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This chapter discusses a meaningful selection of US and British films that portray Italianness in order to show how these hetero-constructed images have been variously received in Italy throughout the 20th century. To convey images of their own ethnicity and national identity to a domestic audience, Italian film translators are presented with a series of challenges: what cultural and semiotic processes are at work in Italy at the moment of translating stereotypes of Italians? Are there images which have been traditionally considered unsuitable for projection in Italian cinemas? What translational options do the translators have at their disposal? Is there any political or social pressure which favours or discourages one particular translational solution over another? The chapter will show that cases of manipulation were frequent and that the translations were often influenced by issues of nationalism and by questions surrounding the use of the standard Italian language and of its regional varieties in films.

This chapter sheds new light on the strategies that Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox developed in the early 1930s to target the Italian-speaking market. It documents how the Italian government, local film traders, and the press responded to the majors’ Italian-language production during a critical turning point for the national film industry. The chapter draws on a range of historical records (diplomatic, censorship and administrative state documents, film prints, press reviews, and other publicity materials) from Italian and North-American archives. The findings show that the majors’ experiments with Italian dubbing and versioning were not always successful and elicited ambivalent responses in Italy; the findings also demonstrate the gradual emergence of dubbing as the most commercially viable solution for both the US majors and the Italian establishment. Incongruities in the archival records, and the scarcity of surviving film prints, pose interpretative problems and call for further empirical research in the field.

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