I Miss Technicolor

technicolor and the pan cake makeup they used to use, made all gorgeous men and women even MORE SO! brought out the color and shine of hair, the beautiful eyes, made their faces skin perfect and flawless.... almost like comic book characters come to life.... then the 70's came and everything went "more real" and natural and realistic...

Yes OP. I especially love the great big Douglas Sirk Universal Pictures releases of the 1950s…Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life. The colors hypnotize me.

Here's the thing. The sad thing.

Like the platinum prints of photography. Like the black and white of silver nitrate films. And so, like Technicolor, the advance in technology going hand in hand with business has led to a degradation of what we consume today.

What we consume today is not the best that the medium can offer. But it is the faster (like Kodak fast film) and more speedily disseminated (like video streaming).

The business end of technology has resulted in the ones that come out on top not necessarily being the best the medium can offer. Connoisseurs know this.

Only 10? #11 should be...

The lady who directed this gets close-

I always loved the lush Technicolor of MGM’s “Quo Vadis” (1951). Full of reds and golds, deep and shiny. What better way to envision Imperial Rome, “master gem of the world’s crown.”

Many of the B musicals of the 40s & 50s are fun to watch if only for the visuals.

This reminds me of Howthe West WasWin, a technicolor cinerama film I was subjected to as a kid. One of the worst movies ever made.

Anyway, I’ll check Black Narcissus. It looks like they couldn’t get Ingrid Bergman so they hired Deborah Kerr to imitate her

Speaking of Ingrid Bergman, I think one of the most beautiful Technicolor films is For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Niagara. The colour photography is just eye popping. Marilyn looks fantastic.

Technicolor not only provided beautiful color. The process also provided more depth. Characters looked almost as if they could step out of the screen

I have a huge resentment against the film world for switching to shitty Eastman color. There's no excuse. Not even economics. Everybody would have gladly paid a bit more for a movie ticket to retain Technicolor.

R9 I'm amused that the trailer boasts about the film being photographed on location in Sonora rather than Spain.

[quote] I have a huge resentment against the film world for switching to shitty Eastman color.

But why did they?

Did a particular studio own Technicolor? I understand that 20th Century Fox owned CinemaScope.

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) is a feast of beautifully photographed scenes - some in Technicolor, some in black & white. The contrast is dazzling.

[quote] Anyway, I’ll check Black Narcissus. It looks like they couldn’t get Ingrid Bergman so they hired Deborah Kerr to imitate her.

That sounds like a rumour (though Ingrid was in London around that time making Under Capricorn).

Michael Powell found Deborah Kerr when the ill-timed Wendy Hiller became pregnant instead of starring in the wonderful Technicolor movie 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp'.

Powell made her star, put her on a contract and MGM had to pay Powell to use her.

This still is practically an advertisement for the Technicolor process, and a pretty good one!

Do any of you eldergays know about Natalie Kalmus?

Michael Powell suggests she was as opinionated as Edith Head and a real nuisance.

Such a cool thread.

Kalmus - or more accurately her "associates' like Henri Jaffa and Morgan Padelford - determined the look of a Technicolor film as much as any director. Some colors could not be used side by side as one would overpower for bleach out the other. Kalmus got the main credit but the associates did the work.

Rouben Mamoulian drove Kalmus crazy with his daring color choices in BLOOD AND SAND, Evoking the pallettes of the great Spanish old master painters , the director went around one set with a can of black spray paint to cover the green foliage in an attempt to evoke El Greco.

R5 I liked that movie. Gian Keys looked great in his underwear, too.

OP You Miss Technicolor. I Mr. CinemaScope.

R17 And this.

It was a stunningly difficult, expensive process - the reason the films look so great is because the release prints were literally printed with 3 passes of colored dye onto clear stock - more like you would print the color cover of a magazine than later color film technology. It fell out of favor when cheaper alternatives were deemed “good enough”

Process 3 Based on the same dye-transfer technique first applied to motion pictures in 1916 by Max Handschiegl, Technicolor Process 3 (1928) was developed to eliminate the projection print made of double-cemented prints in favor of a print created by dye imbibition. The Technicolor camera for Process 3 was identical to that for Process 2, simultaneously photographing two consecutive frames of a black-and-white film behind red and green filters.

In the lab, skip-frame printing was used to sort the alternating color-record frames on the camera negative into two series of contiguous frames, the red-filtered frames being printed onto one strip of specially prepared "matrix" film and the green-filtered frames onto another. After processing, the gelatin of the matrix film's emulsion was left proportionally hardened, being hardest and least soluble where it had been most strongly exposed to light. The unhardened fraction was then washed away. The result was two strips of relief images consisting of hardened gelatin, thickest in the areas corresponding to the clearest, least-exposed areas of the negative.

