English subtitles only. To add insult to injury, Kino actually included the film’s original English language export trailer (under the title Overcome by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea in August), and this is where things get really interesting, because the voices used in the trailer are not the same as the ones used in the English dub I had watched on YouTube. On the contrary, Mariangela Melato’s voice in the trailer is dubbed by Susan Spafford, who was the most prolific and in-demand leading lady dubber in Rome in the 1960s and 70s, whereas Giancarlo Giannini is dubbed by… yes, you guessed it: Frank Von Kuegelgen! Just check out the trailer yourself below:

Veteran dubbing actress Susan Spafford provides the English voice for Mariangela Melato in the trailer.

So Ted Rusoff was right after all! Frank Von Kuegelgen really did do Giancarlo Giannini’s voice! But then what was about the US dub I had watched on YouTube, which by now had been taken down from YouTube, so that I wasn’t able to re-examine it. Was that actually a re-dub? After all, quite a few Italian films from the early 1960s ended up being re-dubbed in New York because the American distributors were unhappy with the original export dubs, so maybe the same had happened here?

Searching around for information about this, I eventually learned managed to dig up some more details about the US dub of Swept Away, such as the fact that the actor who had dubbed Giancarlo Giannini’s voice was actually none other than Michael Tucker, famous for his long-running role as Stuart Markowitz in the hit legal drama L.A. Law (1986-94), but who back in the 1970s had been a struggling young theatre actor who did dubbing jobs to supplement his income.

 

Michael Tucker during his L.A. Law years.

Tucker’s involvement in the English dub is explicitly mentioned in an article called “Spotlight on Stars” that was published in the newspaper The Town Talk on February 25, 1989:

“Here’s a little known fact about Michael Tucker, who stars in L.A. Law. During his early acting days, he was the one whom producers called upon to dub many of the leading foreign actors into English. Michael had developed a dialect (be it French or Italian or German) which made the dialogue understood without losing the foreign flavor. He was heard as the English voice of Jean Paul Belmondo in many films, as well as the voice of Giancarlo Giannini in Seven Beauties and Swept Away.”

Tucker’s dubbing of Giannini is also referenced in a New York Times article on Tucker’s wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, called “Jill Eikenberry – Different Phase of a Moon Child” (published on April 29, 1977), which states that the couple and their 7-year-old daughter Alison have just returned from Italy where they all played small roles in Lina Wertmüller’s latest film A Night Full of Rain. Eikenberry is quoted saying that: “Mike went over to help Giancarlo Giannini with his dialogue, which is in English. He has dubbed a lot of Giannini’s stuff in the past, including Swept Away and Seven Beauties.”

And as for Mariangela Melato, her voice was supplied by voice-over artist and socio-political satirist Cynthia Adler, whose biography on her official website states that “she has dubbed leading roles in numerous foreign films, such as Swept Away and Seven Beauties for Lina Wertmueller, 1900 for Bernardo Bertolucci, and Scenes From A Marriage for Ingmar Bergman.”

Cynthia Adler did Mariangela Melato's voice in the US dub.

Thanks to a tip from an anonymous commentator, I was also able to re-find the US dub, and to give you an idea of how it plays out, I’ve put up this little sample clip from it:

Alas, the Rome dub featuring Frank Von Kuegelgen and Susan Spafford still remains an enigma. Is it possible that they only dubbed the trailer, and not the actual film? Or did they indeed do a complete export dub, and if they did, what happened to it? Was it ever released anywhere? Will we ever know? Quite possibly not. Then again… there must still be some old Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese or whatever VHS releases of Swept Away out there somewhere, and I should think that they would carry the original export dub done in Rome – if it actually exists, that is. So, if you’re reading this and you happen to possess an English dub of Swept Away that is not sourced from a US release then I’d love to hear from you. My contact details can be found here.

This post was last updated on: May 1, 2024.