It is not often that the topic of screen translation makes headlines. It did so on 7 August 1960, when The New York Times published a Sunday column by chief film critic Bosley Crowther captioned ‘Subtitles Must Go!’, which ‘raised eyebrows – and as it developed, blood pressures – from coast to coast’ (Scheuer 1960). So began the eponymous sub/dub war, which raged in The New York Times and a host of like publications until Crowther's retirement in 1966. In many respects, Crowther's defence of dubbing was unusual, yet it was also symptomatic. For although Crowther's anti-subtitling stance was provocatively atypical, bucking the enduring trend within Anglophone film appreciation to associate subtitles with authenticity, his tone was not. Lambasting subtitles rather than championing dubbing, Crowther's headline signals the negativity that pervades attitudes towards translation within Anglo-American film culture. Additionally, his inclination to pit subtitling and dubbing against one another is entirely characteristic of Anglophone screen culture attitudes towards translation – which are still dominated today by this single, polarising issue.

This chapter posits the ongoing sub/dub debate as a succinct expression of the messy value politics that surround screen translation. Initially exploring how current screen culture perspectives are informed by the 1960s New York Times debate, it then proceeds to unpack attitudes to translation by plotting them in relation to concrete examples of subtitling and dubbing in practice. This analysis notes how sub/dub debates within screen discourse privilege mode over execution, in contradistinction to Translation Studies. It also considers how Translation Studies reconfigures the sub/dub split in relation to national boundaries, and, in doing so, exposes and contextualises the Anglo-American parameters of Crowther's 1960s sub/dub war. This cross-disciplinary overview of attitudes and approaches traces the prescriptive tone that typically accompanies value negotiations and quality assessments within screen translation discourse, providing a solid basis for the project of revaluation that occupies the remainder of this book.

1960s Polemics

In his initial call to arms, Crowther expressed his ‘strong conviction’ that ‘the convention of English subtitles on foreign-language films should be – or must be – abandoned when those films are shown in the US market and replaced by the use of dubbed English dialogue’ (1960a).