One of Laurel and Hardy’s first sound films, this short is set in the world of variety, with many of their sketches apparently inspired by those performed by Laurel when he was working with Fred Karno; this is confirmed by the song heard on the pianola, “Down at the Old Bull and Bush”, which was then almost the official anthem of the music hall. The comedy duo faced a daunting challenge: producing versions of their films in multiple languages to satisfy a growing international audience. It seems that Roach was the only producer of shorts to do so, using phonetically written dialogue for the principal actors and replacing the secondary English-speaking characters with casts experienced in the appropriate language. Between October 1929 and February 1931, Laurel and Hardy made multilingual versions of 11 shorts; the 8 in Spanish gained a huge popular success. Night Owls was the first of these, titled Ladrones in Spanish-speaking countries and Ladroni in Italy, the latter dubbed by the actors themselves using dialogue synchronized with the Spanish version, and taking advantage of the phonetic similarities of the two languages. Regarding American productions released in Italy with controvoci or doublage (dubbing) in 1930-1931, an article by Vinicio Marinucci listed three films, L’isola misteriosa [The Mysterious Island], Chi non cerca trova [Free and Easy], and I ladroni [Night Owls] (“Problemi del ‘sonoro’: La produzione multilingue”, Cinemondo, V, no. 94, 20 August 1931, pp. 5-6).
The Spanish version of Night Owls was shot between 30 October and 12 November 1929, and a short notice in the 29 July 1930 issue of Variety announced that “Hal Roach has added Italian to the list of languages for his actors to wise up on. First to be made in that language are the Laurel and Hardy comedies. The two comics will spick on The Night Owls next week.” [Note: The verb “spick” in this context is a disparaging play on words.]
Recording the Italian dialogue was postponed to the end of August: documentation on the semi-synchronized 78 rpm sound discs, which RCA Victor produced for film studios, states that the 4 discs (one for each reel) with the Italian soundtrack of I ladroni were recorded on 25-26 August 1930. Each foreign-language version was expanded to double the length of the original film (from 2 to 4 reels), which Stan Laurel would have approved – indeed, he complained to the Los Angeles Times in 1930 about the relative brevity of the American print. Ladrones and I ladroni are more in line with Laurel’s original vision of the script, including an ending not visible in the English-language prints. The Spanish version – and presumably the Italian one, too – presents Laurel and Hardy’s familiar theme music by Marvin Hatley, known as “Dance of the Cuckoos” or “The Cuckoo Song”, which had its official launch four months later in Brats. Comparing the Italian negative, digitized by the “S.O.S. Stanlio e Ollio” project (35mm, 3500 ft., 39′, from the Roberto Pallme Collection at the George Eastman Museum), with the positives available of the Spanish version, and assuming that the printing negative was unique, we may deduce that the titles and intertitles were replaced when the Italian versions were printed, and that a small lost section was repaired and then reprinted with a slightly different framing and reinserted into the negative. The present Italian subtitles have been created using the Spanish-language version.

Enzo Pio Pignatiello