Return to Article Details Hispanic Hollywood : Spanish-language American films in the 1920s and 1930s

1. Introduction: The Beginning of Foreign-language Versions

The appearance of synchronized dialogues, the incorporation of music, and the use of the recorded sound catapulted Hollywood’s cinema to unseen technological heights in 1927 when Warner Bros. released the first feature‑length talkie, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer. Sound enabled filmmakers to introduce ground‑breaking genres that were based on dialogues, music, and new expressive methods that employed the creative use of silence, voices, and other diverse sounds coupled with the presence of narrators and voice‑overs. Furthermore, the sound in movies increased the integrity of the plot and the credibility of the characters’ behavior. However, talkies did not fascinate all audiences: as a result, some directors were reluctant to switch over to this new means of entertainment. Charlie Chaplin, for example, believed that talkies were the falsifications of the film art (Chaplin 472-474) and assumed that sound would destroy the beauty of the silence, with the story and the movement being submitted to the authority of uttered words. Nevertheless, the French filmmaker and novelist Marcel Pagnol was sure about the fact that while silent films had transmitted, fixed, and spread mime, the new sound films had the same effect on theater; as a consequence, the main duty of talkies was, according to Pagnol, the reinvention of the theatrical experience (493).

As soon as sound films had established their cultural position through the networks of distribution and exhibition, production companies were also willing to take risks with talkies. Hollywood saw that the motion picture industry had the opportunity to capture the international market. The United States and, to a lesser extent, Germany, were able to develop sound films. After WWI, all European film industries suffered a major setback in their production leaving filmmaking and the global distribution mostly in the hands of the American studios. On the one hand, with little competition to count, American films―distributed by their own studios―were omnipresent in almost every corner of the world. On the other hand, most European countries were not prepared to produce talkies due to the lack of the required technological innovations and infrastructure. In many European cinemas talking movies could not be presented because movie theaters were not equipped with the necessary devices, or their quality was unsatisfactory. Language diversity also hindered the spread of talkies, especially as what the export was concerned but the multilingual versions of films offered the best solution. In Germany, for instance, in 1930 Tobis Film produced 58 foreign‑language versions of their own films in order to help their distributions to other countries (Sánchez Noriega 311). Among many others, Josef von Sternberg’s movies, the German Der blaue Engel and the English The Blue Angel were the basic products of these multilingual ventures.

A number of European directors gained their filmic experience in Hollywood; after having returned to their native country, they started to make multilingual versions of a given movie. This was the case of Pál Fejős, whose Hungarian movie Tavaszi zápor [Spring Shower], produced in 1932, had a French version entitled Marie, légende hongroise [Marie, the Hungarian Legend] alongside a Romanian variant distributed as Prima dragoste [First Love]. These two were the dubbed variants of the same Hungarian film―a common method adopted by many filmmakers by the 1940s (quite similar to co-productions, which released the same movies at the same time in all co-producing countries). Almost a decade later, one of the most important European war films, The Siege of the Alcazar (dir. Augusto Genina, 1940) had a simultaneous Italian and Spanish premiere but with different titles: L’ Assedio dell’ Alcazar and Sin novedad en el Alcázar, accordingly.

Meanwhile, the United States had, as the Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite observed, the “most powerful intellectual empire in the world,” and this was “due to its cinematograph” (30). The birth of talkies hindered in some aspect the overall dominance of the American cinema: European countries had also begun producing films in their own languages. Moreover, dubbing American films became an everyday phenomenon over the world from the mid‑1930s. But Hollywood did not relinquish foreign film theaters and through its multiple-language versions was able to preserve its previous dominance. What is more, it extended it over a large Hispanic audience, too.

2. The Birth of Hispanic Hollywood

European film industries could not hinder the expansion of talkies; as a result, movie theaters were compelled to transform their equipment in order to keep their audiences. However, Spain was an exception: during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (between 1923 and 1930) and the Second Spanish Republic (from 1930 through 1936), there was very little financial assistance assigned for the modernization of the national film industry. To compensate this state‑driven negligence, a number of interested individuals set out to experiment with sound. Among them was Francisco Elías, who worked with David W. Griffith in the United States during the 1920s. He established his company, the Elías Press Inc. in New York, producing Spanish intertitles for American movies which were aimed to distribution in Spain and in Latin America. At the end of the 1920s, Elías returned to his home country and started the production of synchronized films, which led to various failed and half-failed attempts, until the birth of the successful French-Spanish coproduction of Pax in 1932. Although Elías had planned to shoot separately both a French and a Spanish version of this film, only the French version was finally completed due to financial problems. This became the first sound film shot in Spain (Sánchez Oliveira 45-46, 67-68, 81-86).

