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Journal of the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia
Volume 3, No 2/3, 2008
Crying in Color:
How Hollywood Coped
When Technicolor Died
Russell Merritt
Accounts of Hollywood color usually leave off with the ascension of
3‑strip Technicolor in 1932 and its near-monopoly over commercial feature
color production that lasted for the next twenty years.1 The 1950s in these
histories is mourned as the decade when Technicolor was abandoned in
favor of Eastman Color, yet another example of Hollywood’s decline. In this
fallen age of shoddy, the original Eastman Color process is remembered as
Technicolor’s cheap, unstable successor, notorious for its instability which
became the mark of cut-rate quality.2
Fig 01: Faded Prince Valiant.
This is color’s own version of the 50s Red
Scare, where prints over time were liable to
turn pink [Fig 01]. Eastman Kodak’s coverup of its color film’s instability – an evasion
that continued well into the 1970s – has,
justifiably, been labeled a disgrace.3 But as
we’ll see, Eastman Color had much more to
offer than corrosion.
I want to argue that this stress on the ersatz
impermanence of early Eastman Color has
created an important distortion, leaving
the impression that when Eastman Color
1
replaced Technicolor the use of color itself
went into a qualitative decline. Far from
providing the epilog for color, I will claim,
the 1950s in fact became the decade when
color movies suddenly matured. It was
the decade in which the studios – and by
extension, their directors, cinematographers,
and art directors – gained control of the color
process, enabling filmmakers to experiment
as they seldom could during the Technicolor
days. Directors debated how color was to
be used in a decade that was becoming
increasingly self-conscious about color.
Instead of a single monolithic concept of color,
a healthy number of rival frameworks emerged
to accommodate a significantly enlarged
variety of color films.
This will not be a technical analysis – but I
need to start with a technical note. When
we think of Technicolor we use the term to
describe a famous kind of color film requiring
a unique camera that used not one but three
strips of film negative. Technicolor, however,
was not just a kind of camera. It was also a
dye transfer printing process. And because
the word Technicolor has been applied to
both the camera and the printing process,
we have had no end of confusion as to what
constitutes a Technicolor movie. Long after
it stopped providing three-strip cameras,
Technicolor continued to offer its services as
a lab to process and print a wide variety of
color films made from negatives manufactured
by its competitors and successors – notably
Eastman, Ansco, Agfa, Ferraniacolor, Gaevert,
and eventually Sovcolor and Fuji – film
stocks that all used ordinary cameras. While
Eastman and its competitors provided camera
negatives, Technicolor after 1954 limited itself
to the highly lucrative business of processing
and making dye transfer prints. In that same
year, Technicolor abandoned its distinctive
photographic system based on its unique
three-strip camera.4 But film companies, eager
to capitalize on the prestige of the Technicolor
name, did their best to blur the distinction
between films shot with Technicolor cameras
and those simply processed by Technicolor.
They continued to advertise Technicolor prints
as though they were Technicolor films.
Hitchcock’s Rear Window is a useful
case in point. The credits read, “Color by
Technicolor.” But in fact Rear Window was
shot entirely on the new Eastman 5247
negative with ordinary 35mm cameras.5
And why did Hitchcock chose to shoot Rear
Window in Eastman Color when he could
just as easily have shot in “real” Technicolor,
the way he had Rope and Under Capricorn five
years earlier? The answer lies in the way that
Eastman Color had improved on the more
famous system in ways essential to Hitchcock’s
requirements.
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
As a feat of engineering, the Technicolor
system was brilliant, but it had an important
technical limitation, inherent in its design,
that it could never overcome.
Fig 02: Tech cam.
Fig 03: Tech cam internal diagram.
Fig 04: A Date With Judy.
Fig 05: Rear Window.
2
As the name implies, the system made use of
three strips of film running simultaneously
through a camera. [Fig 02; Fig 03] On the
right a filmstrip takes a green record of an
image – in fact, simply a black and white
strip of film with a green filter in front of
it. Meanwhile, to the left of the lens, are
the other two strips of film, one behind the
other. Thanks to a beam-splitting mirror, the
light bounces onto the front filmstrip with a
blue overcoat to create a blue record. And like
the green image, this will be razor sharp. But
then the light must work harder. It must pass
through to the second strip of film behind the
blue one to register on a red coated strip.
