What became of colorized movies?

Cafe Society
21

The Legend Films colorized editions of Shirley Temple pictures are very good, good enough that I would prefer to watch them over the black and white. This from someone who has seen hundreds of B&W features from the '30s! I have no dislike of black and white at all, but the Temple movies really look like they are crying out for color. And watch the difference between '80s-style colorization and today’s improved technology. Click on “Demos”.

Laurel & Hardy’s Babes in Toyland also looks right in color. Producer Hal Roach considered filming it in Technicolor, but didn’t have the budget for it.

The colorized Charge of the Light Brigade, with Errol Flynn, was worth the effort. A cotume picture, on brightly-lit sets and locations, offers some of the best opportunities for realistic colorization.

All wrong in color: King Kong, The Maltese Falcon, The Magnificent Ambersons.

22

Thank you very much for that information mobo85. And thanks to you too, RealityChuck. That quote is priceless!

23

I think it’s more the case that they’re colorizing PD movies because it’s really cheap to do that.

24

As much as I think colorization of classic movies is a horrible idea, there is an entire generation who simply refuses to watch a film in black and white.

I can’t tell you how often I will mention a film to my (college-aged) students, and hardly any of them have seen it and whine that the film “is not even in color”.

So is it better to colorize these films so people will watch, or hope that someday this generation will wake up and see the beauty of black and white cinematography?

25

I don’t think it’s worth it in most cases; as I said above, adding colour actually often seriously degrades the movie. If they’re shallow enough that colour is such a deciding factor, their capacity to appreciate the content can’t be all that highly tuned anyway. Complaining that a classic B/W movie ‘isn’t even in colour’ is like, I dunno, complaining that Pride and Prejudice didn’t have enough explosions and aliens in it.

26

I should add that there are probably examples of B/W movies that really are ‘crying out’ for colour - I think someone mentioned some of these the last time we discussed this topic.

27

Colorized movies are a monstrosity. Color has been available pretty much as long as sound; some silent movies were filmed in rudimentary green/red color (If you’ve seen The Aviator, which was filmed–lord knows why–with each section reflecting the color technology of the time period represented, you’ve seen what it looked like). This means that BW was always chosen over color whenever it was used. Economics were a factor in that choice, no doubt, but for the most part the filmmakers knew exactly which medium they were working in and worked accordingly. A director working in BW photographed with that in mind; ditto a director working in color. To come along 40, 50, 70 years later and impose the limited modern perspective upon these older works is just monstrously arrogant. It’s like “fixing” all of Monet’s paintings so the images are in sharper focus.

Color is not an “improvement” over black and white; it’s an alternative. BW is not broken, and does not need fixing.

28

I also wonder whether the person who says “It’s not even in color” is likely to want to watch a movie which has been colorized–assuming that they understand how old it is.

29

Are not. Theyr’e just another option.

Or it COULD be that it was chosen because color looked crappy in those days. That’s a choice, but not an aesthetic choice. Just responding to the technology available. You’ll note filmmakers didn’t exactly hang onto black and white when color technology got going in the 40s.

It’s rather obvious that most directors of the time used black and white because that was the available tech – there was nothing aesthetic about their decision, other than, “The color stuff we have now looks awful.” And you can’t tell me all those Western with posses chasing bad guys and Indians through Monument Valley in glorious black and white wouldn’t have looked 1000 percent better in color. ‘Cause I’ve seen Monument Valley in color and it’s freaking amazing. And those Republic outer space serials were clearly inspired by the pulp SF magazines of the time – colorizing them all in garish primary colors would be more a matter of completing the directors’ vision rather than mucking them up. And they’d look great.

On this we agree. Some of the black and white stuff from the 30s onward is incredibly good to look at – they really worked black and grey for all it was worth. Plus they got away with stuff. Roman Scandals of 1933, for example, had some pretty darned naked women in it. I don’t think they could have gotten away with it in color, with all that pink flesh proclaiming itself. In black and white, the flesh sorta fades into the background.

Of course they didn’t get away with it, ultimately – the Hayes Code got serious in 1934.

30

Here I almost totally disagree. Until the 1960s, when the costs equalized, economics was a huge determinant on which movies would be made in color, and how many total movies would be made in color. The second major determinant was technology.

To give you an example where both factors went hand-in-hand in U.S. feature production: in 1949, virtually the only color process the major studios used was Technicolor, which controlled the camera rentals and the print-making. In 1950, Kodak introduced a color 35mm negative film (Eastman color negative film 5247), and in 1952 another version suitable for professional filmmaking (5382). The cost of making color films dropped significantly: regular cameras could be used to shoot color movies, instead of special Technicolor cameras, and the amount of lighting required for shooting on a one-strip negative vs. a three-strip negative was more than halved. In 1954 the last Technicolor three-strip camera was retired.

In 1949, 85% of American features were shot in B&W. That dropped to 67% in 1952, and by 1954, only 34% were shot in B&W.*

(Nitpick: the color process imitated in the early 1930s scenes in The Aviator was red-blue Multicolor, which Howard Hughes owned, and which was a competitor of red-green Technicolor.)

  • Competition with color television was insignificant at this time. The the first color sets of were sold in spring 1954, but as late as 1964, only 3.1% of TV households in the U.S. had color sets.
31

This is probably true - I’m sure there are examples of movies or scenes where the directors just wished there was a decent colour process at the time of filming, but in very many other cases, having chosen (perhaps reluctantly) to work in B/W, there are consequent decisions of style, lighting, costume, composition, etc that will have been made specifically to work well with that medium - slapping colour on top of these scenes may very well spoil them.