The multiple-language versions and double versions of the same films were produced in three different ways: first, when the same American crew shot the film various times in different languages; the second, when the initial American director shot the same film with foreign actors in different languages; and third, when foreign crews shot the original American screenplay in their own languages. Outside Hollywood, Paramount Pictures established a European studio in Joinville-le-Pont, Paris, which specialized in the production of multilingual films. After experimenting with various languages, they finally reduced the production to four, including French, Spanish, German and Swedish. Methods transformed as well throughout the years: in the beginning foreign‑language versions were accurate translations of the English-language original film but the strictness slackened with time resulting in foreign directors’ loose adaptations of the originals. Generally, the same sets, sceneries, and wardrobes were used to do the translated version; however, after a while these types of films only alluded to the original version, containing only fragments of the basic screenplay (Sánchez Noriega 311-312). Among the first projects in this direction was the Spanish-language American film Sombras de gloria [Shadows of Glory] (1930), directed by Andrew L. Stone and Fernando C. Tamayo, which was the accurate copy of Renaud Hoffman’s Blaze o’ Glory produced in 1929.

However, the quality of the original films and their copies differed substantially. For economic reasons, English films were shot during the day, while Spanish versions, mostly at night. The original version was produced in a matter of months, while new versions only in a period of several days. In 1930, the founder of Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle, mistakenly watched a Spanish version instead of the original English movie. He was shocked by what he saw: the original version had strong lights provided by electric light while in the Spanish version only candles provided some dim light. Seeing this huge difference, Laemmle was very upset and from that moment he decided to have the same producer supervising both the American and the Spanish version of the same film.

In terms of film stars, it was not unusual for famous American actors to do the same film several times in various languages; this procedure was quite common in the case of Spanish versions. Buster Keaton reenacted his role from Edward Segdwick’s Free and Easy (1930) in Salvador de Alberich’s Estrellados (1930), while Laurel and Hardy also ‘copied’ themselves in James Parrott’s “twin shorts” Night Owls (1930) and Ladrones (1930). Moreover, the two comedians shot five versions of James Parrott’s Pardon Us (1931) in five different languages: English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Their case was uniquely lucky, allowing room for certain errors that turned out to be quite successful: since both acted as comedians, the occasional mispronunciation and their marked accent added an extra comical element to these dialogues, which non-English audiences greatly enjoyed. In the production of American films issued in other languages, actors read out from a sheet of paper written with the phonetic pronunciation of the foreign‑language dialogues without knowing the meaning of the words they uttered. In most cases, the Spanish artists present on the set taught them and helped their American counterparts with the correct pronunciation. For example, the Spanish violinist, singer and actor Luis Llanesa gave private language lessons to Laurel and Hardy on the set of James W. Horne’s Los calaveras (1931) but unfortunately he was shortly expelled from the USA due to the lack of residence permit but he continued his work in film in Joinville (Pertierra 9).

The confusion of tongues in the foreign version of American films deepened when American directors themselves embarked on the shooting of the new version. They did not usually speak Spanish (or the given target language) and, at that time, there were only few translators at the studio’s disposal. For the most part, Spanish and Latin American actors failed to understand the American director’s orders; instead, gestures substituted for the lack of a common language: these were the lingua franca in their on set communication. For this reason, it was more general to contract Spanish directors, actors, and screenwriters to produce American films in Spanish for Latin American audiences and for the public in the Iberian Peninsula. In this regard, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the first studio that engaged in the production of multiple‑language versions, later followed by Paramount Pictures and then by Fox Film Corporation.