And there is the problem. The light is now
dimmer, having passed through the first strip.
So, to compensate, the rear filmstrip will be
given a somewhat faster speed than the other
two strips of film, and as a consequence will
create a somewhat grainier image. Moreover,
the rear image is one thickness [a millimeter
or so] further away from the lens than are
the front image and the green image on the
side. So, while the green and blue negative
records are crisp and sharp, the red negative
record will be slightly out of focus. When the
negative records are processed, the green and
blue will print as razor sharp positive magenta
and yellow dyes. The soft red, however, prints
positive as a soft cyan. True, all the colors
are pure [the great strength of Technicolor’s
dye system] but the cyan blues and greens
lack crispness. The spongy cyan is what helps
define the Technicolor look and, as Scott
MacQueen has pointed out, gives Technicolor
its warmth. In particular the soft colors give
flesh tones their distinctive waxy, creamy look
which professional cinematographers can
easily enhance.6 [Fig 04]
But that softness is murder on a film like
Rear Window which needs all the help it
can get in maintaining great depths of field,
as the camera has to shoot from Jimmy
Stewart’s apartment to a bank of apartments
across a courtyard at a distance ranging from
40 to 80 feet away. The plot calls for the
camera to catch small details of pantomime
from actors [notably Raymond Burr] who are
Fig 06: misleading label.
seldom closer than 70 feet from the camera.
No Technicolor camera could register that
kind of depth.7 [Fig 05]
Soft focus, in fact, would prove fatal in the
early 1950s. It put Technicolor on a collision
course with another technical phenomenon of
the decade – widescreen. There were, in fact,
an assortment of widescreen processes – eight
of them altogether. But they all shared the
need for pinpoint sharpness. The anamorphic
CinemaScope and double frame VistaVision
lenses in particular had resolution and
distortion problems of their own that left no
tolerance for the soft focus limitation of the
three-strip camera in the film negative.8 This
becomes a lifesaver for historians, by the way.
It can be taken as an article of faith: if the
film has been shot in any wide screen format,
it cannot have been shot in Technicolor, no
matter what the screen credits imply. [Fig 06]
The popularity of widescreen made the
demise of Technicolor inevitable. Other
– more prosaic – forces made its fall one
that few within the industry mourned.
The system had always been awkward and
expensive, by the end of the ‘40s adding an
additional $100,000 to an average picture.9
Further, the cameras were notoriously bulky,
a particular hardship for location shooting.
Martin Hart estimates that a fully equipped
Technicolor camera, like the one that Huston
took down the Congo with Bogart and
Hepburn in African Queen or that Renoir
used on the Ganges, weighed over 100
pounds.10 Moreover, the insensitivity of the
Technicolor film stock famously required lots
of hot light, special makeup, and specially
toned clothing and sets.11
But beyond that, Technicolor had developed
a reputation for being difficult. Because the
Technicolor apparatus was leased – never
sold – filmmakers were obliged to use
Technicolor’s camera, its labs, its custommade negative and print stock, and – most
important for our purposes – the Technicolor
support staff [called variously the Color
Control Department and the Color Advisory
Service]. That staff included the Technicolor
color consultant who passed on every foot
of film sent through the camera and whose
job it was to make Technicolor look good –
sometimes, it was argued, at the expense of
the picture. Until 1948, Technicolor’s chief
consultant was Natalie Kalmus, the ex‑wife
of Technicolor’s founder Herbert Kalmus,
who quickly became Technicolor’s chief
aesthetic enforcer.
Natalie Kalmus had retired from Technicolor
and was out of the film business by the start
of the 50s, but the principles she is credited
with having created, and the staff she had
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
trained, remained firmly in place during
those last years of three-strip. And their
enforcement is an important reason that
Technicolor films sport such a well-defined,
easily identifiable look.12
For Herbert Kalmus, the engineer, the most
important rule was the need for accuracy
in reproduction. But for Natalie Kalmus,
the trained art student, Technicolor was
to be built on time-honored principles of
color harmony, balance, and contrast. Color
cinematographers and designers, Kalmus
argued, were obliged to study which hues
belong with one another. They were to avoid
foregrounding colors adjacent to each other
on her color wheel because, she argued, the
combinations are characterless, too near
each other to make a significant impression.
