Though I agree for the most part on this subject, sometimes I feel certain films are better dubbed.  For example Japanese Animation and martial arts films (it was quite a treat to watch a DVD of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and watch the fight scenes without any distractions).  I could easily support dubbing for a film like Il Bidone (one of my all time favorites), because your watching Broderick Crawford speak English, dubbed into Italian, subtitled back to English. Anyway, in some cases you don't know if the person writing the subtitles is doing the film justice (the subtitles for Open City have always felt a little lacking to me, but as I don't know Italian, I could never tell).  By the way, there was a letter sent to American distributors a few years ago by foreign directors (Almodovar, for one) that supported dubbing, if for no other reason than more people would show up (I would rather a person see a film like Cold Water dubbed, than to avoid a subtitled version altogether).  At some point this insistence on subtitles verges on snobbery on the part of cine-elitists with a great big celluloid stick up their collective…