Dubbing in Rome
By Johan Melle
May 29, 2026
JM: This certainly helps to explain why so many of the dubs directed by Dick McNamara during the early to mid-1960s always feature the same group of dubbers. Cicely Browne, Robert Sommer and Dan Sturkie did a lot of the leading parts in that group; McNamara himself typically did the heavies; John Stacy and Curt Lowens always did character parts. Do you remember who else was part of that group? There were a couple of female dubbers that were really good, and there was a rather sophisticated-sounding British guy who was very good, too.
RB: Sounds like Roland Bartrop, whom I didn’t know well. Nice guy, a bit into himself.
Bob Sommer was a good, close friend, and I rented his apartment twice when he fell on hard times – me and my then girlfriend and her cocker spaniel. Bob was an opera singer, which helped him sync. He was discrete with his, er, social life. Friends were John Hart, George Higgins, Ian Danby and Jack Gillen. Bob, I heard went to Florida to live with his sister. By now, who knows?
Dan Sturkie was a good dubber, if a bad smoker. At one point he was so busy doing three dubbing turns a day he got hooked on pills to stay awake. Couldn’t string three words together. Bob and I had to go down and bail him out of a hospital. His wife Carol, an English twit, was no help.
I remember Curt Lowens well in the early 60s. Very Germanic and looked it. Loved his voice. Then he disappeared.
Tamara Lees worked for Dick in the splinter group, too – I do not remember her at ELDA.
JM: Jack Gillen is someone I’ve never heard of before. Who was he?
RB: Jack was a friend of Bob Sommer. A very marginal dubber who did mostly brusio (crowd noises) – paid very little, but most of us would do it from time to time, especially for directors who normally used us for major parts.
JM: You and Dick McNamara also worked together a lot when you dubbed Terence Hill and he dubbed Bud Spencer in the Trinity films and various other Spencer/Hill comedies. For some reason, though, he was later replaced by Ed Mannix and Bob Sommer as the voice of Bud. But that was in the late 1970s when you were no longer doing Terence Hill's voice as his English had become good enough that he was allowed to dub himself.
RB: Yes, Dick McNamara dubbed Bud Spencer many times, except when Dino De Laurentiis called me to New York to dub Hill. They should have called Dick, too. His slow Southern drawl was just right. Dick and I were friendly if not friends and I thought he was spot on for Bud. What happened to the last few films of that duo I’ll never know. I was busy getting ready to leave and come back here for chiropractic college. Whoever picked Ed Mannix and Bob Sommer, both good friends, were mistaken.
Terence Hill was good, great with stunts and did funny stuff. He spoke good English, being German, but with a tiny, whiny Peter Lorre-type accent. But he was a big name and he could have said “You want me, you have to let me voice myself in the English version”.
Funny story about Dick. Linda Gary and I were doing a scene, with Dick directing. On playback we heard a jingling, and Dick was beside himself trying to figure out what it was. Turns out it was he himself jingling coins in his pocket, nervous Nellie that he was. Linda and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes.
Dick had two close-ups, no lines, in Patton (1970). I had
no close-ups and one line, which was cut. A paid holiday in Spain.
[Famous superstar Terence Hill, whose voice Roger dubbed into English in the two Trinity films, ...All the Way, Boys! (1972) and others.]
[Roger himself didn't recall for which film he had dubbed Terence Hill's voice in New York, but I have determined it to be Two Missionaries (1974).]
JM: Once you all united under the ELDA banner, was there any more English dubbing going on outside of ELDA then? It’s my understanding that two gents named Bob Fiz and Charles Marshall were doing some dubbing work at a studio called De Fazio in the 1970s, and I think they must have been operating outside of ELDA.
RB: I am not familiar with those two names nor De Fazio studio. ELDA functioned as a union, assuring established rates for work done. If a Fiz or a Marshall brought us a film to dub and paid our rates, fine. But if they grabbed people off the streets and offered them peanuts, they have guaranteed an inferior product which hurts our reputation if they tell their buyer it’s from Rome – makes our people look bad, takes work away from honest, loyal ELDA dubbers, and exploits the poor unsuspecting souls who were grossly underpaid and were possibly told it was ELDA. I could not care less for them! These types were trying to save money, fine, but at the same time undermining people who had been working hard since 1950, to establish a viable organization to benefit a lot of people through the years. The officers like myself, Frank von Kuegelgen, Mike and Rhoda Billingsley, Bill Kiehl, Gisella Mathews and George Higgins received nothing but gas money, which was never cheap in Italy. So, I’ll be goddamned if some carpetbagger was going to come in and screw it up! There may have been some monkey business, but very little I bet. People knew and were told in every letter and meeting, at least by me, that anyone who dubbed outside of ELDA and we found out, they were toast!
JM: One thing that has always puzzled me is how little continuity there looks to have been in terms of voice casting. Very often an actor has a certain voice in one film, and then another one in the next. Was this simply down to different dubbing directors having different ideas about whose voice fit a certain actor best?
RB: Absolutely right. Lack of continuity was because of so many different directors, American but also some English, each having favorites. I was lucky with Gene Luotto and Terence Hill.
Also, the dubbing world was at times like swinging doors. From around 1963-65 through 1968, I was often busy filming, as was also Rodd Dana, Tony Russo, Mike Forest, Frank Wolff, Larry Dolgin maybe, and Frank Latimore early on. So, there was a lot of discontinuity, sometimes having to go 2-3 deep to cast. Nick Alexander often pulled in people from wherever. And the Hong Kong Flu eventually shut us down completely in 1969.
JM: You mentioned having gone to New York to dub. I understand that many Rome-based dubbers used to go to both Madrid and Barcelona to dub Spanish films. I know there was also a pretty big dubbing scene in Munich and that some of the Rome gang did work there, too. Did you ever go to Spain or Germany to dub? And if so, how was it like to work there compared to in Rome?
RB: I went to Madrid twice to dub for Al Santigosa. They work long and late. Marc Smith, good dubber but flaky, and I were walking back to our hotel at midnight when a truck carrying a huge poster of one of my gladiator films passes by. Marc goes crazy, starts running along the truck and pointing at me, shouting: “And here he is right here, reduced to dubbing! How the mighty have fallen!” We had a big laugh!
Bob Oliver brought me to Munich to dub. He had a cute little sala assistant who was gracias with her time after work. I also met a Continental Airlines stewardess who was uninhibited and anxious to see Rome, years before I wed. We took a long train ride through Zurich.
Bob was married to Barbara Marx who had been married to Zeppo Marx and would later marry Frank Sinatra in an outstanding career advancing move as it turned out!
Dubbing in those places was essentially the same as Rome. Only New York was different. They used the ‘Band System’. A broad line starts on the left and slowly moves across the screen and when it disappears, the dubber says his line. I preferred our way, but doing Terence Hill so many times, it was fairly easy. And there was the guide track, which may have been the Italian finished product, often the case in Rome. Adaptation and rehearsal, very important!
[Alfonso Santigosa, who brought Roger to Madrid to dub, was originally born in Costa Rica, and was an important dubbing director for both Spanish and English language dubbing.]
[To be continued]
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