“When one color is placed in front of or
beside another,” she wrote, “there must be
enough difference in their hues to separate
one from the other photographically.” She
recommends “the judicious use of neutrals”
as a “foil for vivid color” in order to “lend
power and interest to the touches of color in
a scene.”13 In the tradition of the German
Romantics and, more recently, of New
York graphic designers like Josef MullerBrockmann and Gyorgy Kepes, color
was to be structured as a set of polarities.
This became Technicolor’s own version of
Hollywood’s 180º rule: a scheme of triads
based on three equidistant colors on the
wheel, where hues should be either next to
one another or roughly 30º apart.14
Technicolor also developed firm rules about
the use of analogous and complementary
colors, rules governing relationships between
warm and cool colors, between saturated
primaries and de‑saturated neutrals, and rules
governing monochromatic and neutral color
schemes. Strong colors must be treated as
accents, never overwhelming the composition.
[Fig 07]
These demo pictures published in a 1950
photography manual provide a classic
illustration of Technicolor thinking.15
What’s wrong with the color combination
at the bottom is that the yellow background
drowns the subject in the foreground. In
the top image, the neutral grey not only
serves as a foil to the red dress and flesh
tones, it gives depth to the composition.
Furthermore, red on yellow is considered
a discordant combination because both
colors are considered “strong:” yellow being
the brightest and most luminous of colors;
red being the most aggressive. This is the
language of the typographer and graphic
designer, where the two‑dimensional
qualities of the image as a graphic design are
arranged in such a way as to enhance the
illusion of three‑dimensional space.
Even Technicolor’s goal of accurately
reproduced color was subject to aesthetic
evaluation. Herbert Kalmus’ acid test was
accuracy in the copying of flesh tones,
the most difficult combination of hues to
capture.16 But as Technicolor was quick
to learn, there is no single flesh tone, and
the eye could readily adjust to inaccurate
reproduction, depending on the color
context. “Proper” flesh tones were, like other
color elements, subject to Technicolor’s
evolving color code, and by the mid‑1940s
the flesh tones Technicolor preferred were
warm and darkish, which could better play
off heavily saturated color surroundings
without being swallowed up by them. One
result, wisecracked Otis Ferguson, was a cast
that often looked like a boatload of tennis
players from the Canal Zone.17 Another,
less obvious by‑product was the emerging
popularity of on‑screen red‑colored hair.
As a glamour accent, red hair was a natural
counterbalance to the creamy, achromatic
ideal of Technicolor skin. It was the one hair
color that had been made invisible in blackand-white, and, even better, it accentuated
the vividness of Technicolor’s reds. By the
mid‑1940s, flaming redheads, preferably
suntanned, were much in demand. This was
the era of Rita Hayworth, Rhonda Fleming,
Danny Kaye, Maureen O’Hara, Red Skelton,
Lucille Ball, Virginia Mayo, and [when the
occasion called for her to tint] Deborah Kerr
[Fig 08]. In Life With Father, the unspoken
drollery is that the entire Clarence Day
family is red‑haired, including the four
sons and their parents, Irene Dunne, and
William Powell.
Fig 07: Kodak Color Data Book.
Fig 08: The Lady with the Fire Hair.
The preoccupation with flesh tones, which
several color theorists have argued amounted
to an ideology, leads to fascinators. James
Peterson and others have even argued that
the deeply saturated look of Technicolor
was a consequence of overcompensating for
keying on white flesh.18
But more than creating an aesthetic
environment for human flesh, Technicolor’s
codes were used to organize space. We can
now consider how the rules played out in
practice.
Fig 09: The Robe.
In this scene from The Robe (Fox, 1953), the
frame is conceived as a grid, with vivid color
strips used to stabilize the composition. The
red textures have also been thematized, the
Emperor’s royal purple robe is no longer
purple. Instead, Caligula wears lustrous red
satin in order to play off the coarse red fabric
of Jesus’ robe. [Fig 9]
Fig 10: King Solomon’s Mines.
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
In King Solomon’s Mines (MGM, 1950) Watusi
warriors’ red and blue check skirts have been
turned into decorator accents, structured not
unlike the entertainers’ costumes in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (Fox, 1952) or the stylized stage
curtains in Scaramouche (MGM, 1952).
