Here's a great clip but it requires a little explanation. In the early days of talking pictures, the studios had a problem. It was pretty simple to sell silent films to foreign countries that didn't speak English. You just had to change the title cards. But when sound came in, the technology to dub movies into other languages was not there, and the producers didn't want to lose all that overseas revenue. The solution at some studios was, amazingly, to film some movies multiple times with multiple casts speaking multiple languages.
Our example today is of Laurel and Hardy, who did a number of these. They didn't do it with all their early talkies but they did it with some. They'd shoot the movie in English and then, using the same sets, they'd go back and do the film again in Spanish, German, Italian and/or French, depending on market conditions at the moment. A few of the same supporting actors could be used but for the most part, they'd bring in bilingual actors to take over the other roles. One interesting example is that Boris Karloff, who apparently spoke pretty decent French, was in the French version of their feature, Pardon Us. In it, he played a part that someone else played when the same film had been made in English.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were monolingual so they had to fake it. Obviously, pantomime scenes were no problem and it was sometimes possible to use what they'd filmed for the earlier version in the foreign version. But when it came time for dialogue, their lines were written out phonetically on blackboards just off-camera and a coach taught them how to pronounce words and where to put a certain emphasis or gesture. I've heard mixed things from people who understand these other languages as to how well Stan and Ollie came across. They did this for a while…until dubbing became practical.
Foreign versions of their pictures are of special interest to us Laurel and Hardy buffs for obvious reasons but also because many contain material that was never in the English editions. Some films ran longer overseas and in several cases when The Boys were making shorts for the American market, they'd be making patchwork features for foreign countries — several U.S. shorts stitched together via the addition of new scenes to connect the storylines. Our clip is from the Spanish film, Los Calaveras, which combined two shorts — Laughing Gravy and Be Big — into a feature. (There was also a French version of the same thing called Les Carottiers.)
So here's five minutes of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy speaking Spanish. And remember: This is not them being dubbed. This is them reading Spanish dialogue off a chalkboard…
