Stefano Sibaldi spent half a century speaking for other people, from Frank Sinatra to a circus mouse, and in Mondo Cane read out atrocities in the tone of a man giving directions. We know the voice far better than we know the actor.
Fi1m perspective
In Mondo Cane (1962) a funnel goes down a goose's throat in close-up and a voice tells us about it as though it were the next course. That voice belongs to Stefano Sibaldi, and it is dry, level and faintly entertained, and it never once rises to meet what the camera is showing. Ortolani and Oliviero's tune does the forgiving; Sibaldi does the not-noticing. We caught ourselves smiling at the rhythm of a sentence before we had taken in the picture under it, and that bothered us more than anything Gualtiero Jacopetti put in front of the lens.
He had been doing this, in one form or another, since before most of that audience was born. Stage work from 1928, a film debut in Full Speed (1934), and from 1937 the dubbing studio, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. Italian audiences after the war heard him as Glenn Ford, as Frank Sinatra, as Danny Kaye and as Louis de Funès. Their children heard him as Timothy Q. Mouse in Dumbo (1948), as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, as the Tramp in Lady and the Tramp and as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. That is a great deal of talking, and almost none of it under his own face.
The list tells you he could be a crooner, a clown and a cat. Mondo Cane tells you what the same instrument does when nobody asks it to be anyone. The narration is the most argued-over part of that film, and we understand why. We called the film condescending and we stand by it, and Sibaldi is how the condescension reaches you: the words are Jacopetti's, the shrug is his. It is done with real precision, without a wasted beat. Whether precision was the right thing to bring to those pictures is another question, and our score answers it. He went back for the follow-ups with Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, among them Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971), which we have not reviewed.
He did occasionally turn up in person. RAI's David Copperfield (1965) cast him as Mr Dick, the gentle eccentric of Dickens's novel, and on paper the part suits what we know of the voice: a man who says odd things calmly. We have not seen it. He retired in the late 1980s, and for most viewers outside Italy his whole career now comes down to one soundtrack. Listen to that narration as the performance it is, and notice how little of it you can take at its word. That, we suspect, was the job.
Biography
Stefano Sibaldi (1905–1996) was an Italian actor and voice actor. He began his stage career in 1928 with the Palmarini company and later performed with Sem Benelli. From 1937 he worked extensively as a dubber, voicing actors including Frank Sinatra, Glenn Ford, Danny Kaye and Louis de Funès, as well as Disney characters such as Timothy Q. Mouse in Dumbo and Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
Sibaldi narrated the documentaries Mondo Cane (1962) and Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971). He also voiced Max Gunther in Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959) and appeared in television productions including Le avventure di Laura Storm as Commissario Ferretti and David Copperfield as Mr Dick. Born in Livorno, he died in Rome.
