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This contribution 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 witness 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.

During the critical transition from silent to synchronised sound cinema, various commercial and politically oriented solutions were adopted in Italy to cope with the challenges posed by the advent of sound film technology in domestic screens. This paper sets out to describe how in the first half of the 1930s the fascist government intervened to solve the question of audible foreign languages in Italian cinemas, and to limit the economic expansion of foreign distribution in the national territory. I shall observe the position taken by the translation of foreign cinema within the increasingly nationalistic environment and the function of dubbing in reinforcing the cultural and linguistic standardisation promoted by the regime. Economic protectionism, political film censorship, cultural propaganda and social concerns related to Italians' literacy will be discussed as important factors leading to state intervention in the development of the dubbing practice.