[Fig 10; Fig 11; Fig 12]
Fig 11: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Balance is as important as the principle
of playing isolated “pure” colors against
transitional background neutrals. Multiple
mirrors, for instance, seldom if ever work to
create baroque, noir‑style regressions, as they
do in Citizen Kane or Lady from Shanghai
where repeated images track back diagonally
to infinity. Instead, as in How to Marry a
Millionaire (Fox, 1953), they provide a means
for reinforcing planimetric grids by generating
a series of strong vertical stripes along a flat
plane. [Fig 13]
Another popular tactic was to create balance
and rhymes by inverting color combinations
in costumes designed for couples. In Knights
of the Round Table (MGM, 1953), for
instance, Arthur and Lancelot divide the
frame, Lancelot’s tunic reversing the colors
of Arthur’s. [Fig 14]
Alfred Junge, the costume designer, creates a
similar inversion when Arthur and his Queen
Guinevere appear. Particularly in historical
epics and musicals, the design inversions were
meant to reinforce links between sweethearts,
partners, and teammates. [Fig 15]
The variation of the color strip is the color
accent, what George Hoyingen-Huene, the
designer for A Star is Born, called “pinpricks”
of strong primary and secondary colors.19
[Fig 16] The pinprick gives the composition
an especially contrived appearance regardless
of the genre. [Fig 17; Fig 18] Brightly painted
lips become a natural focal point. [Fig 19] In
Lili (MGM, 1953) shot glasses on a café table
provide the stabs of color, but practically any
small colored object could serve. [Fig 20] In
Scaramouche, even blood gets turned into a
decorator highlight. [Fig 21]
The color pinprick was the aspect of
Technicolor that particularly intrigued
Fig 12: Scaramouche.
Fig 13: How to Marry a Millionaire.
Fig 16: Annie Get Your Gun.
Fig 19: The Red Shoes.
Fig 17: King Solomon’s Mines.
Fig 20: Lili.
Fig 18: The Benny Goodman Story.
Fig 21: Scaramouche.
Fig 14: Knights of the Round Table.
Fig 15: Knights of the Round Table.
4
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
early Godard, a focal point of his parody
of Hollywood films. [Fig 22; Fig 23]
Godard’s response to classic Technicolor is
itself saturated with irony, nostalgia, and
resentment. The blocks of solid background
primaries are deliberately transgressive –
textbook examples of what Technicolor
warned against. But at the same time,
Godard’s deeply saturated color accents
are direct quotations of Technicolor coded
practice.20 [Fig 24; Fig 25]
Just as obsessive as the saturated accent was
Technicolor’s idea that background colors
should harmonize with the principal colors
in the foreground. Scaramouche provides a
particularly vivid example, where Charles
Rosher manages to find color rhymes and
harmonies in practically every scene. [Fig 26;
Fig 27; Fig 28]
A typical example: when Stewart Granger
finds Janet Leigh in her rose garden, the
camera frames Granger, costumed in a
plum-colored coat, with red roses. In the
reverse-angle shot, Leigh, outfitted in a white
wig and white muslin gown, is framed beside
the white roses. Then the two-shot, for a full
view of the matching ensemble.
Nighttime scenes had their own Technicolor
codes derived from the mid‑30s. In the days
when Technicolor required the greatest
quantities of light, real shadows were avoided
as much as possible because they registered
as gaping black holes, patches of black that
devoured the gray scale. The solution was
to light a scene as evenly as possible and
then work with color filters to create the
appropriate nocturnal mood – soft blues – or
sunset reds for romance. Lurid oranges with
patches of turquoise and blue were used to
represent eerie and uncanny night scenes.
[Fig 29; Fig 30; Fig 31]
Fig 28: Scaramouche.
By the early 50s, Technicolor ASAs had
improved sufficiently that real shadows were
routinely used. But by now the convention
had been thoroughly codified. Throughout
the decade, Hollywood still depended heavily
Fig 29: The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
Fig 22: La Chinoise.
Fig 25: Le Mepris.
Fig 30: Gone With The Wind.
Fig 23: La Chinoise.
Fig 26: Scaramouche.
Fig 31: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Fig 24: Le Mepris.
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Fig 27: Scaramouche.
5
Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
upon those color filter codes long after they
were no longer technically required. [Fig 32]
Fig 32: Quo Vadis.
Fig 33: shallow focus in Scaramouche.