To make each final color print, the matrix films were soaked in dye baths of colors nominally complementary to those of the camera filters: the strip made from red-filtered frames was dyed cyan-green and the strip made from green-filtered frames was dyed orange-red. The thicker the gelatin in each area of a frame, the more dye it absorbed. Each matrix in turn was pressed into contact with a plain gelatin-coated strip of film known as the "blank" and the gelatin "imbibed" the dye from the matrix. A mordant made from deacetylated chitin was applied to the blank before printing, to prevent the dyes from migrating or "bleeding" after they were absorbed.

Dye imbibition was not suitable for printing optical soundtracks, which required very high resolution, so when making prints for sound-on-film systems the "blank" film was a conventional black-and-white film stock on which the soundtrack, as well as frame lines, had been printed in the ordinary way prior to the dye transfer operation

Process 4 - 3 strip technicolor:

Technicolor envisioned a full-color process as early as 1924, and was actively developing such a process by 1929. Hollywood made so much use of Technicolor in 1929 and 1930 that many believed the feature film industry would soon be turning out color films exclusively. By 1931, however, the Great Depression had taken its toll on the film industry, which began to cut back on expenses. The production of color films had decreased dramatically by 1932, when Burton Wescott and Joseph A. Ball completed work on a new three-color movie camera.

Technicolor could now promise studios a full range of colors, as opposed to the limited red-green spectrum of previous films. The new camera simultaneously exposed three strips of black-and-white film, each of which recorded a different color of the spectrum. The new process would last until the last Technicolor feature fil

I Miss Technicolored.

[quote] You Miss Technicolor. I Mr. CinemaScope.

A match made in Heaven!

A journey to...

Technicolor or Kodachrome are never coming back but you can still buy super 8 or 16 mm movie film in either negative or reversal. Here is a random sample off of YouTube. Kodak Vision3. If you want to project you can use Ektachrome or spend big money and have the 16 mm negative printed to a positive for projection.

I miss 70mm film being projected on a 70mm screen.

Certainly someone can create a digital filter to at least attempt to recapture the beauty of Technicolor.

Well, I watched Black Narcissus. It was very……..florid. Sort of like “Rebecca” in a convent. Supernatural atmosphere that drives women mad. It would’ve driven me mad to live in a hilltop fortress in the Himalayas without shutters while every room had large, wide open windows. “The wind blows 7 days a week.” Well then, why not build some interior rooms? How about a cozy windowless den ….with a fireplace? Christmas Eve, the wind must have stopped blowing, because the snow was falling straight down outside the wide open windows. In the Himalayas.

They set up a school for poor village children who don’t speak English (except for the cook’s son who is to act as translator) and they start teaching….algebra.

The nuns - who’ve been living on planet earth - become very agitated because they are around…a male. Even the fey, perfumed teen rajput makes the ladies forget to plant their potatoes.

The air….is….so clear.

A young, horny local female writhes around the decayed “palace” clinking invisible finger bells. She has face piercings, which makes her “wild” to 1940s white audiences and she squirms on the floor like a dark, lovesick snake. One of the nuns becomes possessed by sexual desire and it drives her mad…. mad I tell you! She turns into a snakeface, her eyes reddening & skin paling as her passion overtakes her until she collapses in a sweaty seizure. And then….she goes full-on Mrs Danvers. A woman unquenched is a hellish thing. It can only end in death!

A manly Englishman ….. who runs his manly hand through his thick, wavy hair as he insolently tosses his handsome head…tells the nuns he expects them to abandon their futile convent school “when the rain breaks.” But the nuns spiff the place up. Full grown rosebushes appear at the doorway. Lush grass grows. There are budding tree branches seen through (open) windows. Azaleas bloom. Magnolias. Beds of tulips. It’s a few years later, right? The nuns have obviously been there for quite a while. But no…..this Eden has been conjured in less than a year. When the nuns abandon their eerie aerie to go back to their familiar, all-female flatlands, raindrops fall. The release has arrived. The failed mother superior offers her hand to the manly man. He gazes at her, his face wet with monsoon that is breaking around them.

[quote] Azaleas bloom. Magnolias. Beds of tulips.

And don't forget those luscious Rhododendrons, their buds heavy with nectar!

That was all filmed in a studio, not on location. Remarkable looking film. Pretty gorgeous.

