Word: crowthers
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From the mail received in the first few days after the article appeared, the Times last Sunday printed seven letters or epistolary excerpts. Of these, five took issue with Crowther and two supported him. Whether this accurately reflects general opinion on the matter I couldn't say. At any rate, Crowther's column is probably the most potentially damaging Sunday piece he has ever printed. Since his words are received in many quarters as nothing short of scriptural, he should be refuted on this subject by every possible means. So let me touch briefly on the points as he raised...
...Artistry, commerce and the public's eyesight will best be served" through dubbing, Crowther asserts. Artistry, no; eyesight, no; commerce, doubtful. Can anyone seriously believe that the excision of the speech from the original actors' performances and the substitution of that of a bunch of foreigners outside the supervision of the original director will enhance the artistic result? Are the exact words of the original script, the flavor of the original language, the inflection of the spoken lines, and the timbre of the performers' voices wholly negligible factors...
...inviolate. Otherwise, as Stanley Kauffman put it in his letter of protest, "I would never have heard the voices of Louis Jouvet, Edwige Feuillere, Takashi Shimura, Vittorio De Sica and Victor Sjostrom. These are only a few of the actors about whom I would know much less if Mr. Crowther had had his way." And I myself still recall the disconcerting experience of looking at even such light-weight stuff as a Bob Hope comedy in a Paris theatre a decade ago and being bombarded by an utterly incongruous French-dubbed soundtrack...
Among the Americans who see foreign-language films, more indeed can follow the original dialogue than Crowther maintains. And for those who cannot, subtitles provide the sense without depriving anyone of the vital, special sound of the original. This way, everyone in the audience is served; with dubbing, a large portion of the audience is cheated. Crowther also dismisses completely, as the eminent novelist-critic-essayist Carl Van Vechten remarked in his letter, the sizable number of deaf people, for whom subtitled movies constitute almost the only satisfactory theatrical experience. In addition the preservation of the original sound acts...
...Crowther complains of having "to keep darting the eyes back and forth from the images to the subtitles." A moment's reflection should remind him that one does not stare fixedly at one spot on the screen in a non-subtitled film. The eye is constantly on the move, picking up touches all over the (often very wide) screen. So the glancing back and forth in subtitled films is hardly a unique physiological phenomenon...