Italian Irritations AKA Deep Red Dubbing Dilemma AKA Audio Options Argh!

THIS MAY GET TWEAKED. EARLY DRAFT. HITTING "PUBLISH" ANYHOW.

I find myself with "bachelor time," and rather than plunging into writing projects, I am watching a Dario Argento film, or trying to. 

This relates to an upcoming live music event, by the way, but it's not written as promo for that. I was just thinking to see Argento, actually Deep Red, and then found myself writing this, and realized, hey, there is a Goblin event coming up... Hmmmm. 

Well, let's take note of that, a "Would my wife enjoy it?" evening out. 

Meantime, can I get through this Argento I have never seen, considered by many his masterpiece...? Yes, I think I can... if I can figure out the audio options! 

I plunged in without having consulted the manual, you know? The Ikea method. And understand: the dubbing or lack of dubbing of Italian cinema has always been an issue for me. There are many, many Italian films badly-dubbed into English or with dialogue recorded as per norms in post, which often adds insult to injury, as the scripts were often originally written by Italians with imperfect English themselves; try, oh, I don't know, Fulci's City of the Living Dead if you aren't sure what I mean. 

It can go wrong in very strange ways, on more than one level -- an English language actor struggling to read broken Italian English over the lips of someone speaking Italian; or even worse, an Italian ESL speaker reading English written by an Italian, in an Italian accent, dubbed at least potentially over a different Italian actor speaking English (!), because he had a "better accent." I do believe I have seen that in motion. 

There's more than one permutation of the options available. It all makes it somewhat challenging for a language tutor to enjoy, actually, as I end up thinking about the grammar: "How would I explain this mistake to a student?" "What went wrong there?"

And dubbing in itself, regardless of the original language/ culture, is often an issue for me. I do understand its purposes, but having grown up on badly dubbed Godzilla movies, I was wondering even when I was a child, "Why don't we just watch it in the original language?" 

I am not sure I can think of a film where dubbing wasn't distracting. But maybe with Italian cinema, with so many English stars and such an international audience in mind, some dubbing is better than others, especially given that all dialogue is added in afterwards, anyhow; with even the English-language version being, in effect, dubbed, "Is it well-dubbed?" becomes a more significant question. 

I mean, there are definitely Italian films I'd rather see the Italian language version of, regardless of the star. Pontecorvo's Queimada! (Burn!) is only available in its whole version in Italian, but you definitely want *that* version of it, with Brando dubbed into Italian. It's much longer and richer and it's actually less distracting to extract the Brando from the mix! It becomes less of a, well, Brando movie, so you can focus on the anti-colonial, Fanonist message... this is surely what Pontecorvo, Solinas et alia would have had us do...! 

On the other hand, I was surprised that the VIFF Centre projected the Italian-language version of The Big Gundown, the other week, in fact, because that film has one of the very best English dubs of the spaghettis (and who doesn't want to listen to Lee van Cleef, rather than an Italian voice over?). 

I have seen this film a couple of different ways, now, and believe I enjoyed it in either cut. I don't recall feeling like the longer version was somehow the more essential. I had a brief, "They're playing the Italian version!" moment of surprise, then settled in. It may have been the only way to see the whole, "proper" cut of the film, as with Burn!  - in which case, they made the right call, but, I don't know, I might have considered it the other way too? 

That also seems to be the case with Deep Red, which I recently bought off local man-of-culture Mitch (who sometimes sells pretty good cult movies online). I think I am learning the hard way that there is no workable way to watch the complete film, as it played in Europe. 

I am not sure I was aware that my options would become so quickly complicated:

1. Watch the long, pure director's cut in Italian with English subtitles with an actor as engaging as van Cleef, David Hemmings (of Blow Up fame) also getting dubbed into generic Italian male. No, no, I want the English audio option, please! Hemmings > Brando, thank you. Switch to:

2. An alternate version of the director's cut with SOME English, but only for the parts that were preserved for the English version. All the Euro-version parts are only available in Italian. So Hemmings' character changes not only languages but voices between scenes, and you have to have the subtitles on even WITH the English portions.

3. Finally, there is the shorter, English language American version... with dialogue added in post-production or such, so even though Hemmings is speaking English in his own voice, it sounds dubbed... and is, at a later date... but no need for subtitles, no random shifting between languages (or speaker).... 

I would like to apologize to Mr. Argento, here -- maybe I am doing this wrong; but I am going to start with the dubbed American version: I am going to do it "the American way," so to speak. Sometimes the dubbed version is the best way to go, at least the first time. 

Truth is, I have never really felt like I've "gotten" Argento, and associate him with a rather inferior cut of Day of the Dead, which may actually bias me and inform why I struggle. I have seen about five of his films, one twice (The Cat O' Nine Tails). But hell, I struggle with giallo itself, come to think of it, so I am not going to wrestle with the language, too (if I have an option). 

PS: Imagine my surprise that time in Japan where I rented the VHS of The Cat O' Nine Tails, took it home, and discovered it was the Italian language version with Japanese subtitles!

Post-script: so the English-dubbed version manages to imply, more through tone of voice than writing, that newborn butterflies, termites and zebras lose their telepathy in the process of growing up to acquire spoken language. 

I had no ideas termites grew up to speak English, let alone zebras! 

Actually, of course, they mean newborn HUMANS lose these abilities, but the intonation and delivery are so stilted you actually have to stop and go, "What did he just say?" I actually  had to rewind it. 

I quickly switched to the Italian version. I can't tell if the line reading is any better, actually, but at least I don't notice, if it isn't. Alas, despite some very effective moments, I find it meandering enough that I am napping through it. 

I may not solve "the problem of Argento" tonight...