Voices of Venice (1951) User Reviews

James Fitzpatrick Shuts Up!

[boblipton · 6/10 · 13 October 2018]

I've looked at a couple of hundred of James A. Fitzpatrick's traveltalks and I've grown annoyed by his glib voice-over work. His other job was running a travel agency, and the shorts sound like an agent, trying to sell you a ticket.

With this one, he offers you something different. The commentary of this "People on Parade" short is by native Venetians, speaking hesitant English as we are offered the usual standard pictures of the beautiful city. One woman talks of her delight with the trees. A gondolier sings for us. Another makes amusing comments about the only automobile in town (a small boy's toy).

Fitzpatrick is still trying to sell the audience a ticket to see Venice for themselves; however, he gives us the locals, offering a tour of what they think are the best points, and letting us know we are welcome.

The print that I saw on TCM was not of very high quality and the colors offered on what was originally a Technicolor print look spotty.

Occasionally M-G-M tries to steal Universal's "dark and scary night" thunder . . .

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 14 October 2018]

. . . by releasing its own take on Horror, such as VOICES OF VENICE. MGM crams far more killer pigeons into VOICES OF VENICE than the number of ravens Al Hitchcock's producers would allow him to corral for THE BIRDS. The running "joke" popping up throughout VOICES OF VENICE concerns a young boy who keeps saying "The pigeons ate my pants" (in the Latin dialect of Caligula's time, of course). However, astute viewers will note the alarming disappearance of AT LEAST five other tots--pants and all--before the VOICES OF VENICE fall mute. Most of these tykes are last seen alive struggling amid pigeon mobs. Whether or not the apparently carnivorous "canaries of the canals" have been hunted down to extinction due to world outrage over this live-action short during the first 67 years since VOICES OF VENICE first frightened itinerants away from Italy is for an Orenthal to determine. One can only wish the MGM folks would have kept the focus of this brief horror flick exclusively on the rampaging pigeons and their young victims. You can bet that the Fright Masters at Universal would have sent THIS version for VOICES OF VENICE back to their editing room!

'real' narrators

[SnoopyStyle · 4/10 · 15 October 2022]

People gather at St Mark's Square in Venice. This TravelTalks episode has "regular" Venetians narrating their own stories. They all speak English with overt Italian accents. I cannot believe that I'm going to say that I missed James A. FitzPatrick's narrations. This is worse than any standard racial insensitivity from James. I doubt that these are real people. Of course, the baby wouldn't be speaking in an adult voice. I'm talking about everybody else. They are probably New York actors affecting broad accents. I almost laughed once, not in a good way. The pictures are nice. It's Venice after all. In the end, I can't abide by the narrations.

TravelTalks

[Michael_Elliott · 17 May 2010]

Voices of Venice (1951)

** (out of 4)

Later-day entry in James A. FitzPatrick's TravelTalks series takes a different approach to what we'd normally see. Instead of FitzPatrick narrating everything, we instead see various sites from Venice with the people themselves narrating what they remember about certain events. These range just from minor things a child remembers about the city to some remember a famous earthquake that struck the place. I must admit that I always feel change can be a good thing but it certainly didn't help this series. There really wasn't anything here that I was overly thrilled with and this includes the new format. I'm not sure how many times they tried something like this but I can't imagine any of them would have worked. What's so distracting is that they've obviously got American actors doing the narration and this is easy to tell because the accents are so forced and fake sounding. After a while they also became quite annoying to listen to. I'm sure having real Italians doing the voices would have helped at least a little but thankfully we have other entries in the series showing off Italy.