Les Miserables was written in French and set in France and all of its characters are French speakers, but there have been many English-language film versions made over the last 80 years. The American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was still set in Sweden using Swedish names but was filmed in English starring mostly English speaking actors. The same is true of many other great novels from non-English speaking countries: the film versions made for US audiences are filmed in English, though the characters are still German or Italian or Spanish or Indian or Russian or whatever nationality they were in the source material.
Do other countries do this very often with American literature, history, or characters? For example, is there a film version off Huckleberry Finn that is set in 19th-century America but filmed in Spanish, or a movie about JFK and Marilyn Monroe in which they speak Portuguese or something like that? (I’m not asking about those particular examples, just posing them as possible scenarios.)
I am not referring to foreign films inspired by American films or stories but re-set in another country (for example, there is an Indian version of the play|film * The Miracle Worker* but it is set in India with Indian characters rather than about Helen Keller) or about non-English speakers in the U.S. ( like Maria Full of Grace) but movies about English-speaking Americans that are filmed in another language.
The Soviets often did and not just propaganda films. There was a Last of the Mohicans movie or seriel made.
If Bollywood needs a movie about Helen Keller or Americans in General, it will show them speaking English.
The Soviets did an adaptation of Huckleberry Finn in 1972.
Two of Jim Thompson’s novels were made into French movies but they reset them in French speaking locations.
There must have been hundreds of Italian made B-movies in the 1970s-80s (e.g., horror movies and westerns) which were set in America (for marketability) but actually filmed in Italy with a pan-European cast. Many of them were dubbed in multiple languages including English, but lots of the lower profile ones were only processed in Italian and never exported.
Here is a characteristic example.
When you’re making a film, you shoot it in the language of your audience.
The French made several adaptations of books by UK author Peter Cheyney featuring the spy Lemmie Caution. The lead was played by an American actor, Eddie Constantine, but the movies were all in French.
Not quite what you are looking for, but close: The Soviets did a version of Don Quixote in Russian.
If you extend the OP’s question from cinema to stage drama, quite a few Brecht plays would qualify.
Yeah, the entire spaghetti western genre is a good answer to the OP, because they reflected a European take on American history or historical mythology. There were also German westerns in the early to mid-1960s based on the set-in-America stories of the German writer Karl May.
I know this is frequently true, but it’s not necessary, and there’s certainly examples of (parts of) movies being in languages other than that of the audience. Acting as though everyone speaks English is (in my opinion) a lazy cop-out - lazy for film makers and lazy for audiences. Unfortunately, showing characters speaking languages other than English is a commercial liability, but it leads to ridiculous situations like in Hunt for the Red October where the Russians switch from Russian with an English (in some cases Scottish) accent to English with a butchered Russian accent. And that’s a movie that at least attempts to somehow address the obvious fact that Soviet submarine crews speak Russian. Often you just get Americans that talk funny to convey that they’re not from here, and maybe someone will run one or two of their lines through Google translate that they can butcher.
I realize that in Hollywood, if you suggest that you actually find an actor from country X to play a character that is from there, they’ll probably drive you out into the desert and leave you there. But it drives me nuts that movie makers are so cavalier about something as basic as the languages that people speak and the fact that people speak different languages and that they don’t always understand each other. For all the money that gets spent on movies, surely you should be able to find someone to help you get these details right, too? In any case, it makes me appreciate the movies and TV series that do get it right all the more.
As to the OP, I can’t think of examples at the moment, but I am positive that if there was an English speaking character in a Dutch movie, they would find an English actor and write English dialogue for him and the Dutch actors that they would subtitle for the audience.
[quote=“Svejk_1, post:9, topic:671623”]
I know this is frequently true, but it’s not necessary, and there’s certainly examples of (parts of) movies being in languages other than that of the audience. Acting as though everyone speaks English is (in my opinion) a lazy cop-out - lazy for film makers and lazy for audiences. Unfortunately, showing characters speaking languages other than English is a commercial liability, but it leads to ridiculous situations like in Hunt for the Red October where the Russians switch from Russian with an English (in some cases Scottish) accent to English with a butchered Russian accent. And that’s a movie that at least attempts to somehow address the obvious fact that Soviet submarine crews speak Russian. Often you just get Americans that talk funny to convey that they’re not from here, and maybe someone will run one or two of their lines through Google translate that they can butcher. /QUOTE]
Considering that the “Scottish” character was not Russian and that fact was a plot point…
There was a Nazi German version of “Titanic”, made as propaganda to show how callous the British were to the working classes. Yes, most characters were English but there were Americans, too.
