Ludwig (Visconti, 1972)

[adelmosj]

When I saw Visconti's Ludwig in Paris when it opened in 1973, it was a version longer than 3 hours and it was screened in English with French subtitles. Like Visconti's two previous films, The Damned and Death in Venice, the versions released in Europe back then had English soundtracks - even though many of the actors had accents from various countries yet still did their own dubbing. (Cases in point: in The Damned, all of the characters are German, yet besides Helmut Berger and Helmut Griem having German accents, we get British voices for Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, a Swedish accent for Ingrid Thulin, and British actors doing Euro-pudding accents for the Italians Mario Adorf and Umberto Orsini.) Hence the presence of English-language soundtracks to The Damned and Death in Venice on all versions of those films that have been released in Europe on DVD.

When I saw Ludwig in Paris in English with French subtitles, a similar multi-accented dubbing job was done - with the multilingual Berger, Griem, and Romy Schneider acting in English along with Brits Trevor Howard and John Moulder-Brown, and, as in Death in Venice, Silvana Mangano speaking her own Italian-accented English. (Okay, so in Death in Venice she spoke all of her lines in Polish.)

The current version of Ludwig that is available on most DVD and blu-ray releases is from an Italian restoration of the film that was done at some time around 1990, with Giancarlo Giannini dubbing the role of the title character. (Giannini is also heard doing Burt Lancaster's voice in the restored Italian version of The Leopard that was done during that period as well.)

Because I would like to have as close as possible a viewing experience to the version of the film that I saw with the original voice cast in 1973, I am highly disappointed that the German-dubbed version, which features Berger, Schneider, Griem, Gert Frobe, and many other German actors matching their own voices to their performances, is not available on any of the English-subtitled DVD or blu-ray prints.

This is especially frustrating, since one can find DVDs that include, say, Catherine Deneuve's own voice synching to her French-language performance in Bunuel's Tristana, as well as voices that match the English-speaking lip-movements of the three lead actors in Fellini-Satyricon. And the English-scripted Fassbinder films Lili Marleen and Querelle, both of which were theatrically released in German-dubbed versions in the U.S.A., have been released on DVDs that include optional English soundtracks with most of the actors doing their own original dubbing (one major exception being Giancaro Giannini, whose own voice work on Lili Marleen may be heard only on the Italian-dubbed DVD).