In my past as a profesional still photographer I shot a lot of B&W film. I just trusted/assumed that the film would render color via grey scale in an acceptable fashion and didn’t give it much thought. That said, I am aware of things like the use of a red filter with black and white film can darken blue sky and make white clouds “pop”. Infrared film can have a similar dramatic effect.
I wonder how much the makers of black and white movies concerned themselves with colors of sets, costumes and other visual elements. For example, fake blood needn’t actually be red. It could be faked by using chocolate syrup. Would anybody notice that the leading lady’s hat is not the same shade of yellow as her dress? It would seem that B&W would let you get away with a lot of things that you couldn’t get away with if you were shooting in color.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a perfectionist director did all kinds of test shots to make sure the leading lady’s yellow hat and dress rendered to the same shade of grey. Does anybody in the biz know how that worked?
Costume colors were selected based on how they would show up in B&W. A movie example isn’t coming to mind right away but the B&W Adventures of Superman TV show had a costume designed to better represent the colors of Superman’s costume. This photo contrasts a full color and a B&W version of the costume.
One complicating factor with respect to TV is that, for a significant period of time, there were lots of shows that were broadcast in color but watched by sustantial numbers of people on black and white TVs.
In The Making of Star Trek (published in 1968), they talk about using a special viewing glass to see how their colors would look on B&W TV sets before they started filming.
The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz pulled off a transition from B&W to Technicolor.I can’t find a source that discusses the B&W costume colors, that aspect is overshadowed by the transition itself, but they did have to pick colors that presented a sepia toned Kansas to emphasize the change to color. Sepia was actually an improvement for Kansas which I have been told has not upgraded to color yet, remaining B&W to this day.
It’s not really B&W filming, but the were trying to present that conceptual change to the movie goers still frequently seeing movies in B&W. Although a very simple trick of a switcheroo with a double the effect is stunning as shown in the video from the link above.
As an aside, the bit about going from black and white to color was in the book, too. Kansas was just as drab and monotone back then as it is now, and Dorothy knew it.
Some directors preferred working in B&W. Billy Wilder was one of them:
Series star Vic Morrow objected when Combat! went color (along with all other US TV shows) in 1966, saying that the mood of WWII was best captured in B&W.
I remember a lot of older shows like Dick van Dyke and The Beverly Hillbillies continued to be shown in B&W in morning reruns well into the late '60s at least. They’ve since been packaged for syndication and are often stripped on daytime TV.
Some Like It Hot is an example of a well shot B&W film that uses contrast to enhance the image. Rebecca was directed by Alfred Hitchcock who insisted on shooting it in B&W. His attention to detail in every aspect of that movie was well known and he used the medium in impressive ways despite the lack of color. Going back to the beginnings of color movies Jezebel was shot in B&W by noted director William Wyler and often criticized for doing so because a crucial scene in the movie has the eponymous character arrive at the ball wearing a scandalous red dress.
And here’s a different approach. The early 60s sitcom Car 54 Where Are You? was shot in black and white. The characters drove around the streets of New York in a squad car. But the NYPD did not want a TV squad car confused with the real units, which were painted green and black like this.
The 1931 film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde used layers of makeup and colored filters on the lights to show the transformation effectively, as shown here. This was only possible because the makeup was not visible on black and white film.
John Ford could put a red lens over his camera to enhance the contrasts. Really made a washy sky pop with dramatic clouds. He may or may not have picked that up from The Germans Expressionists, but they had used it first in 1926’s The Holy Mountain.
Lens filters allowed for night scenes too, sometimes with off effects. In the daytime scenes of Gary Cooper’s Beau Geste, the blue French uniforms coats are black under the sun, but the dark red lens used to darken the night scenes turn them slate gray.
