Bad Dialogue of the Week

Don't worry, I'm not going to trash Luis Bunuel's 1967 erotic masterpiece, which gave us Catherine Deneuve at her loveliest. Belle de Jour is a film for the ages, one that can be watched repeatedly and still seem fresh. It is truly a thing of beauty.

The original American trailer for it, however, is another story. Put into the hands of Allied Artists, a company that made American-International look like a bunch of lit majors by comparison, the film was treated like a typical soft-focus Euro skin movie, with dubbing to match. Remarkably, there was no music in the film, so AA chose some Mantovani-like schmaltz for the preview-- listen to how the theme improves with repetition, as well as how it comes to a screeching halt whenever they add a snippet of talk. Also notice the natural-sounding way the voice actors have with Bunuel's translated dialogue ("So, it's the rough stuff you need, huh?").

One can't help wonder what the '60s drive-in audience thought of Belle de Jour after a preview like this. Expecting to see something wild-- maybe even a nipple!-- they were instead treated to one of Bunuel's typically surrealistic films, with an ending that must have caused a lot of horny teenagers great befuddlement, to say nothing of countless cases of blue balls. But don't blame the movie-- blame this trailer. (Note: File size is 400K.)