Dubbed in Rome

  At one point or another, most of the English language dubbers in Rome appeared in front of a camera. After all, many of them originally came to Rome as hopeful actors, before finding that dubbing could provide them with a steadier income. A lot of the dubbers only ever appeared in small film roles (usually early on in their careers), though there were a few dubbers who appeared regularly in front of the camera and who divided their times equally between Cinecittà and the various Roman dubbing studios, with Frank Latimore, Edmund Purdom, Roger Browne, Michael Forest, Craig Hill, Tony Russel and Rodd Dana being the best-known examples. Most of the time, the dubbers provided their own voices for the English language versions, but not always. Sometimes, even the dubbers themselves ended up dubbed by other dubbers. Lack of availability was usually the reason for this happening, though sometimes it also happened that an actor was not capable of a certain accent that the character...

One of the really wonderful things about the DVD and Blu-ray era is the sheer number of films has been released – many of which are rare and largely forgotten European films that have been given new life after years of complete obscurity. As an enthusiast of the English dubbing scene in Rome, though, I am highly concerned with rescuing not only the films themselves from obscurity, but also the English dub tracks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen as there’s quite a lot of dubbing snobbery going on, with several companies choosing to not include the English dub tracks on their releases. One of the worst offenders is definitely Kino Lorber, who, for example, omitted the English dubs of all the films in their Lina Wertmüller Collection, as well as leaving out the excellent English dub track on their release of Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses (1976). In the case of the latter, however, the totally wretched, overly dark and badly color-timed transfer makes it a definite no...