toddly6666

I'm not sure how it is in UK or Australia, but I do know that Americans aren't crazy about watching subtitled films.

Can anyone think of subtitled films that were extremely popular in the theaters of English-speaking countries that weren't dubbed but were watched and appreciated by the masses (meaning not just the art-house crowd who knows of every single good foreign and/or English-subtitled film) with the original subtitles?

Here are the popular ones that I can think of:

1. The Passion
2. Brotherhood of the Wolf
3. Apocalypto
4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
5. Inglorious Basterds
6. Night Watch

(Certainly not one Jackie Chan movie, since I remember them being all dubbed in the theaters during the Jackie Chan movie craze in the States).

islandclaws

Hero

edstein

I remember watching Das Boot in subtitles when it came out. Did a non-subtitled version show in the theaters here back then?

hardercore

Amelie might be up there.

Hazel Motes

Pan's Labyrinth

JumpCutz

Okay...so it didn't exactly set box office records, but I saw it with a full house.

sundog

Seven Samurai, perhaps.

Groucho

toddly6666

I would agree with Pan's Labyrinth and Hero, but Amelie, Das Boot, Der Undertag, and Seven Samurai are still very obscure and art-housey and I don't think the majority of Americans know of these films.

I thought of City of God too, but I don't think that's known enough as well too - still very art-housey and obscure to typical Americans.

Concerning Seven Samurai, wouldn't this have been dubbed for the people that saw this in the theater back in the 1950s-60s - can any old people in this forum shed light on this?

Groucho

I do recall reading somewhere that Seven Samurai was the highest-grossing subtitled film at the time of its release.

Solid Snake

I think Ash Ketchum would be able to tell us...I don't think he's of that era but...he might know it.

Jay G.

If only there was a site that kept track of box office numbers... oh wait:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/...id=foreign.htm

Rank Title Studio Lifetime Gross / Theaters Opening / Theaters Date
1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Taiwan) SPC $128,078,872 2,027 $663,205 16 12/8/00
2 Life Is Beautiful Italy) Mira. $57,563,264 1,136 $118,920 6 10/23/98
3 Hero (China) Mira. $53,710,019 2,175 $18,004,319 2,031 8/27/04
4 Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico) PicH $37,634,615 1,143 $568,641 17 12/29/06
5 Amelie France) Mira. $33,225,499 303 $136,470 3 11/2/01
6 Jet Li's Fearless (China) Rog. $24,633,730 1,810 $10,590,244 1,806 9/22/06
7 Il Postino (Italy) Mira. $21,848,932 430 $95,310 10 6/16/95
8 Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico) Mira. $21,665,468 64 $23,600 2 2/19/93
9 La Cage aux Folles (France) MGM $20,424,259 - $18,709 5 3/30/79
10 Kung Fu Hustle (China) SPC $17,108,591 2,503 $269,225 7 4/8/05

Drexl

Downfall would be a good candidate, if it was just one scene with different subtitles.

vili

Seven Samurai was released in the US with subtitles (and under the title The Magnificent Seven, which would later be used by the remake). It had a very modest run at the box office. The number of prints in the US was very limited (to maybe just one print?), so not too many theatres were showing it at the time. I think that Stuart Galbraith IV talks about this in his book The Emperor and the Wolf.

I'm not sure how the re-releases did, or how popular the home video releases have been, but I seriously doubt that Seven Samurai is among the most viewed subtitled films in the US.

obscurelabel

It was also released in the U.S. with an excellent English dub, which is what I saw back then. I remember reading that this was regarded as one of the best dubbing jobs ever.

NoirFan

Certainly not a block-buster, but I would imagine The Seventh Seal was quite popular at it's time of release.

Jason

Everyone who doesn't like movies with subtitles, leave now.

Rypro 525

yeah crouching tiger opened the door. Hell Hero opened at no1 at the box office. Then again it also helped that it was marketed as a Tarantino movie with Jet Li in it

johnglass

Godfather 2

NoirFan

That's more like half-and-half.

Ash Ketchum

THE LONGEST DAY (1962) was the first movie with subtitles I ever saw--every scene involving the Germans and French was in German or French (just like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). Yet when it premiered on TV in the early '70s (I think it was ABC's Sunday Night at the Movies), all the scenes in French and German were suddenly dubbed into English. Which surprised the hell out of me. All I can figure is that big cities like New York got the prints with subtitles and the regions where people balk at reading got the dubbed prints.

Up until the postwar era, foreign films were generally shown subtitled, not dubbed, which was considered too unwieldy and costly at the time. After the war, there was a new demand for foreign films, esp. Italian neorealist films like OPEN CITY, THE BICYCLE THIEF, and BITTER RICE. Dubbing started in earnest around this time, although I have not been able to determine which were the first foreign films to be dubbed and given a wide release. Someone I asked insisted that BICYCLE THIEF was dubbed, but someone else disputed that. A lot of these films played in neighborhood theaters outside of the arthouse circuit, esp. the ones that had a more European view of sex. (There was generally an "adults only" tag.) And I would guess these were dubbed. Brigitte Bardot's early movies were shown dubbed, but these weren't until the mid-1950s. I remember seeing Rossellini's STROMBOLI (1950) with Ingrid Bergman on TV's Million Dollar Movie when I was a kid. Needless to say, it was dubbed.

Re: SEVEN SAMURAI. It was cut down by an hour to a two-and-a-half hour length and retitled THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and released in the U.S. in 1956 (two years after its Japanese release) in both subtitled and dubbed versions. (This was the same year that the re-edited English version of GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS was a huge hit.) My understanding is that it got a fairly good release here, although I'd have to do some research to prove it. Maybe, as Vili suggests, Stuart Galbraith IV could clear this up for us. Kurosawa's RASHOMON got a lot of play on the arthouse circuit in the early '50s, but I don't believe it was dubbed.

SEVEN SAMURAI finally got released in its full three-and-a-half-hour version when I was in high school and it was the first subtitled movie I went to see in a theater. (I saw YOJIMBO at the same theater a couple of weeks later.)

I saw lots of foreign movies in neighborhood theaters when I was growing up, but they were all dubbed. These included Italian Hercules movies and Italian westerns and the occasional Japanese monster movie and French thriller. (And, later, kung fu and samurai movies.) Some arthouse theaters were still around in my neighborhood when I was growing up. I remember seeing a poster for Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS at one of them. But no one ever took me and no one ever suggested we go see them. By the time I was old enough to want to see subtitled movies, I had to go to Manhattan to see them on my own.

The Bus

Glad to see that my guess of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was correct.

PopcornTreeCt

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Mondo Kane

(Got a question on a subtitled-related note)

When it comes to Cannes (Or other film festivals) how are the various foreign films presented? Say, for instance, a Japanese film is screened to jury members,audiences,and critics. Is there like a multiple set of english/french/spanish subtitles appearing at the bottom of the screen? How is this handled?

The Bus

Most people at Cannes aren't American, so they're likely to know more than the one language.