The All-American
The simplest way to handle foreign languages is to pretend they don't exist. Hollywood history is littered with films set in far-flung locations where everyone somehow speaks American-English—like Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner. Although this 1940 classic takes place in a Budapest retail store, the staffers sound like Midwesterners, Upper East Siders, Jewish immigrants, and street toughs. Needless to say, Lubitsch demands of his viewers a major suspension of disbelief. Yet moment-to-moment, line-by-line, location recedes behind character and story. In getting drawn into the characters' travails, you simply forget that they're supposed to be Hungarian.