Let me tell you something I learned from Roland Barthes. He called celluloid based photography "flat death" and while that sounds negative there is a magical quality within the concept. You see celluloid photography is based on light bouncing off an object then touching the film emulsion. Therefore when we see a Daguerreotypes for example we are metaphysically quite "close" to the object being pictured. The closeness remains even when we are looking at a print from a negative. It's still a sort of "touch" that remains from the original object. So this concept works for still and moving images based celluloid.

In my opinion there is a parallel to vinyl records. Since the technology at the base is live sound converted to ingraving that is literally "touching" vinyl and then retransmitted to touch our ears. This somewhat clouds when magnetic tape is introduced somewhat along the line but still magnetic tape is "imprinted".

What we have with digitally produced images and sound a total and complete removal of any semblance of metaphysical touch to the original object or the original sound.

In other words, digital reproduction is an entirely different medium, in many ways, and experienced differently by humans.

As for sound, it's clear that for 20+ years of digital sound distribution and reproduction, the consumer was cheated although in recent decades HD digital has erased the degradation. Nevertheless, almost all sound reproductive equipment was considerably dumbed down for a few decades, so the consumer got used to a very degraded sound and also pop music took advantage of that and incorporated that into the way music is originally conceived and performed and recorded/produced.

A similar issue exists for the degradation of the film image as it is most often reproduced. Again, in recent years, there have been strides to remove the degradation. For example, a freshly restored 4k recording of a Hollywood classic delivered to a HD TV screen can be visually spectacular.

All in all, time marches on. But there its something to be learnt from the old French and European semioticians who thought carefully about what we are putting before our eyes and ears.

The next time you look at old slides or negatives or a Daguerreotypes, remember that light bounced off that object and has been captured (in a sort of "flat death") on that very piece of celluloid or glass!

Orson Welles didn’t like color film. He preferred black & white because he felt he could better manipulate shadows & depth. It’s a good thing he preferred B&W because no way could he afford color film.

I’ve always wanted to live in Technicolor.

Orson Welles liked black & white film for the same reason I liked cat food

I found some technicolor films to look cartoonish.

Which is why it worked so well for musicals.

The Warner Archive blurays are often restored from original Technicolor negatives which is why it can appear to be watching it on the film's opening day. Unfortunately there was a fire at the Eastman House in Rochester and a number of negatives were lost including Singin in the Rain and the ballet from An American in Paris. I fortunately got to see both films in freshly struck prints before the fire and they were a joy to behold.

Fox which was also famous for its Technicolor prints in the 70s decided to throw all the negatives in the ocean. Therefore the films can appear a little washed out and certainly not as brilliant as they once did. There is however a bluray of The Gang's All Here from Europe which is much better than the Twilight Time(now defunct) domestic release and worth seeking out. Busby Berkeley at his most hallucinatory.

My favorite euphemism for 'to vomit' is 'the technicolor yawn'.

R31 - the beauty of technicolor lay largely in its physical production process, along with the care that needed to be taken in how things were lit and photographed and the colors used on sets and costumes (all a direct result of certain “limitations” of the technology.). There is a stunning unreality to technicolor that has to do with how the light was broken into spectrum components on black & white film negative and then “reassembled” in a printing process using very vivid dyes.

The final component of the look was the light of the project shining through an actual object (a frame of film) to project it on a screen, or later via telecine into a tv camera for broadcast. Digital imaging captures an image in a completely different way than the photochemical process of film, and the images “feel” fundamentally different - the lack of fine grain, the differences in the way a digital chip reacts to light vs silver halide, etc..

You can certainly do a great deal manipulating digital imagery to give it all sorts of looks - it is much more malleable than photochemical imagery, and much easier to achieve the effects - but the underlying basis of the images - a single digital file or three frames of B&W negative that were exposed to red / blue / green light that had been split by a prism in camera are just fundamentally different and that comes into play with how close you can get one to approximate the other.

The correct term is Technicolor burp, r41.

Every image capture medium has a “look”. To me, some things simply don’t look “right” seeing them in mediums or formats different that when I was growing up. Soap operas in 16:9 HD are all wrong in my minds eye. I never watch them but one came on the TV after the local noon news and it just seemed off. Football in TV I have gotten used to, but there was a time when AFC games on NBC had a completely different look then NFC games on CBS. NBC used RCA color TV cameras, CBS used Phillips. AFC teams mainly played on astroturf and had uniforms with bolder colors.

R35 Roland Barthes? Were you a semiotics major at Brown (where incidentally they got rid of that major and renamed it something else)? They used to make up or purloin all these BS Russian words for what was really trying to not really be an English major's study of symbolism. The rest of your post is fine,

R43 - we always called it "Technicolor yawn." I'm not R41. Maybe it's a regional thing.

