Pop

When Katharine Hepburn, Joan Fontaine, Jean Arthur, Merle Oberon and Ingrid Bergman speak their lines on France's movie screens, they talk French as fluently as natives. This is not strange because each of them uses the same native tongue and larynx; tiny, blue-eyed French Actress Paula Dehelly does the talking for all of them.

Paula is one of 200-odd French actors who eke out their stage salaries dubbing French dialogue on Hollywood sound tracks for the French-owned Syndicat de Post-Synchronisation. Theirs is difficult and exacting work. Sometimes they must sit for eight hours a day watching and listening to their stars. "When Bergman's lips pop as she says 'my,' my lips must pop as I say 'mon,' " explains Paula, who tries to duplicate not only the stars' inflections but their voices as well. "Sometimes I have to watch Bergman make her speech three, four or even five times before I am ready. I stare and stare and watch her mouth until I feel that I've practically crawled down her throat."

Last week Paula refused to make her lips pop like Ingrid's-She and the other dubbers had decided to hold their stars' tongues and go on strike for higher pay. "I have only the most grandiose notions of what Bergman got for playing Joan of Arc," said Paula, "but I do know that for being her French voice I got only $148.50." The dubbers' strike leader, Actor Georges Hubert, scoffed at reports that the strike was a Communist attempt to turn off the flow of U.S. pictures to France. "We have only the old-fashioned capitalist aim of more dough," he said. "We think it not enough that French actors dubbing for top American stars get only $80 to $140 the picture. We want to boost the figure to at least $182."

"They want to be considered creative actors," snorted a spokesman for the dubbing company, "when in reality all they do is copy. They may be fat and ugly themselves, making it impossible for them to take original roles." It was a foolish argument, for which Actor Hubert had a prompt answer. "Is Paula Dehelly fat and ugly?" he cried of the svelte little player (see cut) whom many a Parisian had applauded on stage & screen in her own right. "I put it to you, is she fat and ugly? Piece of a rotten turnip--she is not."

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