At the end of the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s, various Spanish filmmakers were invited to Hollywood and Joinville; as a result, more than 130 films were produced in Spanish there. Popular Spanish actors travelled to both places to work in this international cinematographic project. Among them was Carlos Villarías as Dracula (replacing Béla Lugosi), Manuel Arbó as Charlie Chan, Antonio Moreno as Philo Vance (in the place of William Powell); it is not surprising that the Hispanic alter egos of these popular characters were born during this time. Even the most famous Spanish actors of the times―Conchita Montenegro, Imperio Argentina, José Isbert and José Nieto―became involved in similar projects. They were asked to imitate the gestures and even the voice tone of the original, American actors having had to undergo through an unusual ‘adaptation’ process with their entire behavior which had to resemble the classical Hollywood style. As the shootings usually took place at night, they had plenty of free time during the day. Besides, their income was much above their native country’s average salary. Under these circumstances, most of them did not learn English because they could afford a private interpreter. Others, as Óscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot said in a recent Spanish documentary film (2011), enrolled in language courses in order to be able to attend social events. The financial circumstances were far better abroad than in Spain, and Spanish actors in Hollywood and Joinville earned ten times more than at home (for various interesting details about this Hispanic Hollywood see Florentino Hernández Girbal―Juan B. Heininck―Robert G. Dickson’s Los que pasaron por Hollywood).

The Spanish director, playwright, and diplomat, Count Edgar Neville, who was also member of an aristocratic dynasty, had a crucial role in finding work for his compatriots in the film industry. As a diplomat, his first 1928 destination was the Spanish Embassy in Washington; after that he often travelled to Los Angeles, where he became a close friend of Charlie Chaplin and spent considerable time in Mary Pickford’s and Joan Crawford’s company. He also signed a contract with MGM, where he acted as screenwriter and dialogue supervisor. After he settled down in Hollywood, he invited his Spanish friends and colleagues to join him in the production of Spanish versions of American films. Moreover, the friendship with MGM’s Irving Thalberg helped Neville set up a Spanish film community in Hollywood (Matud Juristo 207-208). Consequently, the Spanish version of George W Hill’s The Big House (1930), which was directed by Neville and came out as El presidio (1930), was a real success in most Spanish-speaking countries. Moreover, Florián Rey’s Su noche de bodas (1931) was better received in Spain and in Latin America than its original Her wedding night (1930), which was directed by Frank Tuttle.

Quite interesting was the work and life of Spanish writers, who migrated to the USA and became part of the filmic system in Hollywood. Their main job was to translate English screenplays into Spanish, to create Spanish lyrics for the original American songs, to write additional dialogues, besides supervising the Spanish pronunciation of the American actors. Some of these writers arrived in Los Angeles to take part in one or two films, but others, like José López Rubio, spent many years in Hollywood and worked in many movies. American studios, on their part, did their best to enhance the work of their Hispanic colleagues through various modes. The novelist and playwright Enrique Jardiel Poncela, for example, enjoyed a special treatment: since he was able to write efficiently only in his favorite Madrid Café Gijón, American studios, to help his work, furnished a studio corner designed exactly as the aforementioned Spanish café (Zavala, Castro, Villacañas, Martínez 43). Another interesting case was Benito Perojo’s film Mamá (1931). It was the first Fox Film Corporation Spanish-language film that didn’t ‘copy’ an English‑language movie since it was based the Spanish Martínez Sierra’s play Mamá (1913). Sierra’s international reputation enabled him to gain considerable control over the cast and the supervision of the mise-en-scène of his plays’ adaptations. (It is interesting to remark that the debates over the authorship of his works have been going on from the 1950s, when it was discovered that his wife, María, had been the real author behind his several plays – see the work of Walker O’ Connor, Pérez and Ribot).

The world of the Hispanic Hollywood became complete with the work of Spanish and Latin American musicians and singers. Spanish-language love songs, such as cantaores de flamenco and the Cuban rhythms, which were fairly common in the American bars and clubs of the times were also found in great numbers the productions of the Warner Bros. Previously, Vitaphone produced (in 1926) its first short film with the story taking place in a Spanish-speaking environment, while Fox Film Corporation Movietone made use of various Spanish songs and dances as well. All these productions employed Spanish and Latin American vocalists and dancers who were usually accompanied by a Mexican or a Puerto Rican orchestra. These films did not generally include dialogues; they only had music and songs. When the large‑scale production of talkies began at the end of the 1920s, these songs were also used in the Spanish versions, where they became part of the ‘authentic’ atmosphere (González).