R45 Russian buzzwords? Hmm. Certainly familiar with Semiotics at Brown but it was a battle-ax lesbian photo history prof at RISD who dared assign Roland Barthes, seeing as Barthes was too "popular" for the real egg heads of theory. And thank god, because Barthes is readable and coherent.

The Criterion restoration of The War of the Worlds looks pretty cool with its unearthly technicolor.

Perhaps, r46, but burp makes more sense. Yawning is intake to get more oxygen to the brain and burping is expelling.

I miss when everyone was black or white, life was so simple then. Now there’s too much variety.

The 1950s horrible cheap substitute, Eastmancolor, quickly turned whole movies pink.

My favorite vintage Technicolor movie is LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (45).

R51 I love it. When it was announced as part of the Criterion Collection, I smashed that preorder button

[quote]The Warner Archive blurays are often restored from original Technicolor negatives which is why it can appear to be watching it on the film's opening day.

Here's an example from last year's release of [bold]The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex[/bold]. Absolutely stunning!

Love this clip from This is the Army (1943). So many stars here, even Ronnie, in this wartime film.

BTW the USA national should be changed to this so Americans can actually sing it.

[quote]BTW the USA national should be changed to this so Americans can actually sing it.

No we shouldn't. Not everyone in the US believes in any God much less agreeing on which God. Keep religion out of this.

"Midnight Lace" would have been so much better if it had been done in Technicolor instead Eastman.

Wasn't the 1970s version of Suspiria shot on old Technicolor stock? I think that was the last film to use it.

And as of a few months ago, a developer created a Kodachrome digital filter, so, maybe someone will follow suit with a Technicolor filter.

And while I love Technicolor, it wasn't suited to be used for every movie. I think Eastmancolor was good, and I can't picture Bonnie and Clyde in Technicolor.

Bonnie and Clyde was terrific on the big screen.

R51 - Eastman-color, like other “single-strip” color film stocks, uses sandwiched layers of chemicals that react to different parts of the color spectrum - instead of the 3 separate b&w negatives used in technicolor. This sandwich is inherently unstable, even after processing (unlike black & white). Over time the yellow layer fades - this causes positive prints to turn pink, and also effects the negative - so easily producing a properly color balanced print from it is no longer possible. Much of the work in film restoration is dealing with the problems of the faded yellow layer.

Waxy yellow build-up, R59.

Daytime soaps sought of retained the classic studio system look with the lighting and beautiful aesthetics.

I wonder how Davis and Flynn got along on set.

Flynn is wildly handsome in that clip. Vincent Price looks pretty good, too!

For gorgeous technicolor check out Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Also, Jane has fun with a bevy of nearly nude athletes.

I complain about this all the time. My dad was a big classic film buff and I grew up with all that. Ninety years of technology and movies look *less* good than the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood. I also think the boxier classic car look is nicer than the modern round edges.

Imagine the Wizard of Oz or GWTW in Eastmancolor. Mierda.

R62 Davis thought he was one of the most handsome men ever. She didn't think he was much of an actor though while working with him, though when years later was watching him acting opposite her, she changed her mind, saying that indeed could act. I think she said this on some tv interview. Don't know what Flynn thought of Davis, though she was still quite attractive into the 1950s, though not really in the Elizabeth I makeup.

There's technically no reason why you couldn't use a BlackMagic camera to make a movie with the vivid (arguably, garish) colors of Technicolor... but you'd be bucking more than a half-century of lighting, set & costume coloration, and postproduction norms that now lean towards making everything "teal & orange".

The supreme irony is, if a director could choose among several 2-color bipack processes to use for a particular scene or shot, an average DC/Marvel movie would barely look any different than they do now.

The first time I saw the Wizard of Oz as a kid, the jump from black and white to that vivid color just dazzled me. The red of the shoes and her blue socks, the yellow-brick road, Glinda’s pink dress, I mean…

^^ Yes, beautiful. R58 would tell you those colors are garish, but we know better.

R69 Sepia tone not B&W.

R65 so should I go to this?

R69 - The next time you watch Oz look closely at the shot where, from the back, Dorothy opens the door to reveal colorful, over the rainbow Oz.

That shot is a practical effect -- it is shot in technicolor with a sepia pained set and Judy (or perhaps a stand-in) wearing a sepia costume, wig and make-up so when the door opens to reveal the color set of Munchkin Land it is all achieved in one shot without any matte work compositing needed.

You can see a shift in the sepia tone of the early scenes to the faux-sepia in that shot.

