Is Richard Harris Dubbed?

Just noticed that 'Red Desert' is on Film 4 on the 23rd this week. I watched this a couple of years, and the disappointing thing about it is that Richard Harris is dubbed by an Italian actor. I thought - and still do - what is the point of hiring a famous British actor and then dubbing him with another person's voice? I'm pretty sure that British actors like Dirk Bogarde and David Hemmings didn't do this - it was the Italian actors who were dubbed (usually atrociously) into English. But I've never seen a dubbed co-production that doesn't fail (except, of course, Woody Allen's 'What's Up, Tiger Lily?') - give me subtitles any day.

For a very long time the Italians did post sync audio. It did not start to vanish until the late 1980s. They no longer do it today. Remember when movies went to sound it was before TV and Italy did not standardise its own language until television enabled this. Italy is a country of many dialects and it was even more so back when films got sound. For example before the 1960s almost all Italian pop music was sung in Napolitano and some music was also in Sicilian of course. It took the force of television, the education system and the 60s pop culture to make a kind of generic Roma centric form of Italian into what we foreigners call Italian. Plus nutcases like Fellini would change almost every word his actors were saying in post production.