My brother called me yesterday evening and we got to discussing great film directors.
In the film Silent Movie by Mel Brooks, the whole movie is shot without sound except for one scene with the (in)famous mime Marcel Marceau. He is asked a question & his response is an audible “No”. That was the only dialogue in the entire movie.
My brother told me that in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, the whole film is shot in black & white EXCEPT a scene lasting less-than-a-second where a gun shot muzzle flash was shot in color. You can actually see the yellowish/orangish flash, and then it’s black to black & white.
Has anyone ever heard about this? And, does anyone have any idea what movie he’s talking about?
Thank you Larry Mudd, friedo, and hajario for the info & the links. That’s definitely the movie. It’s interesting that they didn’t film it in color (which was available at the time) but just tinted the scene red. I guess it was cheaper & easier just to do that.
Looks like I know what I’ll be renting this weekend!!
I believe that at that time all color movies were filmed on equipment leased from, and maybe even operated by, the Technicolor Corporation. To arrange for just a few frames to be shot by Technicolor would have been outrageously expensive.
The Technicolor issue aside, the art of moviemaking has been pretty conservative historically. It was years after the first “talkie” that movies with sound became the standard. Likewise, full color films were popping up in dribs and drabs in the thirties (The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind leap to mind), but many directors staunchly refused to move to a color format, feeling it was a gaudy special effect that detracted from the true nature of filmmaking. You can find plenty of B&W pictures right into the 60s.
As for Hitchcock squeezing a red frame into a movie, the practice of coloring individual frames by hand was a rare, but well-known technique. Hitchcock, being a member of the avant-garde, loved tossing in little bits of wizardry like that. He also invented the “zoom in, dolly out” technique for Vertigo which was later employed in, among other things, Goodfellas. And I would also recommend his movie Rope, which is a feature-length film in one continuous shot (actually four shots, if you want to get really technical–one shot per reel–but it’s cut together to look like a single take).
The story is based on the infamous Leopold & Loeb, and will seem awfully familiar to you if you’ve already seen either Swoon or Compulsion. (I think that I like Compulsion best of the three, but tastes vary.)
Sort of like how Ed Gein “inspired” Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No controversy of which one of those is a better movie, though…
How long before this winds up in the Cafe, anyway?
Steven Spielberg did something similar in Schindler’s List, a B&W movie that had the one unforgettable scene of the little girl in the red coat trying to hide from the Nazi destruction of the Jewish ghetto. The first time I watched the movie, it took me a while to figure out why my eyes were drawn to this little girl amidst all the chaos. When I realized it was because her red coat was in color, it really blew me away. What a masterful film!!