32

Surely you don’t mean three-strip Technicolor, introduced in 1934. Take a look at these gorgeous shots of Marlene Dietrich in 1936, or the screen caps below those from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) — or Gone With the Wind (1939).

33

Was “THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE” ever colorized?

34

BTW, how cheap are those colorizing programs nowadays? And how much of a computer do you need to run them?

Just asking, heh heh.

35

From your first link
“Technicolor ACTUALLY WORKED! The studios took note of the quality output of the company and began to slowly use the system on their big films. The cost was monumental, raising a film budget by nearly 50%”
with bolding added. The reduced price was probably more of a factor to studios chosing to make films in black and white rather than technicolor more than any artistic merrits of black and white.

36

Like I said I don’t mind certain types of films being colorized. The Hal Roach Comedies for example do not need to be in Black and white. They were cheapie shorts filmed in black and white because that was the cheapest film of the time.

These films did not have great black and white cinematography on the whole. Now I wouldn’t colorize say the Universal Monster films because they used the film medium for effect heavy shadows and grades of grey to create atmosphere. (They were going to try and then refused to film Son of Frankenstien in colour)

In the end if some films can get a new life with say a really young market (Tikes and whatnot) who are very unused to black and white films, why not?

If you want to be completely purest you could leave films as they are on the reel to rot
in the vaults instead of digitally manipulating them (restoring is a form of this)

As a side note you’ll see taht the original black and whites are not destroyed (And are even offered with the colourized version) So what is the real damage. It doesn’t replace the original it is just another version. You can choose not to watch it.

I learned that last bit, when it came to the whole Letterbox debate… If I have a choice I don’t begrudge the pan and scan being available to those who want it.

37

There are, indeed, quite a few films that wouldn’t suffer from coloization. Disnay has, I notice, been colorizing its circa 1960 black and white movies, such as the Ansent-Minded Professor. Our daughter, for one, would’ve refused to watch it in black and white, but she liked the color version.

Along the same line as the Hal Roach “Our ang” comedies, you wouldn’t offend anyone by colorizing the Bowery Boys, or The Three Stooges, or Laurel and Hardy. You could colorize Abbott and Costello – AFAIK, the only movie of their in color was Jack and the Beanstalk (and it was in Cinecolor, no less, not even Technicolor). In fact, I think one of the Legend colorized films is their Africa Screams.

Lots of bad 1950s monster flicks could be colorized without any artistic compromise, too. And a lot of 1940s and 1950s comedies that were effectively churned out as if they were TV sitcoms from the 1960s.
For that matter, colorize 1950s and early 1960s TV shows.
Stuff you shouldn’t do? Anything filmed as an exercise in artistic black and white. Orson Welles’ stuff. Thye original King Kong (a lot of their stuff based consciously on Dore and other engraved art), Hitchcock’s films. Film noir classics. The Universal Horror flicks. Even Avvott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (so it matches the old Universal Horror flicks, as Young Frankenstein did).

38

One of the factors in the decision was economic. But once that decision was made, all subsequent decisions were artistic.

First of all, they didn’t just choose a script and go, “Nope, I’m feelin’ cheap today. Do this one in BW.” They (the deciders) decided *which *scripts would be appropriate to the extra cost of color *based on the script. *Some movies they thought would do better in color, so they budgeted for it. Some they thought were more about story than spectacle, so they didn’t. It wasn’t an arbitrary dollars-only decision.

And then, once a director knew what medium he’d be working in, he worked accordingly. He didn’t shoot a BW film as if it were a color film only desaturated: he concentrated on story; on pure composition; on montage; etc. etc. If he’d been directing for color he would have directed a different picture.

Compare color photography to BW photography. Color photography is almost always about little more than color. If you desaturate a beautiful color picture, suddenly there’s not much picture there. (Of course there are exceptions; don’t waste our time pointing this out.)

If you only have limited budget to cook a dinner, you choose your ingredients differently and make a meal that emphasizes the value of those less expensive ingredients. If decide after the fact that you can spend more on it, you don’t go back and dump caviar and champagne all over what you’ve already carefully made and imagine that this will “improve” it.

Directors who worked in BW paid more attention–or at least a different kind of attention–to texture and composition and montage and story to make a complete picture. The pictures they made are not lacking anything, anymore than The Passion of Joan of Arc or Sunrise are “missing” sound and need to be fixed with laid on dialogue tracks. Imagine the closeups of Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress filling the screen with baby’s butt pink, instead of the sculptural shadows Von Sternberg lit for. If he were filming in color, his every composition, every single lighting set up, would have been different.

(And of course there were hack directors whose direction was arbitrary and shallow and made no distinction between color and BW, but theirs are not the movies that have stood the test of time; those are not the movies that are the first to have color spread over them like Betty Crocker frosting on a loaf of crusty French bread. <<shudder>>)

39

I just watched A Miracle on 34th Street both in BW and Colorized. The colorization give it an almost cartoonish feel which I kind of liked for that particular movie but the BW version was…I don’t know…crisper somehow.

40

Guy came into my video store last night and asked if we had the colorized version of It’s a Wonderful Life; seems his daughter didn’t want to watch the black and white. After I gave him a lecture on it’s his *job *to educate his children, I jabbed a pen in his neck and, after he’d bled out, rendered him for popcorn oil.

True story.

(The next one, hopefully I’ll get to him before he breeds.)