It's summer! Take a vacation on a boat with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe for the musical cruise of your life. We're heading to France and their dubbing of musicals.
What's a musical? C'mon now! Even if the trend of movies where people break into song when they're in love or when they're happy or sad tend to come and go, some still meet with success nowadays like High School musical.
In France, American musicals are still dubbed in French but, probably because they speak better and better English, or maybe because the song sound better that way, they only dub the dialogs and keep the original recording for the songs. That wasn't always the case. Translators in the fifties often became lyricists and had a hard time combining lip synchronism, the musicality of the rimes and the meaning of the sentence.
They would be frustrated to hear that their hard work was thrown away in many cases like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In fact, when released in France, Marilyn paraded in her pink dress while singing in French. Imagine her Parisian accent. Hard to believe? Yet in this film, Lorelei Lee is in France and is supposed to sing in a Parisian cabaret. She even starts her song by an operatic "non, non, non".



French singer Claire Leclerc recorded her dubbing of Marilyn on November 16 and 17, 1953. Actress Mony Dalmès dubbed her speaking voice. But the voice of the American star is now popular throughout the world, heard many times on CD, so lately when the movie is aired on French TV in a dubbed version, the songs are kept in English, sometimes with subtitles. However these French songs are not lost, you can find them all on DVD. I'm giving you here an extract of the most famous one. In it, Diamond is no longer Marilyn's best friend, it just "seduces her better".
That's all for today folks!
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