Fig 34: deep focus in Written on the Wind.
Fig 35: deep focus in Written on the Wind.
These, then, were some of the grand clichés
of classic Technicolor and they continued
to exercise a powerful hold over Hollywood
even after the era of 3‑strip color ended.
It was a highly disciplined color system,
made possible by skilled craft departments
equipped to coordinate their activities in
order to ensure a readily identifiable look.
The system crossed generic boundaries, a
structural part of Technicolor’s transcendent
look. The structural formulas were applied
equally to war pictures, musicals, noir films
about criminal insanity, comedies, social
allegories, westerns, horror films, nostalgic
Americana, and adventure pictures set in
far‑off lands.
Scott Higgins has forcefully counter-argued
for the versatility of the Technicolor aesthetic
as it grew from the Thirties. In his close
examination of five seminal Technicolor
films, he stresses the rapid multiplication of
stylistic precedents established in such films
as Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The Adventures
of Robin Hood, and Written on the Wind to
illustrate the flexibility of Kalmus’ color
theory.21 For Higgins, Kalmus’ strictures
operate as a set of broad guide lines rather
than strict rules. But the atmosphere of
exploration that Higgins finds in the 1930s
is difficult to locate by the early 1950s.
The aesthetic strategies sharply narrow as
Technicolor’s production career comes to an
end. The rapid growth of stylistic precedents
that accumulate in 3‑strip’s formative years
result not in greater range in design, but, as
we have seen, in an increasingly entrenched
set of color rules. Innovative Technicolor
films continue to be made. But, particularly
after the war, such innovation is perceived as
a self‑conscious reaction against an ingrained
system, not part of the system itself. The
famous iconoclastic works such as Ford’s She
Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man,
Huston’s Moulin Rouge, and Sirk’s Magnificent
Obsession were either produced abroad where
filmmakers were given more latitude in
experimenting with Technicolor, or at home
in open defiance of Technicolor policy.
At the start of the 50s, however, powerful
new alternatives to the Technicolor
aesthetic emerge that revitalize the debate,
as studios and directors take direct control
of the color processes.
Fig 36: matte in Scaramouche.
6
This became possible because of the advent
of Eastman Color single‑strip negative
and printing film stock. With practically
no fanfare, but with meticulous planning
and extraordinary discretion, Eastman
commandeered the manufacture of color
motion picture film negative. Its single
domestic competitor, Ansco film, secured
an exclusive contract with MGM, and with
the release of The Wild North in March
1952 actually beat Eastman to the gate in
exhibiting the first Hollywood monopack
feature.22 But by the end of 1954, after the
last stragglers had finally returned their
Technicolor cameras, Ansco was out of the
movie business, and through the rest of the
decade Eastman provided the color negative
to all the major studios and virtually all the
independents.
Few comparable revolutions have gone so
utterly unnoticed. Although studios were
[secretly] signing contracts for Eastman
Color film as early as winter 1949 [in secret
so as not to jeopardize their relationship
with Technicolor], the first features would
not be released for another two-and-ahalf years. Eastman was using the time to
install equipment in studio labs and train
studio technicians at Warner Brothers, Fox,
and Columbia – the first studios to adopt
Eastman color – on how to process and print
the new negative.23 Testing took the form of
seminars and filming short subjects, released
without ceremony. And when the Eastman
system was finally introduced into the feature
market – in April 1952 as a low budget
Warner Brothers western called The Lion and
the Horse – Eastman’s name was nowhere to
be found.
Pursuant to the settlement of its 1948
anti‑trust suit with the Justice Department,
Eastman originally did no processing of its
own film, and permitted the studios and
labs to re‑label the process as they saw fit.
So, The Lion and the Horse was released “in
WarnerColor,” just as Fox subsequently
released color films in “Deluxe,” Columbia in
Columbia Color, and M‑G‑M, after it gave
up on Ansco, in “MetroColor.”24 But all this
meant was that studios and independent labs
were developing Eastman film themselves
rather than sending it out to Eastman or
Technicolor for processing.
When the prints from Eastman negative were
made by Technicolor [as with Warners’ A
Star is Born and virtually all the Paramounts
shot in VistaVision], only Technicolor’s name
appeared as the color source – in the opening
credits, in film trailers, and sometimes on
theatre marquees. Audiences rarely saw
Eastman’s name except on low budget
productions when Eastman’s lab finally
agreed to print films that the smaller studios
could not afford to develop themselves.
