June 26, 2025: Sound in Film: Dialogue Dubbing

[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]

On three characters whose dialogue was dubbed by a different actor than the on-screen performer, reflecting one of cinema’s more hidden histories.

1)      Goldfinger: Dialogue dubbing was apparently more or less ubiquitous in the early (ie, Sean Connery’s 1960s) Bond films—for example, the same German actress, Monica “Nikki” van der Zyl, dubbed at least 15 women across those early films, including Bond’s leading ladies in most of them. But it still feels pretty strange when a Bond film’s principal villain, a character who is on screen almost as much as Bond himself, is voiced by someone other than the actor we’re watching. And that was the case with Auric Goldfinger from the 1964 film of that name—he is played by German actor Gert Fröbe, but voiced by Englishman Michael Collins. I can’t lie, when I found out that it wasn’t the actor onscreen saying “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!,” I was both shaken and stirred.

2)      Darth Vader: This example of dialogue dubbing is obviously much, much more widely known than Goldfinger’s. But while of course George Lucas was happy to have James Earl Jones’s iconic and booming voice for his first trilogy’s iconic villain (turned sympathetic Dad), it also seems, from the behind-the-scenes footage that has since been released, that the actor walking around in Vader’s outfit (David Prowse) had a voice that quite simply would not have worked for the character no matter what. Prowse still got to wear the black suit and visit all those sets and act opposite the films’ other main performers, but it’s fair to say that Jones provided the performance most fully associated with the character—which of course reveals something about both the importance of dialogue and the complicated situation in play whenever dialogue is dubbed.

3)      Trish in Exit Wounds: And if that situation is always complicated to start with, I can only imagine how painful it feels for an actor to only find out that they’ve been dubbed when they watch the completed film for the first time. Apparently that was the case for Eva Mendes in the 2001 Steven Seagal and DMX action film Exit Wounds—Mendes filmed the entire role, producers were unhappy with her performance (believing she didn’t sound “intelligent enough”), the part was dubbed by an unidentified actress, and Mendes only discovered the change when she watched the film at the theater. Of course some toxic combination of sexism and racism had to be in play for them to feel that way about Mendes but not, y’know, Steven Seagal—a reminder that dialogue dubbing is always connected to other issues as well as sound in cinema.

Last film sound studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?