I was thinking that exact thing only with *Wizard of Oz *just before I scrolled down this far.
Look, if you want to do a remake in color fine, if you want to do a scifi version or a Shakespearian one, knock yourself out. But painting over the original is like Micheal Jackson releasing Beatles tunes with Hoo Hoo’s dubbed over them. You could take some Ansel Adams photos into photoshop and colorize them, but that would be lame too, just take a camera up to the mountains and make your own damn art.
So where can I find the damn thing?
Why is it in every colorized movie there is someone wearing a shirt or a coat that is tinted Eyesore Green? An awful, off-color sickly shade that distracts from the whole movie.
No hater of B&W movies here: I’ve seen well over a thousand of them. I don’t reject colorizing out of hand. March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1935), and several Shirley Temple movies of the 1930s looked better colorized. All used high key lighting for most of the film.
But darkness and low key lighting do not work well when colorized, and The Maltese Falcon, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Night of the Living Dead looked all wrong.
Color doesn’t add anything to the movie.
And how many paintings by Caravaggio and El Greco were in black and white? IMO the costumes and splendid sets lose a lot of their impact because of b&w. The same goes for films like the Private Life of Henry VIII and Rembrandt. Making a film about a painter in b&w for artistic reasons would be pure idiocy. Doesn’t necessarily mean that colorization would work of course but IMO it should judged on its merits and not dismissed out of hand.
An example of why colorization sucks can be seen towards the beginning of Arsenic and Old Lace, when Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane are in the graveyard chasing each other around a tree.
In the B&W version, it looks like a tree.
In the colorized version (which I accidentally rented from Movie Gallery, curse them), it’s a tree-shaped lump of paper mache or plaster or something that’s been daubed and splashed with paint and highlighting to give it tree-like shadows and texture - IF PHOTOGRAPHED IN BLACK AND WHITE.
Now when I rent classic movies I read the boxes more carefully.