The TV in my house is tuned to Turner Classic Movies a lot of the time. I like the older B&W films. No cheesy special effects. No stupid shaky cam. Immaculate and creative lighting. What’s not to love?
Katherine Hepburn was in a number of B&W movies playing a strong female lead. Rosalind Russell as well.
It’s not just those. For some reason, it’s become a cliche that an indie director has to make one of his first movies in black and white.
Examples: The Addiction, Anchoress, Border Radio, The Bunny Game, Chan Is Missing, Clerks, Don’s Plum, Down by Law, Eraserhead, Forbidden Zone, Frances Ha, Go Fish, The Hours and Times, In the Soup, Judy Berlin, Killer of Sheep, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, My Best Friend’s Birthday, Nebraska, Pi, She’s Gotta Have It, Stranger Than Paradise, Suture, Swoon, and Three Bewildered People in the Night.
So if you want to establish your credibility as an indie film director, make a black and white movie. But after you’ve made your statement, switch to color.
Your list provides one example that may lead to to the correlation - Clerks. Budget was a big driving factor for Kevin Smith since his major funding was personal credit cards. Budget is less of an issue with the transition from film to digital but ISTR some things are still easier/cheaper in post-production with black and white.
I love old movies. JMESHO, but color did not make B&W irrelevant. If you rule out the B&W movies, to must leave behind some of the films that made the industry what it is today.
We have Bruce Crawford bringing in another great film Friday evening. We will be seeing Some Like It Hot on the big screen of the Witherspoon Concert Hall at the Joslyn Art Museum. Via this series, we have seen some of the greatest films made, and many of them B&W classics.
Clerks, Pi, Sin City. You’d have to really go out of your way, even if you decided never to watch a movie older than 50 years.
I know I saw Dr. Strangelove in a theater in the original run, and my college film group would routinely show B&W classics like Marx Brothers films. Also in theaters: Manhattan, The Artist, Clerks.
I have seen many B&W films on TV and video, of course.
I haven’t gone out of my way at all. I actually didn’t even realize there were current(ish) movies made in B&W. Granted, I’m not a huge movie buff, but I’m not a hermit in a cave, either.
This is a bit off the subject, but Cozi TV runs the colorized episodes of the old series Zorro, starring Guy Williams. It was originally filmed in B&W and colorized by Disney in 1992.
I’ve seen the colorized Zorro in other venues. Disney knows the value of a color product. As I say, they filmed several of their 1950s TV series episoides of Disneyland in color, even though they were going to broadcast in black and white. It served them in good stead with theatrical releases (as with the Davy Crockett series, broadcast on black and white TV, then released in theaters in color – there was a definite reason to go see something you’d already seen on TV in the theater in that case) and with later releases on color broadcast on TV. But Zorro and Mickey Mouse club were filmed in black and white. To save costs, I guess. (Although I was surprised to learn that the animated opening to The Mickey Mouse Club was filmed in color:
Watch The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), where the husband/father and his friend
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do kind of dumb shit so the men can rescue them, etc.
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while the wife/mother saves the day at the end by taking up a police sniper’s rifle and shooting one of the kidnappers of her daughter as he chases her across a rooftop.:eek: It is most definitely not the 1956 version with Doris Day crooning away :rolleyes: though Hitchcock made both of them.
Also, in the old screwball comedies of the '30s, the women gave (verbally, usually) as good as they got. 
Ohhh… a wiseguy, ah?
That’s not how I remember it!
The most recent film I saw in black and white was Frances Ha (2012) and I think it would have been much better in color. In particular, the shots of food look particularly unappealing in black and white.
This. To this day, most of the movies I watch are in B&W.
I can’t stomach anything from the Hays Code era. Just not interested. But I have seen a handful of B&W movies, including a few mentioned in-thread that I’d forgotten:
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (None of the clips meant anything to me; still good.)
Clerks
Pi
It’s a Wonderful Life
In a similar way that I don’t like Hays Code movies, I don’t like cartoons. The entire category leaves me cold with maybe a handful of exceptions.
Here is a list of 31 classic black and white movies , I have seen most of them and there a few I had not heard of. I love classic black and white movies .
'The Grapes of wrath " in on TV right now in b/w.
I’ve certainly seen a number of them…Charlie Chaplin movies, Young Frankenstein, the beginning and ending of The Wizard of Oz. A couple of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Isn’t It’s a Wonderful Life in black and white? And the Elephant Man? Twelve Angry Men? Some of those black and white movies are quite good, though I saw practically none of them in commercial theaters (college auditoriums, TV mostly).
That being said, I would **much **prefer to watch a movie in color than one in black and white. As someone upthread mentioned, my own world is in color. Watching black and white always strikes me as being the visual equivalent of listening to music that contains the notes of the C major triad, and nothing more. Obviously, many people strenuously disagree with this analogy–but to me, at least, it makes sense.
So, to answer the OP. Apparently only one person at the Dope has never seen a black & white film. The rest just enjoy watching themselves post.
I get a kick out of my teenage daughters. Whenever I tell them it’s dad’s turn to pick the movie and the opening scene is b&w, they scream in unison, “EWWWWW!”, then run out of the room (I don’t mind…just more popcorn for dad).
And then there are those who have nothing to say about the subject at all, but only post to complain about other people.