Come The Color Revolution, But When?

1934 Sees Early Bite From Three-Color Technicolor's Live-Action Apple

Technicolor In Full Bloom

Imagine if color had taken over movies in the mid-30’s. It could have happened. A lot of people expected it to happen. Writers said at the time that three-color Technicolor would revolutionize the business and erase black-and-white off screens. “America’s foremost stage designer” Robert Edmond Jones applauded an “entire industry reoriented” by color, if only movies could harness the rainbow. So far, Jones said, they had not, a task to which he would apply skills. It surprises me how then-contemporary voices knocked early efforts with color. Jones went west to advise Samuel Goldwyn, who announced Technicolor for all future output, while Fortune magazine wondered if the old two-color process had crippled prospects for what was now vastly improved. Color had been around long as movies. The French hand-applied tints to physical prints, a task that even eagle eyesight found arduous. Talk about labor intensive … George Melies upped price for color versions of his magic reels, the surviving lot of which is on Blu-Ray and works wonders yet. The Great Train Robbery made history enough as was, but there again came colors penned by unknown artisans to wow watchers in 1903. Reminds me of what desk-bound labor did later for cartoons at Disney and elsewhere once animation took on color. Blackhawk once sold The Great Train Robbery in color and one or two Melies to teach us that it wasn’t an altogether black-and-white primordial world.

So color didn’t take over in the 30’s. We could wonder why that was (or wasn’t). Quality they surely had, if surviving evidence is to be believed. A recent Blu-Ray of Glorifying The American Girl has historic short La Cucaracha (1934) as an extra. This was claimed a first use of three-color process with live action, but Warners made two comedies ahead of it, among Warner Archives’ Vitaphone Collections. La Cucaracha, however, was pushed hardest. RKO did a lavish-for-shorts pressbook, issued lobby cards, plus B/W and color-tinted stills. La Cucaracha was made to promote Technicolor as a perfected format, and it’s said, to promote use of same for features. Somewhere I heard that color added a third to production budgets. Maybe that is why support was slow in coming. There had been complaints about the old two-color being pale and inaccurate; now fuss was over hues hurting eyes, a signal to mute bright application lest we be blinded by too real renderings. Look at Trail of the Lonesome Pine on DVD, or lately at Retro Plex in HD, where colors are subtle and natural backgrounds soothe rather than startle. Nitrate prints, where occasionally seen, display often muted effect. You could ask why they applied color at all where so dialed down. Were users afraid to go full tilt with it? Maybe we were all waiting for Betty Grable to show up and empty paint cans with 40’s abandon.

Disney wanted, and had, three-color to himself for a first couple years, leaving rivals w/ inferior two-hues to demonstrate how superior his cartoons were, but proper preservation will show how appealing limits could be, red and green suggesting blue and yellow if not showing them. MOMA ran Mystery Of The Wax Museum, new-restored by UCLA Archive, and it was amazing, so good as to make me wish two-color were still around as an aesthetic choice. I wonder how closely it could be duplicated by modern photography. Two-color gets a rap for being rotten-rendered since initial runs. Most films that used the process are lost. Would-be improvers juiced up what was left with blues dishonestly applied, like with Whoopee, and Wax Museum before UCLA got there. If we can’t see two-color accurately, why see it at all? Assuming Warner gets out Mystery Of The Wax Museum on Blu-Ray as promised, there could come dawn of appreciation for artists whose ingenuity at the time did miracles.

To UCLA Goes Credit for Fixing Mystery Of The Wax Museum. It Has Never Looked So Grand.

When did we adopt color as a must, or more to point, when did we banish black-and-white, and why? I understand drive-ins, powered by greater attendance after the war, chose color because parked fans could see it better. B/W holdouts gave allowance by timing prints lighter to juice outdoor screens. I think it was color television, however, that wiped out monochrome. Viewers with color by hearthside saw no reason to drive out and pay for less. My family didn’t get a rainbow set until the end of 1966. Before then, I took movies however presented, the play being the thing, unless it was showroom of a Hercules In The Haunted World or The Nutty Professor, where color was drilled into skulls and we had to notice. I saw Seconds at the Liberty shortly before we got the color set, barely realized how effectively it used black-and-white, let alone the fact movies presented that way were on a fast road out. Is it safe to call those born after the mid-sixties, a point to which we can date color’s takeover, a first generation to reject any and all of black-and-white?