A characteristic case of Hispanicized Hollywood was the adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula (1897), one of the few Universal Studios horror films that were converted into Spanish during the 1930s. Although both Dracula film versions made use of the same set, decorations, and basic screenplay, there were notable differences between Tod Browning’s original Dracula (1931) and George Melford’s Hispanic Drácula (1931). The most remarkable discrepancy is their duration: the Spanish version is 30 minutes longer than the original because Melford didn’t delete any of the necessary scenes and dialogues. Moreover, Browning shot his film during the day and when they finished, Melford and his crew occupied the same set and shot almost the same scenes but this time with Spanish (as Carlos Villarías), Mexican or Chilean actors. Since Melford didn’t speak Spanish, his co‑director, Enrique Tovar Ávalos, lead its communication with the Hispanic actors. As for the budget, from the total sum of 440,000 dollars only 66,000 dollars were assigned to the Spanish version. The producers of Universal took film shootings under strict control: they obliged Browning to eliminate various scenes and interfered in small details. At the same time, they paid little attention to the Spanish version, so Melford could work without any censoring restrictions following the instructions of the original screenplay. It was obvious that the Spanish‑language version was not as important to the studio as the English version. While producers were keeping a close watch on the original budget, on the controversial methods of Browning and on the difficulties concerning Béla Lugosi’s star allures, Melford and his crew, outside the main limelight, worked much faster than the American team, sometimes even overtook them, so the Spanish version was completed days before the original was ready. Due to the studio’s constant interventions, Browning’s Dracula turned out to be a movie with a number of inexplicable, ambiguous and some quite incoherent scenes, while Melford’s film came out as a clear‑cut adaptation of the original screenplay. Occasionally, the director reinterpreted the original scenes in order to achieve more credibility or aesthetic harmony but the adaptation was rather a faithful one. Furthermore, the Spanish version contained more violence and erotic content than its English counterpart because the distribution in Spain and Latin America was beyond the range of Hollywood’s rising morality codes and developing censorship. For instance, we can see close‑ups of Carlos Villarías’s teeth as they reach the victim’s neck, while Lugosi’s bite is always shown from a certain, safe distance. Additionally, there is a obvious contrast in acting that ultimately placed unfavorably the Spanish version: while Lugosi’s enactment of Count Dracula exhibits the character as a mysterious and exotic person (due perhaps to the very censoring effect), Villarías embodiment of the same person delivers an off‑key performance, overtly inferior to his real acting skills. In Spanish‑speaking countries Universal Studios distributed only Melford’s version, and thus the audience didn’t have the chance to compare Lugosi’s with Villarías’s performance. However, the Hungarian actor highly appreciated the Spanish version; and the two actors appeared several times together at the screenings in Los Angeles to stand by each other’s movie (Roig 37-44).

Melford directed other memorable Spanish versions, too, always assisted by his co‑director Tovar Ávalos. Among these were La voluntad del muerto (1930), which was the re‑adaptation of Rupert Julian’s and John Willard’s The Cat Creeps (1930), while the romantic comedy of Don Juan diplomático (1931) reproduced the plot of Malcolm St. Clair’s The Boudoir Diplomat (1930).

3. The Decline of the Double-versions

Although there were masses at the movies, the Hispanic audience was generally unsatisfied with the majority of the Hispanic Hollywood films. The main problem emerged from language itself; as the cast of these movies included not only Spanish, but also Mexican, Colombian, Argentinean, and many other actors coming from diverse Hispanic countries, the result was rather questionable. For instance, the pronunciation of Argentinean actors was so different that a considerable number of Mexican and Spanish viewers claimed that they couldn’t understand it. The situation became close to absurd when the main actors of a film came from different countries and this had all different accents or talked in various dialects. Also, many Latin American actors did not tolerate the presence of other Latinos and they were in constant conflict them. Each seemed to behave as the cultural ambassadors of their home country, which they wanted to (re)present as best―over all other Hispanic countries. Cubans were extraordinarily intolerant towards other Hispanics. In order to solve this problematic situation, producers chose mainly Spanish actors with a standard peninsular pronunciation (Pérez, Ribot) instead of Latin American actors. Not surprisingly, Latin American countries felt offended by this strategy, and, as a result, some of them banned those Spanish‑language films where the most important actors were Spanish, and not Latin American. This so-called ‘war of accents’ had thus a negative effect on the distribution of Spanish‑language films over the world. Furthermore, Spanish‑speaking audiences refused to accept the sometimes neutral acting style of the Spanish and/or Latino actors (who did not have yet the aura of Hollywood stars) instead of the glamour of the American film stars.