Add a comma to your title, OP, and you’ve got a great drag name: I, Miss Technicolor!

R72 Two of Errol Flynn's best. Though only [bold]Robin Hood[/bold] is in Technicolor, [bold]Captain Blood[/bold] is nevertheless terrific.

Hell, I might go to that double feature myself.

R24 That sounds too complicated for me to understand.

Does that explain the weird colours Scorsese was trying to recreate?

Some of those Fox Technicolor musicals are really a lot more fun than those at MGM -- less preachy, more down to earth. I'd much rather see Betty Grable, Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda over June Allyson and sorry, he was talented, but a little of Mickey Rooney hamming it up goes a long way.

r57 Suspiria was shot on ordinary film. The prints that were projected in the theater, however, were some of the last to use the dye transfer process described above, where the different color layers are stamped onto the film. Here's a video showing how the dye transfer process is used for still photography.

The last film shot in Technicolor was Jet Pilot in '57.

R77 I agree with you. Even Warner Bros. made some technicolor movies in that period. June Haver playing Ziegfeld Girl Marilyn Miller in Look for the Silver Lining is a good example.

Singing In The Rain was spectacular. The colors of some of the scenes just mind-blowing.

Every decade has a 'look'. Film stocks evolve.

My favorite is the 70s, with films like Taxi Driver, Superman, Day Of The Locust, Paper Moon, Lucky Lady, Chinatown, Looking For Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever.

Another movie shot in Technicolor that looks great is The King And I.

I want R35 inside me. That was the sexiest post I've ever read in Datalounge.

Hear, hear, r84 - this is what I imagine DL must have been like during its oft-lamented, bygone glory days. So refreshing to have a thread devoted to such a cool subject, without all the name-calling and ugliness that constantly makes me wonder what I'm still doing here... Anyway, thanks to this thread, I just ordered Cobra Woman and Dr Cyclops on Blu Ray from the Kino Lorber website! (They're both on sale, as well as many other Blu Ray Technicolor gems)

Some of the movies mentioned here, like the King and I, were not shot on 3 strip Technicolor. By the mid 50s the 3 strip process was retired in favor of the standard 1 strip of film. Though the theatrical prints were often still printed using the dye transfer process. The credits may say "color by Technicolor" I think this just means the film was processed in the Technicolor facilities.

JET PILOT was actually made in 1950, and then Howard Hughes shelved it (as he was wont to do) and eventually sold RKO to General Tire Corp. It was eventually released in 1957 by Universal-International (as it was then called).

I LOVE Technicolor films of the 1940s and early ‘50s before the inferior Eastmancolor prints came in and transformed color photography by making the process cheaper.

But the digital technology we have now ought to be able to replicate the richly saturated hues of Technicolor, and the sensitivity of new TVs are capable of showing every subtle gradation of color. The problem is that there is a current vogue for desaturated color onscreen. Most of the 10 pictures nominated as the best at the Oscars purposely desaturate their color palettes, and this includes not just “Power of the Dog” and “Dune,” but also “West Side Story,” which is insane when you consider how vivid and expressive the use of color was in the 1961 version. It was particularly egregious in “The House of Gucci” (not a nominee) which opens in Italy in the 1970s, for Christ’s sake! I have to assume this is an attempt to make movies look more ‘real’ and less pretty, and as a way to distinguish from most streaming TV series.

But it is a mistake — bring back fully saturated color!!

To make vibrant colors pop, you require a deep black somewhere in the frame. Or so a cinematographer told me.

Desaturation of color started in the late 60s with the youth films that became into vogue trying for a cinema verite, documentary look. There were exceptions to that in films like Oliver!, Funny Girl, and Hello Dolly but by the early 70's it was pretty much gone. I remember seeing big musicals at Radio City like Scrooge, 1776, and Tom Sawyer and they had that desaturated 70s color look which was very disappointing to me.

When I saw Singing in the Rain at Radio City in '75, which I had never seen before not even on television, it was quite the eye-popping revelation. Then I started going to the Regency and saw Cover Girl and then went to their MGM summer festivals and those color films were pure joy even sometimes if the films themselves might not have been the best.

I recommend looking at the site bluray.com which reviews new bluray releases and has a back catalogue of reviews and of course reviews releases of new films as well. They review the qualities of the transfers. Sometimes they are disappointing and they will let you know. Not all blurays are of the same quality. Some may have come from a poor source or there was no care taken in the transfer. As I said before the European Cover Girl is said to be better than the domestic so I got it though I haven't seen it yet. The European The Gang's all Here I read was better than the domestic which I had bought. I then got the European and it is indeed better. If you get a 4k player that will play even foreign discs with different regional codes and regular discs which I got for not too expensive price of $150 it is worth it for the 4k My Fair Lady alone. I understand Oliver! is great too. And many more recent and contemporary films are being released in 4k. HomeTheaterForm.com is great too where you get reviews from the great legendary Robert Harris who restored My Fair Lady, Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia along with the opinions of many consumers and what their experience have been with different releases. Of course arguments ensue.

