I checked out a copy of the DVD, Georgy Girl today. It’s a good movie and I was thinking about it being filmed in black and white (B&W).
I looked it up and the Internet (for what’s that is worth) says that it was filmed that way to save money. Fair enough, but it seems to me the B&W really added a lot to the movie.
Trying to imagine it in color, to me, would make the impact of the story go down.
I feel this way about another of my all time favourite movies, Come Back Little Sheba.
So any movies do you think are better for being filmed in B&W?
I’m not a movie buff so I’ll expand a bit.
In addition to the above, any movies filmed in color do you think would’ve been better or had more of an impact if filmed in B&W?
No specific movie in mind, but I think old World War II movies & clips do well in B&W. It gives them a stark apocalyptic feel. And of course I’ve been habituated to the idea that WWII = B&W.
Any movie that was made in B&W is better in B&W. I don’t want to see *Jezebel *with Bette Davis’s red dress actually red. They put a great deal of thought into making that dress just the right shade of gray, and seeing it actually red would ruin the illusion.
Scary movies are always better in black and white. I can’t accept Psycho in color. And really low-budget horror films, like Night of the Living Dead absolutely have to be in black and white – high contrast, no grayscale black and white, at that!
No, no, the whole world was in black and white then. That’s why new WWII films show it in color. The old films stayed black and white because they are color films of a black-and-white world.
Back in the Ted Turner-colorizing-everything days Roger Ebert made the good point that there isn’t anything missing from B&W movies. In fact, because the real world is in color, B&W films are essential adding something.