Few people know that the two actors did the dubbing themselves in all languages. In Pordenone a surviving fragment of their version
A surprise, between silent and sound, for the many Italian friends of Stanlio and Ollio at the Days of Silent Cinema in Pordenone running until 8 October. Few people know that the funny, crippled language, with improbable intonations of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, whose main voice actors in Italy were Mauro Zambuto (who will then get a chair in theoretical physics in New York) and Alberto Sordi (who will leave for fame with Fellini) derives from the fact that originally the two actors dubbed themselves in all the languages of the foreign markets where their hugely popular films were released, an idea of the famous producer Hal Roach, when dubbing was not yet a perfected technique.
So the protagonists spoke in addition to English, the French, the German, the Spanish and the Italian, before the Italian voices intervened in the mid-30s, before Carlo Cassola and Paolo Canali, from ’34 to ’37; then of Zambuto-Canali in ’37 and ’38; finally by Zambuto and Sordi (which Hardy did) until 1946, with forays into the various editions of famous titles such as Cheerful heroes, The children of the West, Fra Diavolo, We are the pillars, of other voice actors such as the couple Elio Pandolfi-Pino Locchi, Fiorenzo Fiorentini and Carlo Croccolo, Enzo Garinei and Ariani, while in the theater the best imitation was by the Campanini-Dapporto couple. When the two actors dubbed themselves it was a real tour de force that forced them to read the lines about the hunchback, crippling the pronunciation and accents in different languages and thus adding sound gags to visual gags, thus also imposed on their voice actors.
Of course today some films shot in Italian by Laurel and Hardy there is no trace, but at the Giornate there will be a surviving element of the Italian-American version of Thievesfrom 1930, i.e. the American Night owls by James Parrott, scripted by Leo McCarey, in a reduced edition of 15 ‘, reconstructed on the basis of the Spanish edition also for the assonance of the two languages.
The long research in museums, film libraries and collectors which is part of the project for the digital recovery of Italian editions, has made it possible to find a copy in which the voice of Oliver Hardy can be heard in a Spanish-Italian joke, part of a recording of the film which took place in August ’30. For the first time in the opening credits the famous leitmotif Cuckoo songwhile curious that the director of photography of the film is George Stevens, who later became a great director twice Oscar of films such as A Place in the Sunof Knight of the lonely valley he was born in GiganteDean’s latest film.
October 1, 2022 (change October 1, 2022 | 20:46)
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