Apparently Technicolor on Nitrate stock is even MORE dazzling.

Especially when one chain-smokes in the projection booth R91!

R75, I once saw a double feature of The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Sat through it twice.

Curious, what kind of film/filming was used for Monroe's screen test and the footage of her from 'something's got to give" in 1962? she literally looked beyond luminous, glowing and angel like......was it all just her screen magic, magnetism and charisma?

Thanks for this thread, OP. Like R1 and R90, I remember as a kid watching the deterioration of a movie's "look" by the early 70's, but couldn't figure out what it was. I used to think I was the only one noticing this.

Honestly, I think one of the reasons Disney/Marvel is doing so well is that many of their films are still colorful.

They used to show a very faded "King & I" on tv. They restored it to its original colors years later, and it was gorgeous. I'm not sure what kind of film they used though.

Rear Window was not shot in Technicolor. It was shot on Eastmancolor stock processed by Technicolor, hence the credits reading Color by Technicolor.

For those interested in real early Technicolor, a brand new restored version of the first A Star is Born (1937) is coming out on Blu-ray tomorrow. If you saw the current prints that have been shown on TCM and on Blu-ray you will not recognize the movie. It is absolutely spectacular and a strongly recommended purchase.

The Third Reich film industry used its own color process, AnscoColor. Restored films reveal a vibrant red and orange palette and the actors' complexions are suitably creamy-looking.

KinoNow (streaming site of KinoLorber) has a couple of examples, the best being PORT OF FREEDOM (44).

TT

MGM started using Ansco color for their cinemascope films. Minnelli liked it a lot. It faded horribly but when new it looked really good. Seven Brides and Brigadoon used it. I never liked the film of Brigadoon with all the cuts and the phony as hell backdrops. But it's lovely on bluray with its restored colors and stereo soundtrack. I've watched it twice and that's remarkable for a film I don't think is very good.

Minnelli wanted to film BRIGADOON in Scotland or, barring that, Big Sur. MGM nixed both ideas.

I once saw a Technicolor nitrate print of Gone with the Wind. I saw the movie many times before and after but it never looked as gorgeous as that print. Not even the restored BR looks that good. Three-strip Technicolor was otherworldly.

When 3 color Technicolor was new and they started using it for full length features critics thought it would induce eye strain and headaches.

I saw a restored print of the David Selznick Tom Sawyer at MOMA back in the late 80s. It was very beautiful but the colors were a bit muted to look like color illustrations in a children's book. The bluray got poor reviews so I wonder what happened to that print or perhaps the company that produced it couldn't be bothered to do research.

What color film was used by television studios in the 1960s? Some early color TV shows like Green Acres, Dragnet, Gomer Pyle USMC and The Lucy Show have the Technicolor "look".

R106 Yes, a lot of them had glorious color. Also, they weren't on film but the soaps really kept the vibrant color palette, for years. Especially the ABC soaps, DAYS, and Y&R. I think the goal of most soaps in the 80s and early 90s was to aspire to look like a Douglas Sirk melodrama.

Putting soaps in HD was a mistake. It looks weird especially with such cheap sets

The Soap Opera Troll is relentless. NO ONE CARES ABOUT SOAPS. They have NOTHING to do with Technicolor you stupid fuck.

Let's get back to Technicolor films, shall we? There are so many things to love about Black Narcissus. Scorcese agrees...

R110 The ever-enthusiastic Scorsese says the film's erotic moments scandalised the Catholic Church but I understood the film is about a troop of Protestant nuns.

It is, but very few people at the time knew there were Protestant nuns. They READ as Catholic.

Nuns shmuns. The point is, he was talking about the visual splendor of the film, especially when viewing it on the big screen.

Technicolor is such an eye candy

Marilyn's "Niagara", "Gentlemen prefer blonde" and "how to marry a millionaire" are delicious

The Opposite Sex was shot in Metrocolor and is ridiculously bad. The sheer spectacle of so many actors propels it along for a while…until Reno when it sinks. However, the color is outrageously intense and oversaturated. I was mesmerized. The musical sequence with Joan Collins, Carolyn Jones, and Barrie Chase is a standout. They spastically dance around (well, not Barrie) in red, pink, and coral dresses….dancing with bunches of bananas…and it is nearly seizure-inducing. It’s on HBO this month.