All Of Primary Colors Make Up a Golf Team in 1934's Service With A Smile

Seems to me B/W has been in-part rescued by improved rendition as Blu-Ray and/or HD broadcast. It’s easy to romanticize movies from beneath blanket of nostalgia, but face it, most of what we saw looked lousy, unless they were projected on theatre screens … but where? I saw a literal handful on ticket basis before being old enough to drive or fly to distant climes. Even vaunted revivals used 16mm prints where 35mm (often) wasn’t available. This happened at Gotham sites that flocks look back on as exemplars of a Golden Age. Color prints were often as not horrid. For every IB Technicolor print of Adventures Of Robin Hood, there were a dozen Eastman smears that could not begin to reflect what the movie was supposed to look like. Revivilers would book titles and pray. Gone With The Wind was for large part a mess in 1968 and after, color a way fall down from IB long abandoned (MGM used their own “Metrocolor” lab). Subsequent ownership tried a 90’s-rejuvenated IB process, for which GWTW and The Wizard Of Oz served as test rats, but I saw neither that way. Did anyone? … and if so, how did they look?

Service With A Smile Satisfies Mid-30's Yearn For Fullest Colors

Back to what-iffing. Heard about BFI recovering 68mm Biograph films shot in Victorian England? They’ve got footage of the Queen, as in the nineteenth century Queen, sharp/clear as a Star War on IMAX. Movies were a bear to shoot that way, let alone project when folks still rode horse and buggy to cinemas. But what if somehow, 68mm had been accepted as the standard? Imagination boggles at the thought. I frankly feel cheated that they didn’t embrace 68mm, because truth to tell, 35mm looks pretty punk beside it. The topic came up again when rebel William Fox did a brace of large-format specials in 1930-31, others tentative-following his lead. The Big Trail was most noted offspring of the try. Theatres lately switched to sound, and spending plenty to accomplish that, raised H as Depression revved up, obliging an allied industry to declare no more 65,68,70, or whatever, jumbo millimeter. Again I’m miffed for that lost opportunity, technology being there, and these folks timid to embrace it. Reasons made sense of course, film companies worried about how best to survive, so where do I come off second-guessing them from ninety-year distance?

Lovely Blue-Skied Beach Scene Captured in Good Morning, Eve!

Good Morning, Eve!: Nero Fiddles While Technicolor Lights Burn

I looked again at opener rounds of three-color Technicolor. The process, outside the Disney cartoons and animated one-off The Wizard Of Oz, made independently, were industrials and ad shorts to start (one for General Electric products), then a couple of WB comedies, one of which beat La Cucaracha to theatres, though some claim the RKO-released two reeler was shown earlier at closed venues in addition to trade screenings. All this matters because it’s worth knowing what mainstream commercial audiences saw first. There were Technicolor sequences, fairly brief, to cap features MGM and Twentieth-Century Pictures did: The Cat and The Fiddle and The House Of Rothschild. Under heading of never pleasing everybody, complaints were heard that gaudy color lowered an otherwise dignified saga of the banking family as personified by dual-player George Arliss. The Leon Errol laffers, vanguard of major studio live action shorts done in three-strip, were thought vulgar in “garish” color, as if suddenly critics needed to protect Technicolor from heathen misuse. Service With A Smile and Good Morning, Eve! are vulgar, but cheerfully, slangingly, so, and I’ll take garish color the live-long day where it appeals like renditions of these given us by Warners in five-disc Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy. For that matter, there is wide DVD, now more-so Blu-Ray, access to earliest Technicolor. For a splendid go at so-called limit of two-color, we have King Of Jazz to show how lovely it could look; lately too has come Becky Sharp, The Garden Of Allah, Nothing Sacred, all high-def. I bet Kino ends up releasing Trail Of The Lonesome Pine as part of their pre-49 Paramount haul. Methinks after seeing these that maybe we missed good revolution opportunity in those mid-30’s years, though on the other hand, look how much the poorer we are for black-and-white being so long run out of town. There should be a bigger tent for it all, even two-color Technicolor, if somehow they could revive that.