22 November, 2011

Franco's 80s actors: ANTONIO DE CABO


Although Antonio de Cabo started out with Franco in the early seventies, one tends to associate him with the director’s later output in Spain, which made better use of his easily recognizable appearance: tall and spindly, with a long, saurian face, bushy eyebrows and a heavy head of silver hair. His case is similar to that of Trino Trives – a man of the theatre who, although not fundamentally an actor, performed as such for Jess Franco and, would seem, few other directors (none at all in Trives’s case, at least from what information we have). The basic vocations of this well-educated man with a well-off family background were as a stage director, a set designer and a translator of plays. In the latter capacity, he was responsible for the translations used in the very first Spanish productions of Tennessee Williams, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which opened in Madrid in 1959, with Aurora Bautista (of Eugenio Martín’s A Candle for the Devil) as Maggie. De Cabo also translated The Rose Tattoo and Sweet Bird of Youth.

Some of De Cabo’s work for Franco, in Drácula contra Frankenstein (1972) and Eugenie (Historia de una perversión)(1980), was in keeping with his background, as a location scout and art director, although he did appear briefly in the earlier film. His first acting role for Franco, in X312 – Flight to Hell (1971) is curious. At first, we think that the presumably gay Spanish aristocrat who is among the plane passengers will be part of the main cast – then, however, he departs from the story and is never seen again. It could be that Franco, at the very last minute, shoved him into the film as an afterthought. In future, the filmmaker was to make more prominent use of De Cabo’s distinctive appearance: Other Franco roles for De Cabo at the time include a barely recognizable appearance in the docudrama Virgin Report (1972) and the notary in Virgin among the Living Dead.

Director and actor met again on a more regular basis during the crossover from the seventies to the eighties, when Franco started casting De Cabo in either co-starring or distinctive supporting parts, initially as Lina Romay’s randy father in Las chicas de Copacabana (1978); later, as the confessor in the footage of El sádico de Notre Dame (1979) that is not taken from the 1974 Exorcism; and memorably as the “drunken, decadent marquis” in Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada (1980).

Except for Franco’s movies, Antonio de Cabo’s filmography is minimal: he acted in two non-Franco films from, respectively, Brazil and Portugal, both of these being countries where De Cabo travelled as part of his theatre career - directing Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in Brazil and Godspell in Portugal, where he resided for long. Both of them, in fact, are also countries where he was captured by Franco’s camera.And Portugal, in fact, is also the country where Antonio de Cabo died in the mid-1980s.


X312 – Flight to Hell

Virgin Report

Drácula contra Frankenstein (next to Eduarda Pimenta)

Virgin among the Living Dead

Las chicas de Copacabana

Devil Hunter (1979)

El sádico de Notre Dame

Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada

El lago de las vírgenes (1981)

A link to Antonio de Cabo’s imdb entry:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0127656/

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen (Special thanks to Ricard Reguant)

19 November, 2011

Soledad Miranda: Estudio amueblado 2P



Thanks to Amy Brown for sending a link to this video of Soledad Miranda in a 1969 Spanish comedy.

09 November, 2011

Franco's Spanish voices: JULIO NÚÑEZ


On the 17th October 2008, heart failure put an end to both the life and the sonorously stylish voice of Julio Núñez Merino, who had been born in Torrelavega, Cantabria on the 30th June 1930. His last onscreen role had been in an Isabel Coixet film, A los que aman, made ten years earlier, but feature films were not common in the career of an actor mainly devoted to the stage and the sound studio, and mostly seen (as opposed to heard) on TV performances of plays. Starting out as a stage and radio performer in Santander, Cantabria, he later settled for a distinguished career in Madrid. His stage work included texts by Sophocles, Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca, in addition to numerous contemporary Spanish plays. His long career as a voice actor started in the fifties, remaining uninterrupted until his death. Voice work includes several Anthony Quinn and Jack Palance roles, several of Omar Sharif’s recent appearances, Stanley Baker in The Guns of Navarone, Telly Savalas in Birdman of Alcatraz, Franco Citti in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, Martin Balsam in Catch-22, Albert Popwell in a couple of Dirty Harry movies, Ernest Borgnine in Hannie Coulder, Adofo Celi in the Peter Collinson version of And Then There Were None films, Christopher Lee in Richard Lester's Musketeers films, Vic Tayback in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Marlon Brando in the first Spanish dub of Apocalypse Now. He evcen dubbed his fellow dubber (and Cantabrian) Ricardo Palacios in Margheriti’s The Stranger and the Gunfighter. Another fellow dubber he did a voice-over for was Pepe Calvo in Aldo Florio's Euro-western Anda muchacho, spara! (1971). On TV, he was the Spanish voice of Claude Akins in The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, as well as taking over from an ailing Francisco Sánchez for the John Forsythe role in Dynasty. Another voice actor he took over from was regular Franco voice (and occasional onscreen presence) José Martínez Blanco; when Martínez Blanco left the Spanish vocal cast of The Love Boat, Núñez stepped in to dub the voice of Gavin MacLeod’s Captain Stubing. In TV redubs of old films, he was often the voice of Boris Karloff, including the monster’s sepulchral lines in The Bride of Frankenstein.



Also of note are the following vocal roles: Ivan Rassimov in Planet of the Vampires, Charles Bronson in Master of the World, Gian Maria Volontè in A Bullet for the General, Reggie Nalder in Mark of the Devil, Piero Lulli in José Luis Merino’s Comando al infierno, Umberto Raho in Cat o’ Nine Tails, William Berger in My Dear Killer, Harry Baird in Four of the Apocalypse and Michael Berryman in The Hills Have Eyes.

What follows is a list of those Jess Franco roles dubbed into Spanish by Julio Núñez that I’ve been able to trace. A total of three:

Howard Vernon in X312-Flight to Hell (1971)

Claude Boisson in El sádico de Notre Dame (1979)

Antonio de Cabo in Devil Hunter (1980)

Link to a partial list of Núñez’s films as a voice actor:
http://www.eldoblaje.com/datos/Fichaactordoblaje.asp?Id=163

Link to sample of Julio Núñez’s voice, dubbing Claude Boisson in El sádico de Notre Dame:
http://www.4shared.com/audio/dDmAFax6/julionuez-snd.html?

Below, a scene from an onscreen performance of Julio Núñez’s, seemingly taken from a videotaped TV performance of a play. Núñez is the man with the pipe. The moustached man is José María Caffarel (seen in the Paul Naschy film Licántropo) and the woman is Lola Herrera (of Eloy de la Iglesia’s Cannibal Man). The seated actor is Estanis González, whose voice can be heard in the Spanish-language version of The Girl from Rio.



Below, a compilation of several TV roles and cartoon voice-overs of Núñez’s. Note the presence (in scenes from the 1989 TV series Juncal) of Paco Rabal and Manuel Zarzo. Núñez, incidentally, dubbed Rabal’s performance as Ben Barka in the Spanish-language version of Giuseppe Ferrara’s Faccia di spia (1975).



Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

05 November, 2011

CINEMADROME - Public Forum Name - Recent viewings (or re-viewings)

CINEMADROME - Public Forum Name - Recent viewings (or re-viewings)THE DEATH RAY MIRROR OF DOCTOR MABUSE (1964): The last follow up to the series of films generated by the success of Fritz Lang's DIE TAUSEND AUGEN DER DR MABUSE (1960). A German-Italian-French coproduction (CF Jess Franco's LA VENGANZA DEL DR. MABUSE)...