Moreover, parallel with the ‘war of accents,’ the economic crisis reached the film industry as well, and studios were forced to reduce costs. Thus Hollywood invested more money into dubbing and subtitling instead of the production of expensive and less successful double versions. The year of 1933 signaled the decay of the multiple‑language versions and indicated the rise of dubbing studios (Zavala, Castro-Villacañas, Martínez 44-45). Despite these changes, some Spanish and Latin American actors remained in Hollywood and continued their so‑called career as dubbing actors, but the majority of them returned home. In case of the Spanish artists, their arrival in Spain was shortly followed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; and many actors, who had taken part in these Spanish versions of Hollywood and Joinville productions died on the battlefield or became prisoners of war. Others appeared later in some American movies that were shot in Spain during the cooperation between the film industry of the Franco regime and Hollywood, which resulted in a number of important international blockbusters of the 1950s and 1960s (Lénárt 33-35).

Besides the above mentioned reasons, political arguments were also against the multi/double versions. Spanish‑speaking countries yearned to create their own film industry and thus to expand their culture, but they were too weak to compete with the filmic power of Hollywood studios. The main objective of the First Hispanic American Congress of Cinematography that took place in 1931 in Madrid was to find the appropriate means to oppose the “foreign colonization” of films. In order to protect the Hispanic countries’ film industries from the influence of Hollywood, participants urged the collective refusal of Hollywood’s Spanish versions; these productions, were seen as the Troyan horses of the United States’ policy and thus considered as a threat leading to the disastrous situation of the film culture in Latin American countries (Caparrós Lera 51-52). Additionally, the Second Spanish Republic was aware of its financial and commercial weakness and hoped to improve its international image through the creation of a historical and cultural bond with Latin America, based on their common past and common language (a mild and democratic prefiguration of the forthcoming dictatorial and exclusivist concept of Hispanidad of the Franco regime).

The cinema constituted an important component of the intellectual and cultural Hispanic cooperation, but the American Spanish‑language movies raised some difficulties as the United States became implicated in the concept of the Hispanic world. According to the prevailing Hispanic opinion, Panamericanism, once again (but not for the last time), threatened to take over, in this context, the role of Hispanoamericanism. Though the repudiation of Spanish versions of American films was not unanimous among the participant countries of the First Hispanic American Congress of Cinematography, afterwards, most national governments enacted new laws and established companies launching compelling projects with the intention of stimulating their own film industries. Their goal was similar to the European initiative during the 1920s and 30s called Film Europa, which sketched the plan for a Pan-European network of film production and distribution, with the aim of counteracting the overwhelming presence of Hollywood film in Europe. This attempt failed, while the Hispanic efforts yielded partial results.

However, the end of double versions did not imply the fall of Hispanic Hollywood; under the supervision of Gregorio Martínez Sierra and with the collaboration of his friends, Fox Film Corporation launched the production of original Spanish‑language movies that had no English‑language predecessors, all within the Spanish Department of Fox led by Martínez Sierra. The first steps had been made some years earlier with the adaptation of Martínez Sierra’s (or rather by his wife’s) own plays. The aim of Fox was to produce world-wide successful Spanish‑language films. These new films, like Louis King’s Julieta compra un hijo (1935) or James Tinling’s Señora casada necesita marido (1935), were mostly comedies and gained the recognition of both the audience and the critics throughout Spain and even Latin America. But this golden age of the Hispanic Hollywood movies did not last long: in 1935, Fox Film Corporation fused with Twentieth Century Pictures and the new Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation closed the Spanish Department (Ferreiro).

 

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Copyright (c) 2013 András Lénárt

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