Had never seen it until TCM aired in back to back with the documentary on “The Day the Clown Cried.” Some random thoughts, and I’m inviting anyone with more insight into the movie (or the doc).
It took a while for it to sink in that Guido and Uncle Eliseo were Jewish! Even when the horse, and later the bookstore, were painted. I guess it never occurred to me that (somewhat) common Jewish names like Goldsmith might be translated into a native language, in this case, Orefice.
For Guido to turn out to be a heroic character, it definitely didn’t seem that way for a good part of the story. He came across as a complete clueless doofus, except maybe for that (apparently deliberately) cryptic exchange with the doctor about the duckling, which was about as serious as he ever got. What Dora saw in him is a complete mystery.
In the version I saw, the subtitles for the duckling conversation showed the doctor saying “cheep, cheep, cheep” while he was obviously saying (the Italian version of) “quack, quack, quack.”
Also in the version I saw, they didn’t translate any of the German. In the snip included in “The Day the Clown Cried” doc, they translated the Italian and the German.
And if you didn’t see the doc on “Clown,” here’s the situation in a nutshell: The producer never secured the rights for the story from the author. When Lewis realized this, he tried to purchase the rights. He went to the (still-living) author, showed her what he had done with the story, and she wasn’t happy with it (according to Chris Lewis, she was expecting more of her dialog, I think), so she just said, “No.”