Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

I've only seen the colorized version of Stagecoach, but at the time, not knowing it was originally black-and-white, didn't realize it was a colorized job and enjoyed it just fine. Do you think I'm missing anything by not seeing the black-and-white version?

If you've seen colorized Stagecoach or colorized any film...I am afraid you have just not seen the film.

Thats all.

Colorization is garbage.

I heartily agree. Colourization of intentionally black and white films is utter crap. My DVD of My Man Godfrey has the colour version as well and it's awful. Takes out the beauty somehow.

Ted Turner got a lot of crap for colorizing all the great classics back in the day - and the critics were right.

Believe it or not, incidentally, Turner wanted to colorize Citizen Kane, but Welles' control over the picture was such he would have had to ask him for permission. And not only was he dead, he would have probably never said yes while he was alive.

Orson Welles and John Ford are two film-makers who preferred making films in black-and-white over colour.

Welles only did two movies in colour : The Immortal Story and F for Fake and he preferred being Deliberately Monochrome because "black-and-white is an actor's friend, it brings out their eyes".

Aesthetically speaking, cinematography in black-and-white was far more difficult, far more experimental and more important and influential than cinematography in colour. With black-and-white, D Ps have to be creative in using light to illuminate background from foreground in a way that isn't theatrical or stagey. You have to simulate the look of daylight/afternoon/night. You have to be attentive at capturing subtle gradations of gray....something like Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (shot by the great Sven Nykvist) would lose most of its effect in colour.

Black-and-white cinematography began with panchromatic film stock which was invented by the end of The Twenties. Before that people used Orthochromatic film stock in silent films which tended to make everything look sepia and washed out, and necessitated the use of those famous tints in silent cinema. Panchromatic film stock, which was used most famously in The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer allowed film-makers and DP to photograph light more realistically without the use of tints.

In addition to all of that, the fact is that a film shot in black-and-white dictated every aspect of production. Directors and DP decided the costumes, sets, and props based on how it would photograph black-and-white. So colorizing it is simply not indicative or reflective of the full set of choices made during production. You will not be seeing realistic colours.

February 26

The day of technical noms/winners it seems:

• Test Pilot (1938) — Big names in this one: Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Lionel Barrymore. Nominated for 3 Oscars.
• That Girl from Paris (1936) — About a Parisian opera star who meets a handsome American. Nominated for Best Sound Recoring.
• That Hamilton Woman (1941) — After many tries, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh star in a movie together. Alexander Korda directs this drama. Won Best Sound Recording.
• That Man from Rio (1964) — Adventure in Rio with Jean-Paul Belmodo (''Breathless protagonist). Nominated for Best Screenplay.
• Them! (1954) — COMMUNISTS ARE COMING! Er, I mean aliens. Nominated for Best Special Effects.
• They Were Expendable (1945) — Robert Montgomery and John Wayne star in this John Ford film. Nominated for Best Special Effects and Sound Recording.
• The Thin Man (1934) — William Powell and Myrna Loy star in this fantastic mystery/comedy. Nominated for 4 Oscars.
• The Third Man (1949) — Great noir with Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles directed by Carol Reed. It won Best Cinematography. I'm surprised that the score didn't get nominated.
• Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) — Van Johnson, Spencer Tracy, and Robert Walker star in this WWII flick. Won Best Special Effects.
• A Thousand Clowns (1965) — Martin Balsam won Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
• Thousands Cheer (1943) — Gene Kelly vehicle with Mary Astor. Nominated for 3 Oscars.

edited 25th Feb '17 11:49:40 AM by LongTallShorty64

That Hamilton Woman was Winston Churchill's favorite film. He screened it a hundred times during World War II.

It's a truly great film and has an awesome Vivien Leigh performance and considering she's one of the greatest actors in film history and appeared in comparatively few films of note this has to be seen. And also she's far more gorgeous in black-and-white than in colour. Of course, the fact that Emma Hamilton is inherently a nicer person than the slave-owning racist Scarlett O'Hara (aka symbol of Southern Sorry-Not-Sorry), means its more palatable.

