Color segments in b/w films

Cafe Society
1

I’ve seen 3 recently:

The Picture of Dorian Gray - shots of the painting of young-and-pretty Dorian and old-and-dissipated Dorian are in color.

Portrait of Jennie - like Dorian Gray, Jennie’s portrait at the very end of this film is shot in full color. The storm sequence is also tinted green, and the morning after the storm is tinted pale red.

The Secret Garden - When the children go into the garden, the film switches to color.

Seeing these so close together made me wonder: How many films are there like this? Can anyone name any others? (No, not Wizard of Oz–I’m thinking of short segments in otherwise black-and-white films.) All three of the above were made in the late '40’s; was this sort of thing a fad during the post-war era, when Technicolor was too expensive for all-but-the-most-special movies, but film-makers still wanted to highlight certain shots or give their films that little extra kick? Any ideas?

2

The practice goes all the way back to the silent era: the classic Lon Chaney version of Phantom of the Opera includes several scenes in color.

3

Didn’t D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) have some hand-tinted scenes?

4

One of Douglas Fairbank’ silent films had the final reel in technicolor. Color films were technically feasible very early on; the technology was not often used because it was much more expensive than T&W.

5

Schindler’s List had one object in color: a girl’s red coat.

6

This practice was much more common in the silent era. Some notable examples:

Cecil B. DeMille silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923) had the Exodus scenes photographed in Technicolor.

The masked ball in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) was photographed in Technicolor.

Ben-Hur (1925) had the Natvity scenes, a triumphant procession, and one or two other scenes, in Technicolor.

DeMille’s .The King of Kings (1927) had the Resurrection scene in Technicolor.

Some examples from the sound era:

The Broadway Melody (1929), winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, had the musical number “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” in Technicolor.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) had several musical numbers, and a scene from Romeo and Juliet, in Technicolor.

A musical number in the MGM’s*.The Cat and the Fiddle* (1934) had the first live-action use of full (3-trip) Technicolor.

The final four minutes of The House of Rothschild (1934) were in Technicolor.

The final scene of the Shirley Temple feature The Little Colonel (1935) was in Technicolor.

The “Alice Blue Gown” number in Irene (1940) was photographed in Technicolor.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) had only one brief sequence in Technicolor, a point-of-view shot of a man coimmiting suicide with a gun, in which the screen splashes bright red for a few frames.

The Tingler (1959), a thriller starring Vincent Price, was an otherwise black and white movie with one shock scene in which the foreground action (an arm rising out of a bathtub of sludge) was in color, and the background (a woman reacting in horror) was in black and white.

The American WideScreen Museum has a well-illustrated history of Technicolor.

7

Ironically, making a black and white Hollywood movie is now more expensive than making a color one. The Coen Brother’s recent black and white movie, The Man Who Wasn’t There, was shot on color stock and then processed to make it B&W, because it was prohibitively difficult/expensive to find film labs who could deal with B&W.

8

Hmm. That’s not what I read. The director of photography said that the quality of 35mm black and white camera negative available today and has not kept pace with the quality of color negative available today. Also, the financial backers wanted a color master to fall back on if they decided to release a color version for home video or television.

9

A Man and a Woman had some color segments.

10

Roger Deakins, director of photography for The Man Who Wasn’t There:

From
Rotten Tomatoes.

11

Kafka started and (I think) ended in black & white but switched to color when Jeremy Irons penetrated the secret society.

12

The Women (1939) featured a fashion show sequence in color.

I’m not sure, but I think there’s a color sequence in Hell’s Angels (1930), too. It’s my understanding that there’s a seen of a garden party that Hughes had hand-tinted, but I don’t remember for sure.

13

Nope, you’ve forgotten that the candles in the ceremony the Jewish prisoners perform are in color as well.

14

More on The Man Who Wasn’t There:

From The International Cinematographers Guild.

15

The garden party was photographed in Technicolor. Some other night scenes in the movie were tined blue.

16

Raging Bull had some home movies in color, right in the middle of the film.

Putney Swope’s fake ads were in color, and the rest of the film was B&W
(weird. two chances to mention putney swope in two days. :))

17

The Great Train Robbery, one of the first narrative movies ever made, had some color in it. The scene where the bandits blow the safe has color explosion and smoke.

18

Thanks for the link- the second answers a long-standing question about the first. The two color process seems to be responsible for the abundance reds and blue-greens in this scene. (It always seemed counter-intuitive and lessened the visual impact of the Red Death.) The books I had only noted it as being “technicolor”
AL

19

A Matter of Life and Death mixes Technicolor for scenes set on Earth into an otherwise B&W film (most of the scenes are set in heaven).

20

Andrei Rublyov is four hours long and entirely in B&W, except for a colour coda consisting of a verrrrry slow pan (did Tarkovsky ever do any other kind?) of Rublyov’s most famous icon.

and, from the sublime to the nearly ridiculous, Pleasantville used the B&W/colour mix as a major plot point.