Black and White Movies . . . With Color!

[Walloon]

@CalMeacham

But still – the 1929 Mysterious Island was filmed in all color? This is the first I’ve heard of that, and I’ve seen that film several times and read about it. I’m similarly surprised about Way Down East

Most but not all of Mysterious Island was filmed in Technicolor, which is what made it one of M-G-M’s most expension productions up to that time.

Unfortunately, the movie exists only in B/W today. Technicolor negatives from Process 2 and Process 3 were kept at the Technicolor labs, and in the late 1940s, Technicolor, in a space-clearing move, after offering the materials back to the studios, discarded what remained, which is why so many early Technicolor movies don’t exist today.

The color sequence in Way Down East was a fashion-show sequence (prologue?) shot in Prizmacolor. I’m not sure why it was filmed, but it doesn’t fit into the main part of the movie.

[CalMeacham]

I’ll have to hacve a look at that copy of The Ten Commandments again, because I would’ve sworn that it was hand=-colored. It didn’t look like a misregistration process, which is what your explanation implies. In that case, I’d expect to see slightly separated differently-colored images from frame to frame, kinda like an anaglyphic 3-D m,ovie. The color on the frames I saw seemed to jump all over the place.

Certainly other folks thought these were hand-colored(Here, for instance: http://www.dvdmoviecentral.com/ReviewsText/ten_commandments.htm ), but that proves nothing – they could be as ill-informed as I.

This site( Handschiegl color process - Wikipedia) says that the Handsciegl process was used for some scenes in TTC, aas well as for the red cape scenes in The Phantom of the Opera. (I suspect for the recent DVD release they simply tried to duplicate the effect, rather than cleaning up prints using this process. It just looks too clean on my DVD. And this page I link to says it was computer generated.)

[Peter_Morris]

A Matter Of Life And Death is the reverse of Wizard Of Oz. The sequences in heaven are B/W while the sequences on Earth are colour. IIRC, B/W is the majority and about 1/4 colour.

[h.sapiens]

Wings of Desire starts out in black & white, and then, after a certain point, is mostly in color, if I remember correctly.

[Walloon]

On this page of the History of Technicolor, you can see the Technicolor cameraman shooting side by side with the regular cameramen during the Exodus sequence of The Ten Commandments.

From the autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille:

When we were assembling the battery of camermen needed for a picture of this size, the then relatively young Technicolor company approached me with a proposition both interesting and fair. For the big scenes of the Biblical prologue, would I let them set up a camera alongside mine, to shoot the scenes in color? If I liked the result, I could buy it. If I did not like it, the experiment would cost us nothing, and they would give me the film to burn. I agreed, and Ray Rennahan, still one of Hollywood’s best cameramen, was assigned to do the color photography.

The reason that you don’t see the mottling or fringing in the Technicolor sequences in The Phantom of the Opera or Ben-Hur is that the source materials of the color sequences today are not Technicolor Process 2 prints from 1925, but better quality Process 3 prints from their reissues in 1930.

[brendon_small]

I checked this thread with find and hadn’t seen it mentioned, but The Great Train Robbery (1903) featured hints of color in an otherwise black and white film. I watched it a few weeks ago for film history class. When they shoot the guns, the film is actually painted around the gunshot so that it is “more realistic” and they also have a girl in a red hooded shirt walking through the train station (I think)

I know I saw a couple other clips in class that were made in a similar fashion but can’t remember any others in particular…

Brendon