I also think it's a counter to Casablanca where wartime insists that people must commit to unfulfilling monogamous relationships for the greater good. Here war is so uncertain, that adultery is not only acceptable but necessary since people need any happiness they can get before they die.

I prefer it greatly for that reason.

Orson Welles: "Tell Ted Turner to keep his crayons away from my movie!"

Now that's funny. XD

I don't know if he ever actually said that quote. It's a popular Beam Me Up, Scotty!, one of those, "He would have said this" that became a quote.

But Orson Welles would hundred percent have opposed colorization of any of his movies. He said constantly and repeatedly in interviews that he preferred making films in black-and-white over colour. The only reason he made some films in colour (and only in The '70s and never before) was that it was, as the law of technological entropy proves, getting cheaper while black-and-white more expensive. That's the reality today. Interestingly, his documentary on Brazil, It's All True had colour sequences that took a lot of time and effort to be processed.

This attitude of wanting to colorize black-and-white films is something like doing old paintings with say pastels or tube colours...or crayons...simply because technology was advanced. Yes some of the people in the old days would have preferred colour if they could afford it, but they would have also preferred another actor than the contracted ones they were stuck with, they would have preferred bigger sets, a better script and no censorship.

And black-and-white is inherently appealing and awesome. As Welles said, it tends to remove all the unnecessary distractions on colour and brings to light essential features. In the case of people, faces, expresses and gazes. In the case of landscapes, forms, angles, lines and perspectives.

I'm not going to say black and white is better, it's not like I watch The Wizard of Oz and boo when Dorothy opens the door to Munchkin land. But goddammit a film should be viewed in the way it was made. Especially when colorizing it makes it look so shitty. And even if it doesn't, as I imagine today's computer tech could probably make fake color that looks a lot better than Ted Turner's did 30 years ago.

The beginning of The Wizard Of Oz isn't even black-and-white, it's sepia.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Ted Turner to colorize that film?...

Give him a little credit. I think even he understands that colorizing the small scenes that aren't goes against the point of what the producers were going for with that film.

The Wizard of Oz quite obviously felt that its Technicolor was a major gimmick and it would have been in The '30s for many audiences who saw it as the next "Sound" or the like.

Yeah the opening or rather Kansas-section Framing Device of The Wizard Of Oz, directed by King Vidor is meant to simulate an older and more naturalistic setting to deliberately make Oz the fantasy place it turns out to be. It's similar to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari where Fritz Lang and others insisted the Framing Device be realistic so as to ground the expressionism that would follow.

For a long time the code among movie-buffs was that reality was black-and-white, and fantasy was colour. This eventually became the past is black-and-white, the present is colour and sometimes vice-versa. The idea is that black-and-white represents realism. One of the few films to challenge it is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death where the Afterlife is in black-and-white, and the Earth is in colour. And colour is associated with life.

The black and white—ok, sepia—of the Kansas scenes comes straight from L. Frank Baum's novel, which goes into detail about how everything in Kansas was gray.

I love the two-strip technicolor of silent films, as seen in the 1925 Ben Hur, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, one whole movie—The Black Pirate—and a couple of early sound films like Hell's Angels. Not a particularly realistic palette but pretty.

I tend to feel that black-and-white ages better. Older films made in color can frequently look over-saturated and garish to my eye. Black-and-white always seems to keep its sharpness.

edited 26th Feb '17 10:09:47 AM by Robbery

The main reason why older colour films are garish is that the set designers and production staff used garish coloured costumes, sets and lighting to show-off their new set of crayons. It wasn't the colour making everything inherently shiny. Three-Strip Technicolor and the famous corresponding dye process was actually the best colour system ever invented. For one thing it's actually black-and-white film stock separated into three strips which were then sorted through the dye process. So that allows for a sharpness and gradation of light.

You can see that in the British films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger where they toned down the garishness of the American colour and went for something more psychological, surreal and weird. The DP Jack Cardiff based it on Dutch masters like Jan Vermeer. You get something even better in Jean Renoir's The River shot on location in India (think about that, he went to Bengal with a gigantic three-strip technicolor camera in hot weather and shot everything in colour there...that man had gumption). It's really powerful and striking, and Renoir of course continued in that vein in the three films he made in France after that, The Golden Coach, French Cancan, Elena and Her Men. The finale of French Cancan is...well it's better than anything MGM ever did. Renoir was of course the son of the painter so he knew a lot more about use of colour than anyone else.

