Dubs or subtitles?

I was thinking about this again after watching the Wild East DVD of Un Buco in fronte. I am accustomed to the NEW (Germany) DVD so the “English voice” of Anthony Ghidra in the Wild East version somehow doesn’t seem to “match” him.

Generally I prefer Italian with English subtitles. Sometimes, as in the Blue Underground Django, it’s because the English dub is lacking.

In Il Bianco, il giallo, il nero so much of the humor and charm of the opening scene is lost because the dubbing ignores almost all of the original Italian. (It would be difficult to reproduce the scene with English or German subtitles but it could be done, especially when the Italian titles and the English titles are the same.)

I guess there are times when the dub is funny or crazy and that might be preferred.

When the film stars Lee van Cleef I want it in English!

What do you think?

Some thoughts in this thread:

[url]http://www.spaghetti-western.net/forum/index.php/topic,2394.0.html[/url]

my general view on subs and dubs is i want to watch the movie in whatever the native language is where the film is set. (i guess this falls foul in the zapata spaghettis)
it just seems odd to have a western clearly set in america but the whole cast speaking italian. however after seeing some awful dubs i’m looking to change that. django has to be the worst english dub ever so i’m going to look into a italian track with english subs. this works across the board with films, ie memoirs of a geisha was ruined for me by having it in english rather than mandarin. i’d have much rather had them speaking wonky english when the american soilders came into town. it sometimes seems silly having a say german war film about the nazi’s where they all speak english.

but going back to spaghettis, i just watched the koch version of at the end of the rainbow in italian with english subs and that was fine. so the flood gates are open and i’ve just ordered a few more, so we’ll see.

Depends on the quality of the dub. Dubbed in English if dubbed by the actors involved. So that’s all the ones with American/international actors in the lead roles, plus the ones where Franco Nero dubbed himself in English (Mercenario, Companeros). I also don’t mind the dubbing on the Trinity & Nobody films. But most of the other SWs I’ve seen with all Italian cast have a very poor or annoying English dub, & I would rather watch a good film in Italian with subtitles than endure a bad English dub.

This irritated me when I watched “Where Eagles Dare” recently. We learn at the beginning of the film that all the agents selected for this mission are fluent in German, but then all dialogue which should take place in German (when they go undercover) is actually shown in English, as well as dialogue which would be in English anyway (when they talk to each other or their commanders). Not only does this demand an unreasonable suspension of disbelief, but it’s hard to follow what dialogue is in English-pretending-to-be-German, and what is in actual English.

On the other hand, in a film like “Cross of Iron” where all dialogue would really be in German but is represented in English, it doesn’t really bother me. Watching a SW in Italian is a different experience to watching it dubbed, but doesn’t seem particularly ersatz. Leone’s answer to criticisms of Italians making westerns was that Hollywood had already done the equivalent to Italian culture with its heavily Americanised (& English language) Roman epics such as Ben Hur & Spartacus.

FYI, Memoirs of a Geisha is set in Japan & so should by rights be in Japanese, not Mandarin. The casting of mostly Chinese actresses in lead roles as Japanese characters is also typical hollywood silliness & possibly one of the reasons it wasn’t filmed in Japanese. According to a documentary which appears on the DVD, communications on-set got a little chaotic, what with Chinese-English, Japanese-English and Chinese-Japanese interpreters used constantly by the cast & crew.

argh forgive me for that little blunder. i just assumed because the pretty girl from house of flying daggers was in it and she speaks mandarin in that then of cource memoirs should be in mandarin. HA silly me.

but i’m glad even though my point was factually wrong it still got my point across