Yet, if it sailed in under the radar, the
Eastman revolution was real and its effects
far reaching. Within two years of its debut,
Hollywood crossed its color Rubicon and
the dye was cast. By 1954, virtually all
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
Hollywood color films were shot in Eastman
Color negative. And as far as Eastman was
concerned, studios could do with their stock
whatever they wanted.
For the studios, the most conspicuous
advantages were practical: color movies
suddenly became significantly cheaper
to produce and easier to make. The most
conspicuous advantage of Eastman Color
was that it eliminated the need for the
bulky Technicolor camera. As a single
strip of film, it could fit into any 35mm
camera and did not even require Eastman
processing. Eastman also had a considerably
higher rating than Technicolor – by 1955,
somewhere around 50, more than half‑again
the speed of the most up‑to‑date Technicolor
film [and by the end of the decade a
whopping 125 and 160 ratings for its two
high speed stocks].25 Deep focus in color had
at last become possible. We may compare, for
instance, the maximum focal length possible
in Technicolor from Scaramouche where
Charles Rosher has only five or six feet to
play with, and the focal length Russell Metty
can achieve a year or two later in Written on
the Wind (Universal, 1957) so that Sirk can
stage in depth. The shot in the Sirk film starts
with Robert Stack coming out of a distant
hallway door and ends with him sitting a few
feet from the camera. And because of the
recovered depth of field, filmmakers could
free themselves of contrived process shots,
necessary in Technicolor when filmmakers
wanted to simulate depth of field. [Fig 33;
Fig 34; Fig 35; Fig 36]
The implications of this shift, all but
unnoticed amidst the hoopla about wide
screen, were enormous. Precisely because it
had been so expensive, color had previously
been reserved for special categories of
films: musicals, historical romances, and
swashbucklers – genres that accounted for
less than 10% of Hollywood’s output.26 The
other staples – family melodrama, westerns,
comedies, crime films, sci‑fi, and war films
– had almost always stayed in black and
white. The rule of thumb: reality was meant
for black-and-white; color indicated fantasy.
Unless the locale was exotic – say Hong
Kong, Korea, Ireland, or Niagara Falls –
any film set in the contemporary world was
also shot in black and white. It was in fact
one function of Technicolor to make even
impoverished settings, like Florida’s scrub
country in The Yearling, appear romantic
and unreal. James Agee’s review of Leave
Her to Heaven, the first of only two noir
films ever shot in Technicolor, is revealing.
Agee thought the color a mistake, making
the narrative look superficial. He wrote,
“The story’s central idea might be plausible
enough in a dramatically lighted black and
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white picture, or in a radio show. But in the
rich glare of Technicolor, all its rental-library
characteristics are doubly jarring.”27 Color
itself is the issue for Agee; it never occurs
to him that Technicolor coding might be
the problem. Color itself is wrong for social
realism and acute personal drama.
But in the 50s, not only did color come to the
modern world. Domestic melodrama – the
quintessential black-and-white genre of the
40s – became the new cutting edge for color
experimentation. Although the sudden surge
in color westerns at the start of the decade
meant that, numerically, Eastman Color
westerns far outnumbered so‑called women
pictures in color, by the time the studios
hit their stride in developing their own
color aesthetic, the new lords of color were
the melodramatists: Sirk, Minnelli, John
Huston, Otto Preminger, George Cukor,
and Fritz Lang – directors who quickly
created signature styles, while dramatically
broadening the range of color applications to
narrative.28 At the same time younger Turks
[Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray in particular]
collaborated with their cinematographers
to create color experiments of their own.
Minnelli is an especially interesting case
because he had been the leading director of
Technicolor musicals in the 40s, and then
with Ansco and Eastman Color created a
brand new color style for his 50s melodramas
– notably Lust for Life, Tea and Sympathy,
and above all in his masterpiece Some Came
Running.29
those vivid accents and the large blocks of
solids. Brilliant ruby reds – Technicolor’s
signature – become virtually taboo. In their
place, contemporary films – even musicals
– tended to be dominated by pale color
schemes, either neutrals such as taupe, gray,
or beige; pastels; or lightened primaries like
peach, glacier blues, pinks, and chartreuse.