OF course by the end of The '40s you saw the end of the three-strip process, now that colour film stock was discovered in Nazi contraband (yeah, the Nazis were the first to discover colour film stock, Agfacolor). Sergei Eisenstein famously used stolen or confiscated Agfacolor stock for the famous colour sequence of Ivan the Terrible. In The '50s every studio had their own patented version of the stock. Warnercolor (which was used for Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden) and that had a more dryer, subtle look, greater realism. Something like the opening section of Lust For Life, the prologue dealing with Van Gogh's time in the mines and a priest, inspired by the lighting of The Potato Eaters is closer to documentary. At the time Vincente Minnelli made that he declared that 'Color can do anything that black-and-white can'. Which if nothing else vindicates the inferiority complex color cinematography had towards black-and-white.

Now of course even if three-strip technicolor was gone, the dye transfer process was still used...until it stopped in The '70s in USA, and in China by the end of The '80s.

edited 26th Feb '17 10:27:07 AM by JulianLapostat

February 27

The Ts:

• Three Comrades (1938) — Love story about three Germain soldiers. Stars Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullivan, Franchone Tone, and Robert Young. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay. Sullivan was nominated for Best Actress.
• Three Little Words (1950) — Fred Astaire musical about the life and times of song writing team Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Nominated for Best Score.
• The Three Musketeers (1948) — Second out of 6 live action Musketeer movies. Stars Gene Kelly and Lana Turner. Nominated for Best Cinematography—Colour.
• Through a Glass Darkly (1961) — Ingmar Bergman film. Nominated for Best Writing/Screenplay
• The Time Machine (1960) — The original adaptation of HG Wells scifi story. Won Best Special Effects.
• The Time, the Place and the Girl (1946) — Comedy with Jack Carson. Nominated for Best Original Song.
• T-Men (1947) — Anthony Mann directs this thriller. Nominated for Best Sound Recording.
• To Be or Not to Be (1942) — Ernst Lubitsch’s last film. Starring Jack Benny, and in her last role before her untimely death, Carole Lombard. Received mixed reviews but is now regarded a comedy classic. Nominated for Best Scoring.
• To Each His Own (1946) — Mitchell Leisen drama which won Olivia de Havilland her Oscar.
• Tom Jones (1963) — Not that Tom Jones. It's the adventures of a cad in 18th century England. Won 4 Oscars.
• Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) — A really bad movie. Ginger Rogers stars. Nominated for Best Original Screenplay which just escapes me.
• Too Young to Kiss (1951) — The title alone sounds creepy. Van Johnson and June Allyson star in this Romantic Comedy. Nominated for Best Art Direction.
• Top Hat (1935) — Astaire and Rogers vehicle. Nominated for 4 Oscars. Has the famous "Cheek to Cheek" scene.

edited 26th Feb '17 2:43:19 PM by LongTallShorty64

MGM's colour palette is usually the most garish from what I've seen. My favourite colour palette is from The Archers. The Red Shoes (1948) is the standout for me.

edited 26th Feb '17 2:49:13 PM by LongTallShorty64

The Archers were among the first to really understand how to use colour on film. In American cinema of The '40s, the good colour films I can think of are Leave Her to Heaven, King Vidor's An American Romance which has some gorgeous use of colour to show an industrial forge in a documentary way, but alas was mangled by MGM (an action which so angered Vidor, that he left MGM and never returned there again). His Duel in the Sun is also super-garish but it kind of works, and you know it was produced by El Selznicko, no way it was not going to be filled with some amount of sleaze.

Hitchcock's Under Capricorn was also quite effective.

...Moving on, I got to see a double bill today in San Francisco, The Power and the Glory and Citizen Kane. The former is the film that was supposed to have anticipated Kane, in that it's about a tycoon and his love life and its told via flashback, so many have said that this was the movie that inspired Welles and Mankiewicz. The movie is directed by William K. Howard, written by Preston Sturges, stars Spencer Tracy and has cinematography by James Wong Howe.