I swear, I never do this, but I have read no posts on this thread. Why? I had to fly to the bottom to say, doesn’t OP’s picture look *exactly* like PeeWee Herman? Remember the nun outfit from Big Adventure? I can’t stop seeing PeeWee.

Joan Collins sang and danced?

I've seen bits of The Opposite Sex and it seems unwatchable. Even Radio City which played all those kinds of big Metro films of the period didn't want it.

I've read the bluray looks great but it is in mono. The film was released in stereo as was the DVD so it wasn't a case of it no longer existing. Those Warner blurays are excellent but nobody's raves are going to make me buy this one.

As said above Technicolor stopped be used in the 50s. At that point on it was other colors. Technicolor produced the prints. Eastman was cheaper, probably looked good initially but then didn't hold up. The producers didn't care. They made their money on the initial release and even when television came into play they were going to look lousy anyway. Very few were thinking of home video. Disney was one of the few.

[quote] a troop of Protestant nuns.

I'm sure there's a better word for 'troop'.

R118 Aside from being an unnecessary remake of The Women, it added men to the cast and made it a musical. Not a musical per se, but in the sense that the backdrop was show business. It also seems to be aping The Seven Year Itch with the opening segment “sociological” narration style…describing the denizens of the jungle of New York City, etc. For a while, sumptuous costumes and the endless odd supporting cast keeps you going…”why, there’s Agnes Moorehead…Joan Blondell…Ann Miller.” But it’s a real clunker. Plus: Joan Collins at 23 doesn’t hold a candle to Joan Crawford at 33. Crawford’s Crystal Allen was tenacious and self aware—she knew she was past her expiration date. Collins is merely shrill.

r117 Not well. It was just one of the expectations one had of a starlet with a major studio contract, circa 1955.

Technicolor lived on until the early 21st century... as a medium for preserving Eastmancolor prints. Instead of shooting in Technicolor, they'd shoot in Eastmancolor, then immediately transfer anything that survived the first cut to Technicolor (because Eastmancolor began deteriorating almost immediately) to stop the clock.

George Lucas went further, and spent a FORTUNE getting every last scrap of film he shot duplicated to Technicolor for preservation.

The amusing thing is, at the very end, Technicolor's company basically digitized films & color-corrected them before printing to Technicolor... for years.. before anyone asked what the point was of printing to film after digitizing.

How to Marry a Millionaire is not technically Technicolor but Eastmancolor processed by Technicolor Labs.

[quote]Don't know what Flynn thought of Davis, though she was still quite attractive into the 1950s, though not really in the Elizabeth I makeup.

Errol Flynn had appeared with Bette Davis previously in a 1938 film ([italic]The Sisters[/italic]) and they managed to get along, but on [italic]The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex[/italic] their relationship had deteriorated to one of mutual loathing.

I've read Flynn's memoirs and it's impossible to know when he (or his ghostwriter) is telling the truth or embroidering upon it, but according to Flynn Bette's hostility arose from his rejection of her romantic and/or sexual overtures. Bette hit him for real when they were shooting the slapping scene-- he said that she hit him so hard he saw stars. (That take was not used in the film.) Flynn also mentioned retreating to his dressing room to throw up between takes, although this could be due to his extreme drinking problem rather than stress.

R51~~~Straight outta The Preppie Handbook

R119---Technicolor movies were still being made in the '60s: Susan Slade, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, My Fair Lady, The Pink Panther and many more.

Black Narcissus was ridiculous. Women's sexuality is depicted as insane-making.

“You can’t put a woman with sexual desires in an isolated religious place with a bunch of nuns and a hot man. It can’t possibly end well. You’ll wind up with a man-crazed version of Mrs Danvers!”

I became a movie fan as a boy watching B&W classics with my dad and watching everything on 4:30 movie in Metro NY area. 4:30 movie showed color and black and white movies with no second thought. We liked the B&W and we liked the color. Because we grew up watching them and both made sense. IT was a good education because it meant you could go all the way back to silents and have enough references and experience and the eye to appreciate them. All the great film mediums have their own interest. It's not just technicolor which is fabulous. They were all fabulous when used by real artists and clever business people.

There was no glass in the windows in Black Narcissus. And the doors had spaces between then even when closed. No wonder they went crazy.

“Let’s build a palace on a sheer cliffface thousands of feet above a valley. That will be nice.”

“The wind…the wind”

Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are nightmare movies. Horrorific.