It’s certainly necessary – there are many people in the US who refuse to go to movies with subtitles, and who refuse to rent anything with them.
It’s not laziness. If you decide to do Moliere on stage in the US, you don’t do it in French, and no one calls it “ridiculous” when they do it. It’s the same with movie versions of Cyrano de Bergerac or Dangerous Liasions or Oedipus Rex.
And what is lost by showing the actors speaking English instead of what they would normally be speaking? You can understand their dialog more quickly and more easily, and the emotional content is more clear and easier to understand. The only thing missing is a foolish consistency.
I’m not sure what you mean to convey with those six full stops there, but it was not a plot point that Sean Connery’s Lithuanian character spoke less than perfect Russian.
That does not make it necessary, that makes it commercially important to avoid different languages, but the fact that there are still movies being made in which more than one language is spoken naturally and accurately shows that it is far from necessary.
Well I think those people in the US that don’t rent or watch movies with subtitles are lazy. That’s just me. I also think that the tools that writers use to show someone is not a native speaker are lazy. You get these people speaking perfect English for a while. Then the writer thinks ‘Oh wait, I need to remind the reader/audience that this character is actually German’. So you have the character say something like “I was reading this fascinating … wie sagt man das, Buch… ah, Jawohl book, I was reading a fascinating book the other day that made some staggering claims about transsubstantiation and methodological individualism”. That’s lazy writing, to me.
No one is talking about re-making original works in a new language. Please pay attention. This is about movies that are (mostly) in language A but that have characters who we would not expect to speak that language - do you show them speaking language A magically, or do you show them speaking their own language like they would in reality?
Well, realism is lost, for one. For me that is important and I find it jarring if people are speaking English when realistically they never would, only to make things easier for the actors and the audience. I realize that perhaps there’s not many that would agree, and that there’s even those that find it jarring to hear people speak languages other than English. That just means they find reality jarring, though.
I think you might want to heed your own advice. The OP is asking about “re-making original works in a new language.” This is directly taken from the first post:
“Do other countries do this very often with American literature, history, or characters? For example, is there a film version off Huckleberry Finn that is set in 19th-century America but filmed in Spanish, or a movie about JFK and Marilyn Monroe in which they speak Portuguese or something like that? (I’m not asking about those particular examples, just posing them as possible scenarios.)”
The only major American filmmaker who makes movies where all the characters speaking a foreign language is Mel Gibson. Now, I know that correlation doesn’t prove causality… but still. Maybe there’s a reason only a certified lunatic would do it.
There must be quite a few foreign-language movies about people immigrating to America. For example, Utvandrarna which was in Swedish.
I’m certainly not adverse to watching a movie in subtitles, but I think it’s a distinctly inferior experience to being able to understand the language in which a movie was filmed. But as much as I love me some Kurosawa, I’m not going to learn Japanese just so I can fully appreciate Seven Samurai. Subtitles are an acceptable compromise to allow me to enjoy a movie that would otherwise be inaccessible to me.
But for a movie made by and for an American audience? The Hunt for Red October would not be improved by having half the film in subtitles, while Sean Connery babbles on in phonetic Russian. It certainly wouldn’t be improved by replacing him entirely with a Russian-speaking actor. Hell, Sean Connery is about 75% of the point of watching the film. I’m more interested in being able to fully understand and enjoy the nuances of Connery’s performance, then I am in a movie that’s 100% linguistically accurate.
They only speak Swedish to each other, and other immigrants. Americans in those movies speak English.
Here’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Russian, although it’s a TV movie:
Priklyucheniya Toma Soyera i Geklberri Finna
Here’s a TV mini-series on Tom Sawyer which despite the title appears to have been filmed in German.
Does it count if an English-speaker speaks English? The King of Hearts is an example of this. Alan Bates’s character was a not-so-proficient English/French translator stranded in a French village. Of course the American release had English overdubs, hopelessly confusing a major plot point.