Having seen it, I will say that it's by no means a big foreshadowing of Kane. Kane has multiple flashbacks by different narrators. This movie has just one narrator albeit it does flash back and forth in time multiple ways. It's got some amazing touches, and one scene that I think was given a Shout-Out in The Wolf of Wall Street. Tracy acts very well and he's pretty much the major reason to see the film. Politically and dramaturgically, the movie is kind of amazingly amoral. At one point, the Protagonist, a Rags to Riches tycoon is revealed to be guilty for suppressing a strike that led to the deaths of 400 people, and the narrator, who is an Audience Surrogate more or less tells us to forget about it, and not to judge him for it. It's got some daring father-son dynamics with some nice oedipal stuff...i.e. the hero's second wife, young enough to be his daughter, has made him a Cuckold with his grown up son from his older model first wife...but this was made in 1933 when the Pre-Code Era hadn't fully ended.

It only highlights how amazingly defiant Kane's insistence in refusing to let Kane off the hook, refusing to sentimentalize him was. And why that provoked so much defiance.

As for seeing Citizen Kane again on the big screen...at this point it's like catching up with an old friend every now and again and I felt the same feeling seeing Jed Leland, Bernstein, Raymond the Butler, Susie, Charlie Kane and the Reporters as I do when I meet my old friends. And you know the audience totally got the film's relevance and topicality. Like there's the part where the Inquirer has two headlines prepared in the lead-up to the Gubernatorial election, and the second headline is "Kane Lost, Fraud at Polls" and god that made everyone laugh because of the Applicability to a certain Big Name Fan of the film who has succeeded where Charlie Kane lost. And some other parts are incredible...like when Kane says he's going to call for a special prosecutor to charge Boss Gettys...in earlier screenings I remember cheering and saying yeah he's a Badass but this time I don't because of how reality has changed the context of that. As such I found Boss Gettys fairly sympathetic in that brief scene played by Ray Collins and I got what Welles was doing with that character.

That movie is still America's greatest, the triumph of cinema as narrative art, prophetic as all get out and as foundational in American culture and history as say Moby-Dick and Death of a Salesman are.

12 Angry Men is running on TCM in a couple of days.

Know what that means? It means that, unlike the goobers who run TV Tropes, the good folks at TCM know that you spell out numbers when alphabetizing.

February 28

The third-last day:

• Topper Returns (1941) — Joan Blondell, Roland Young, and Carole Landis star in this sequel to the Cary Grant and Constance Bennett film, Topper. Nominated for Best Special Effects and Best Sound recording.
• Torch Song (1953) — Joan Crawford stars. Marjourie Rambeau was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
• Torpedo Run (1958) — Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine star in this WWII flick. Nominated for Best Special Effects.
• Tortilla Flat (1942) — Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, and Hedy Lamarr star in this drama. Frank Morgan was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
• Trader Horn (1931) — A story of white trader's in Africa. Nominated for Best Picture.
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — Directed by John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt. Won Huston Sr. Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Houston Jr. won Best Director and Best Writing/Screenplay.
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) — Elia Kazan directs and Dorothy McGuire and Joan Blondell star. Won James Dunn a Best Supporting Actor award.
• Tulsa (1949) — Story about oil boom in Tulsa. Stars Susan Hayward and Robert Preston. Nominated for Best Special Effects.
• 12 Angry Men (1957) — Was the child the real murderer? Twelve men try to figure it out. Starring Henry Fonda. Nominated for three Oscars.

edited 27th Feb '17 1:40:22 PM by LongTallShorty64

Topper Returns. Between Carole Landis and our hero Joan Blondell, that's almost too much hotness in one movie.

And the kid from 12 Angry Men was totally guilty.

Well you know Blackstone's maxim, "Better to let guilty men go free rather than send an innocent man to jail". In 12 Angry Men or Anatomy of a Murder the fact that the defendants are not nice, and probably malicious doesn't change the fact that the sentence is one hundred percent open and shut.

Anatomy of a Murder was even worse, oh my goodness, the bullshit line that Jimmy Stewart comes up with to get his client off.