Dubbed in Rome

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...

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...