To date a dub...

 

Being a ‘dubbing detective’ can oftentimes be a very complicated job. It takes a lot of time, effort and patience to familiarize yourself with a voice to the point that you can trust yourself to be able to positively pick it out in any and all types of roles. And that’s just one part of it! There are many other challenges one is frequently faced with when doing research on dubbing, and one of them is trying to pinpoint exactly when a given dub was actually recorded. Now, a lot of the time, English dubs in Rome were recorded in close proximity with the original production of the films, but there are also several examples of dubs which were recorded up to several years after the film was originally made. Sometimes, because an actor in the film who was unknown at the time of production but later ended up becoming famous and thus greatly increasing the film’s marketability. Other times because a certain type of film became very popular; prompting producers to try to make some money on an older film that has some common traits with this popular trend. Or so on, and so on. A lot of the time, it’s impossible to detect whether a film was dubbed some years after the original production or not, but sometimes, there are indicators that give it away, and in this post, I’m going to spotlight three examples of films that were belatedly dubbed into English:

 

1. Plot of Fear / E tanta paura (1976)

The first example is Paolo Cavara’s giallo Plot of Fear (1976). The film stars Michele Placido as Inspector Lomenzo, a cop who is investigating a spate of sadistic murders, where in each case the killer leaves behind an illustration from a famous children’s book. Now, at first sight – or listen, really – there’s nothing unusual with the English dub, which certainly sounds as if it could have been recorded around the time the film was originally made. There is one notable outlier, however: leading man Michele Placido is dubbed by Leslie La Penna. Now, Leslie was a major dubbing actor and director in English throughout the 1980s and 90s, but not only is Plot of Fear the earliest film in which I’ve found Leslie’s voice, it’s also the only film from this period in which he can be heard. His next known dubbing roles are as young adults in some sex comedies from 1979, and he then has some other scattered roles in the early 1980s, but doesn’t appear to have become really prolific in dubbing until in 1983. I therefore find it extremely unlikely that Leslie could have dubbed Plot of Fear in 1976. The film must have been dubbed some years later – possibly as late as 1983 or even 1984. Which sounds very strange, I know, but if we accept this hypothesis then it would certainly help to explain the mystery of why neither the film’s two international marquee-value actors, Eli Wallach and Tom Skerritt, supplied their own voices for the English version, but were instead dubbed by Robert Sommer and Ted Rusoff, respectively.

 

Leading man Michele Placido is dubbed in English by Leslie La Penna.

The question of why the film didn’t get dubbed until maybe 7-8 years later still remains, however, and I’m afraid I don’t have any good theories. One would think that having Wallach and Skerritt on board was reason good enough to immediately dub the film and try to secure some international distribution, but I guess maybe not…? What do you think? Take a look at the clips in the video below and then let me know if you think this was dubbed in 1976 or if it could have been done in 1983/84 instead.

2. Ghosts of Rome / Fantasmi a Roma (1961)

Other times, the presence of a specific dubber in a Rome dub from a time period when that dubber is known for a fact to not have been working in Rome can be a dead giveaway. Such is the case with Ghosts of Rome (1961), a charming little comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Belinda Lee, about a group of ghosts living in an old Roman palazzo who must try to come up with a clever plan to prevent their home from being demolished and turned into a supermarket. The English dub is very rare, which is very unfortunate, as it’s a top-notch effort, with a first-rate dubbing cast that includes a lot of the greats from the 1960s, such as William Kiehl, Carolyn de Fonseca, Stephen Garrett, Tony La Penna and John Stacy. You can sample a little scene from the English dub here:

Watching the above clip, it might initially sound just like your typical early 1960s Rome dub, but the presence of the voice of Tony La Penna (Leslie’s dad) precludes the possibly that this dub could have been made in 1961. After several years of doing English dubbing in Rome during the 1950s, Tony had relocated to New York and the end of the decade and would go on to spend several years there working with dubbing at Titra Studios, not returning to Rome until in 1963. We can therefore safely conclude that the English dub of Ghosts of Rome could not have been recorded any earlier than 1963, and fortunately, we can narrow the timeline of the dub’s creation down even further thanks to the English version’s airings on US television, the earliest of which was in December 1965. Thus, the dub must have been produced sometime during 1963-65 – most likely sometime in 1965.

 

US television listing for the English dub in The Los Angeles Times (December 26, 1965).

 

3. The Defeat of Hannibal / Scipione l’africano (1937)

Finally, there are even a few cases in which the gap between the time a film was originally made and the time an English dub was recorded is very considerable, and nowhere was that gap larger than in the curious case of Carmine Gallone’s historical epic Scipione l’africano (1937) which depicts Rome’s defeat of the Carthaginian general Hannibal at the Battle of Zama. Made with the backing of Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was eager to revive Italian cinema after a series of box office failures in the 1920s, the film was massively expensive and features large-scale scenes with tens of thousands of extras. So impressive were the film’s battle scenes that in the 1960s, it was finally decided to create an English version and try to distribute it as another muscleman epic in the vein of the then hugely popular Hercules, Samson, Maciste etc films. Thus the film was rechristened The Defeat of Hannibal and dubbed into English by the American Dubbing Corporation, one of several English dubbing groups that were active in Rome during the early to mid 1960s before they all united under the English Language Dubbers Association (ELDA) a little later, and with some of the more prominent characters dubbed by Tony La Penna, Charles Borromel and John Stacy. You can watch a few clips from it in this video:

 

The Defeat of Hannibal was picked up for US distribution by Walter Manley Enterprises, who released it directly to television. The earliest American broadcast I’ve been able to find records of is from March 1965, and that coupled with the presence of Tony La Penna, who we know was absent from Rome until 1963, means we can safely deduce that – just like Ghost of Rome – the English Defeat of Hannibal dub must have been recorded sometime during 1963-65. To be more specific than that is difficult, but my educated guess would be on 1964.

US television listing for the English dub in The Star Ledger (March 27, 1965).

Well, there you have it: three movies that may initially seem to have been dubbed at the time of the original production, but which upon closer inspection are revealed to have been dubbed later. And they are not in any way unique cases. Garibaldi (1961), Star Pilot (1966) and Blood Calls to Blood (1968) are a few other examples that immediately spring to mind. Know of any others? Then feel free to drop me a line in the comments.