“When the English Dub Actually Works Better.”

We’re told foreign films should always be watched in their original language, but in a few surprising cases, the English version delivers the stronger performance.

People often believe that you should always see foreign movies in their native language. That suggestion is good in theory. Subtitles keep the rhythms of speech, the tonal changes in performance, and the soundscape that the filmmaker wanted. But there are some important exceptions, and a lot of them are from Italy.

For a long time, Italian movies were usually made without sound that was in sync. Actors spoke whatever language they knew, Italian, English, French, or German, on set, and the final soundtrack was put together later in post-production. Dubbing wasn’t something that came up later; it was the standard. In movies with foreign casts, actors often spoke their original languages during shooting and then dubbed their voices for the version that came out in that language. The end consequence is that practically every Italian movie is technically dubbed, regardless of which language track you pick. In these cases, authenticity is more about who speaks for them than where they're from. Occasionally the English version keeps the main performance better than the Italian version.

La Strada. Courtesy of Janus Films / The Criterion Collection

Think about Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada. The movie is about a ragged group of circus performers that travel: Anthony Quinn plays Zampanò, a brutish strongman; Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, the childlike waif he buys and forces to work as a clownish assistant; and Richard Basehart plays Il Matto, the philosophical high-wire artist whose presence makes Zampanò jealous. Masina may do her part with her voice while watching the Italian track. Masina’s portrayal is mostly physical, with amazing mime and gesture work, whereas Quinn’s lumbering, melancholy Zampanò relies a lot on his voice. The English version lets Quinn and Basehart record their performances, keeping the full power of Quinn’s most famous part. The balance is now clearly in favour of the English-language track.

Home video distributors once agreed to this practical compromise. With Criterion’s laserdisc version of La Strada, people may choose between Italian and English soundtracks. When sections that were only in the lengthier Italian cut came on without any English audio, the music temporarily switched back to Italian before switching back to English when the shared material started up again. It was a smart way to solve a challenging issue, and it should have been the norm. Sadly, subsequent versions haven’t always kept that flexibility, which means that viewers have to choose one audio option even when the film’s international production history suggests that they should have more than one.

Fellini’s Casanova. Courtesy of Produzioni Europee Associati.

There is a similar problem in Fellini’s Casanova (1976). The movie was filmed in English and Italian, and Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange, wrote the English dialogue. Donald Sutherland’s amazing portrayal as the aged libertine Giacomo Casanova lies at the heart of the movie. It is disgusting, sad, and strangely fascinating. Sutherland’s voice is dry and somewhat sardonic, which is an important part of the persona. But the version that is most often aired on TV substitutes that voice with an Italian dub, which means that the performance is no longer connected to the actor who made it. Because Burgess was involved and Sutherland was crucial to the film’s odd emotional atmosphere, the English-language audio is not a secondary alternative; it is the best one.

Anthology films like Spirits of the Dead (1969), which is based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Fellini, make things even more complicated. The European home video version, called Histoires Extraordinaires, shows the whole movie in French, regardless of what language the performers spoke originally. The choice works out well enough in certain parts. Vadim’s “Metzengerstein,” which stars Jane Fonda, is better since Fonda dubbed her French lines quite well. Louis Malle’s “William Wilson,” which stars Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot, is perhaps more realistic since it lets its French actors use their language.

Spirits of the Dead (also released as Histoires Extraordinaires). Courtesy of Les Films Marceau / American International Pictures

But “Toby Dammit,” Fellini’s part, falls apart when treated the same way. The part is all about Terence Stamp’s acting as a decadent English actor who starts to hallucinate while marketing a movie in Italy. Fellini came up with the narrative based on language alienation: Stamp’s character speaks English, but everyone else speaks Italian. This scenario makes it seem like he is lost in a place he doesn’t comprehend. Changing the whole part into French takes away that suspense and makes the notion seem silly. In English, Stamp delivers one of the best performances of his career as a star who is falling apart. Hearing it replaced with a voice in a different language is like seeing the movie’s basis slowly come apart. The original American edition, which was put out by AIP, also included a framing introduction and conclusion by Vincent Price, which made the anthology’s macabre theatricality even more clear. That version has never been adequately restored for home video, but it is still the best way to see the movie.

Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963), another horror anthology that is generally said to have arrived before Spirits of the Dead, makes the subject of language more odd. The first part, “A Drop of Water,” has so little speech that language doesn’t really matter; the feeling of growing fear stays the same no matter what. The second tale, “The Telephone,” has the opposite difficulty. The American distributor severely re-edited the English-language version, presumably to eliminate overt implications of a lesbian connection between the protagonists. The edit that came out seems broken, and the story doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s evident that the European version, which adds back the lost parts, is better here.

Ludwig. Courtesy of Mega Film / Cineteca di Bologna.

But the last episode, “The Wurdalak,” brings the topic back to how important the actor’s voice is. Boris Karloff plays the head of a family that is in danger of becoming vampires. He gives off the kind of threatening power that characterized his later work. You can’t separate Karloff’s voice from his on-screen presence. It’s deep, measured, and recognizable. If you replace it with a foreign-language dub, you lose the part that makes the performance noteworthy. A genuine release of Bava’s film should contain both versions so that spectators may enjoy the restored story of “The Telephone” and the unique sound of Karloff’s voice.

Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (1972), a huge history of Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was frequently nicknamed the “Mad King,” is the most irritating version of the problem. Many people think that Visconti’s picture of Ludwig, an obsessive artist, a supporter of Wagner, and a doomed king, is the director’s best attempt at a self-portrait. Helmut Berger played Ludwig, Romy Schneider played Empress Elisabeth, and Trevor Howard played Richard Wagner in the movie’s main roles. Berger and Schneider are both from Austria and speak English with accents that fit well with the Bavarian environment. Berger’s soft, almost androgynous tenor voice is especially important to the character’s psychological texture.

Black Sabbath. Courtesy of Galatea Film/ American International Pictures.

After a lot of hard work, the picture was restored to its original length of about four hours and its visual splendor. But the version that is easy to obtain only has the music in Italian. Another actor completely takes over Berger’s voice, which is an important part of the character. The outcome is a curious contradiction: a visually canonical version with an audio track that takes away the performances that people used to hear.

These instances show that the customary advice concerning foreign-language movies isn’t always right. In the Italian film business, dubbing was not an afterthought; it was an important element of making the movies. The “original language” is not always as clear-cut as people think. When choosing which version of these movies to see, performance should be the most important factor, not grammatical purity. Occasionally, the most accurate version of a movie is the one where the performers can speak for themselves.