The present paper aims to address the issue of retranslation using the case study of two Italian films distributed in the UK as an empirical basis: De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Fellini’s La Strada. Two sets of English subtitles produced for each film, 43 years apart on average, are compared according to a two-level analytical framework, technical and translational. The study shows that, although major improvements can be observed on a technical level, the more modern retranslations seem to depart further from the original dialogue than the older subtitles. Therefore, the notion of ‘retranslation as improvement’ and the retranslation hypothesis are questioned.