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10 Dubbing at Warner Bros. By mid-1934 Luis Buñuel’s cinematic status in Spain was that of a living, if somewhat outlandish, legend. Though adored by a small minority of cinephiles, because of his lack of activity as a filmmaker the niche he occupied was becoming clogged with dust. Perhaps due to Dalí’s intervention, Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or had been shown at the Cine Lido in Barcelona on 13 January 1933. The screening was to be accompanied by a public debate between Guillermo Díaz-Plaja and Lluis Montanyà, but this never took place.1 On 18 May 1934 L’Âge d’or had a further outing at Barcelona’s Cine Fantasio, along with a recent Fox production, a melodrama much prized by the Surrealists, Berkeley Square (Frank Lloyd, 1933). This Sesión Mirador annoyed Dalí, who wrote indignantly to poet J. V. Foix protesting the omission of his name in the advertising for the show in La Publicitat of 11, 15, and 16 May—only Buñuel’s authorship was mentioned—and asking Foix for a rectification that never came.2 On 7 June L’Âge d’or was again projected privately in Barcelona (at Sinera Estudis Espanyol) for members of the Friends of the New Art Group (ADLAN), the main platform of the Catalan avant-garde since its founding in 1932. In the attendant publicity it was announced that the film would not be subject to “the mutilations of the public screening,”3 which leads us to infer that the civil governor of Barcelona, responsible for local censorship, had made some cuts in earlier sessions, although we do not know which segments were eliminated. The echo of these screenings was, in any event, extremely modest. Buñuel’s professional inactivity in France, along with an ever more chronic sciatica that the cold and damp climate of Paris did nothing to improve, impelled him to settle definitively in Madrid during the spring. Years later, in a résumé of 181 182 Dubbing at Warner Bros.  his return to the city, he would declare, “I returned [to Spain] around 1934 because I had sciatica and wanted to get over it. Warner Brothers made me an offer to supervise their films in Spain. They paid me magnificently for doing almost nothing. (Warner had thirty films a year for dubbing into Spanish.) I merely chose the speaking voices, got the dialogues corrected, and then checked that the synchronization and sound were OK. I was working on that when the October revolution began in Asturias.”4 And in his 1939 professional autobiography he added, “I have a pleasant memory of my association with that company and of its chief in Spain, Mr. Huet.”5 Unlike Fox and Paramount, Warner Bros. Spanish-language productions were very thin on the ground, with only six titles, five of them directed by William McGann. The cycle opened with El hombre malo, a Spanish version of Clarence Badger’s The Bad Man, filmed alongside the original in its Burbank studios in May 1930—a French version was also shot—and closed with El cantante de Nápoles by Howard Bretherton, filmed in August 1934, by which time Buñuel was the head of Warner’s dubbing program in Madrid.6 Warner Bros.–First National Films, a Spanish corporation, had been set up as a distribution company in November 1932, with its head office in Barcelona and a branch in Madrid. In its first year of activity it imported twenty-two films, which were shown in subtitled versions as was habitual in Spain ever since the Madrid distributor Exclusivas Diana had introduced the practice. Warner’s first big hit in the Spanish market was a subtitled I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn Le Roy, 1932), based on an autobiography by Robert E. Burns, two-time escapee from a brutal prison in Georgia. A model example of the social cinema Warner was turning out during those years, it won Oscar nominations for its main protagonist (Paul Muni) and for its soundtrack. I Am a Fugitive opened in Madrid on 27 March 1933 and was shown in Barcelona at a Sesiones Mirador film society screening that same month.7 When José Castellón Díaz asked Buñuel about the movies he took to be exemplary, he duly cited it.8 And after seeing the film in Paris, Juan Piqueras, usually so hard on American cinema, pointed out that it was...

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