I love all those technicolor Fox musicals with sexy leading men like George Montgomery and John Payne. MGM was so square and sexless after Thalberg died.

The Godfather was one of the last major films shot in Technicolor.

This is a thread that reaffirms my love for DL.

The article @OP claims Maria Montez was called "The Queen of Technicolor, but I've always read/seen it was the luminescent Rhonda Fleming who was famously termed TQOT.

In the 1960s if you had a good receiver tuned properly, color television was gorgeous on those sets. So much more than today.

I wish I could slap whomever came up with the hideous and depressing gray blue tint seen in so many modern films.

For r136

Jon Hall, hubba hubba.

When Vertigo was "rediscovered" in the 1980's it made its way around art houses and I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen. The vibrancy of Technicolor made this scene in Midge's apartment so immersive that you felt completely transported back in time...

Elizabeth Taylor looked best in Technicolor

How many Technicolor films was Elizabeth Taylor in? And which ones?

OP's pic looks like Pee Wee Herman

R41, R46 He demonstrates the 'yawn' here.

When was Technicolor last used?

R8

I hadn't heard. Although Ingrid Bergman is one of my favorite actresses, Deborah Kerr is superb in Black Narcissus.

R128

Not so. In Black Narcissus, before the nuns arrived, a group of English monks had tried to live on the mountaintop and also failed. The palace had been used as a harem for a maharajah, its walls had been painted with erotic scenes. The place was viewed by the property agent, an Englishman, as fundamentally unsuitable for ascetic Christians. It was too intense, too sensual. It amplified any peculiarities people had and one of the nuns in the group was mentally unstable. She's in OP's photo. He predicted the nuns would be gone by the rainy season, and he was right.

R130

The maharajah didn't want other men messing with the beautiful ladies in his harem.

R147

In addition, although Ingrid Bergman is gorgeous, Deborah Kerr's coloring is made for Technicolor. There are scenes of her character before she took orders. Her flame-red hair against the lush greens of Ireland or Scotland is amazing. Powell and Pressburger loved redheads in their Technicolor films, for example, Moira Shearer in "The Red Shoes."

R147

No, no. Ingrid Bergman may have been in London at the time doing a Hitchcock film. But 'Narcissus' was never meant for Ingrid Bergman.

Michael Powell had Deborah Kerr on contract and his unreliable memoir claims he was intimate with her. His supposed intimacy came to an end when MGM bought Kerr out of Powell's contract.

I recently viewed “Rear End Window” and it amazed me how videotape porn made me long for the same kitchen light quality that hinted that a soap opera might break out at any minute.

Nothing beats the colorful opening of "Guys and Dolls."

^ Yes, it does look good but it does have a bias towards the pinks and reds. No greens.

Radiant, Technicolor Kerr in a pre-nunnery flashback (Black Narcissus)...

^ Sister Clodagh was entranced by emeralds.

After she was ejected from the convent in the Himalayas she journeyed down to Ceylon to pick up some inexpensive sapphires there.

[quote]Elizabeth Taylor looked best in Technicolor

"National Velvet" is a stunning looking film brilliantly shot in Technicolor when few dramas were considered worth the cost and bother. It makes the story that much more effective, looking into young Elizabeth Taylor's violet eyes. Her character's name is Violet Brown even!

For R157...

Which movies should have been filmed in Technicolor but were not?

Doesn't matter what they use when everything is CGI and looks like a Zoom background.

OP I loved it when she left with her bike and started a paper route!

Alice Faye in Technicolor, with Cesar Romero watching in the shadows. Hypnotizing.

Who was in the most Technicolor films?

r163 Probably someone associated with musicals/comedies.

This fluffy shipboard musical was a perfect example of Technicolor.

I’m a photographer and I just started shooting film for the first time this past summer. I absolutely love it. There are obviously advantages to digital but nothing beats the look of film.

FUCK YOU, OP.

Maureen O'Hara was born for Technicolor. So lovely in John Ford's "The Quiet Man".

It worked well in North by Northwest.

Did Leave Her To Heaven look the best in Technicolor?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has gorgeous Technicolor for such a smutty story.

How many Marilyn Monroe movies were shot in 3 strip T?

Leaver Her to Heaven is the best of the Technicolor. No movie was ever filmed so beautifully. Gene Tierney took your breath away.

I know Agfacolor is deemed far inferior to Technicolor but Russkies (who seized huge amounts of raw Agfacolor film in Germany during WWII) used it to great effect in The Stone Flower, filmed right after the war. The restored version of the film is breathtaking to look at.

How many original negatives are missing from 3 strip Technicolor movies?