[Fig 40]
As illustrated in this scene from East of Eden,
when there were accents, the pinpricks were
seldom bold or brilliant. At best they might
be pastels; but more often they were diluted
dirty colors – pale yellows, oranges, and
Fig 37: drab colour in River No Return.
The Technicolor codes did not suddenly
evaporate. Particularly in the early
transitional years, expensive CinemaScope
and VistaVision spectacles faithfully followed
the Technicolor formulas, making their color
designs all but indistinguishable from the
Kalmus model [the widescreen illustrations
I have used from The Robe, Knights of
the Round Table, and How To Marry a
Millionaire, all shot on Eastman Color or
Ansco, are classic examples of Technicolor
practice being used verbatim during the
new regime].30 But, by the mid‑1950s,
conspicuous shifts appear.
Fig 38: drab colour in The High and
The Mighty.
Color plots become noticeably more
Expressionistic, while color associations are
now built not just with the fantastical, but
with the drab, the commonplace, or simply
non‑heroic. What are the most appropriate
colors for ordinary, non‑glamorous people?
How do you represent colorless or harsh
environments in color – oil fields, factories,
brothels, steel mills – without making them
pretty, picturesque, or contrived? [Fig 37;
Fig 38; Fig 39]
Fig 39: drab colour in Giant.
The color palettes themselves become
noticeably less saturated, dispensing with
Fig 40: East of Eden.
7
Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
cabinet, pills and capsules were color
coded to improve identification. Children’s
medicine was being colored to help create
emotional associations with candy.
Working along similar lines, school boards
experimented with yellow chalk on green
blackboards, while in factories engineers
were painting colors onto moving machine
parts to diminish fatigue and improve
industrial safety.36
And where science and psychology led,
could business enterprise not follow, seeing
in color a hidden persuader with mysterious
psychic power? A new profession emerged: the
color engineer who could be hired to show
department stores, magazine publishers, retail
manufacturers, the appliance industry, and
supermarkets how to increase sales.37 [Fig 43]
Fig 41: The Searchers.
browns, or mottled green. It’s tempting to
see Goya, Corot, and Murillo, the masters of
muted color schemes, as the new color gods.
[Fig 41]
Intertwined with the dirtier palettes were
other experiments to deglamorize color. As
early as 1956, Oswald Morris was using handheld color cameras to explore the atmospheric
possibilities of high-speed color film for the
whale hunts and typhoon sequences in Moby
Dick.31 And towards the end of the decade,
cinematographers like Floyd Crosby and
Haskell Wexler, shooting exploitation movies
for Roger Corman and Russ Meyer, were
using those grainier stocks for the full length
of their low-budget features.
But particularly noticeable are the new claims
being made for color. Kalmus’ statements in
her writing and in her practice at Technicolor
derive entirely from a decorator’s perspective,
arguments for harmonies, restraint, and
balance. Color design for her is a cinematic
element that must please the eye. The new
thinking is that color, particularly as it is
applied to family and social melodrama,
must be re‑conceptualized. The consistent
note struck in interviews with Sirk,
Preminger, George Cukor, and – overseas
– with Renoir and Max Ophüls, is that
color must be expressive. These directors
grow interested in deliberately discordant or
arbitrary color combinations, taking colors
out of familiar contexts in order to draw
attention to them.
Sirk in particular, had great ambitions for
color in melodrama. When properly applied,
he claimed, color had therapeutic, healing
power. It could be used to manipulate the
emotions as effectively as music – help
generate tears, soothe, and exhilarate.32 And
in a genre often synonymous with emotional
8
duress, it’s unsurprising that the leading
directors would suddenly want to search for
color’s melodramatic possibilities.
The idea that colors have emotional values
that an artist may manipulate is a very old
one that extends at least to Goethe, the
German Romantics, and the Theosophists.
Kalmus herself intertwined color’s emotional
power with its symbolic associations [i.e.,
“Yellow and gold symbolize wisdom, light,
fruition… but also deceit, jealousy, [and]
inconstancy in its darker shades, particularly
when tinged with green.… Magenta is very
distinctly materialistic. It is showy, arrogant,
and vain.”]33
But by the start of the 1950s the
psychological claims for color had grown
even more extravagant. Among psychologists
themselves there was [and remains] common
agreement that color has neither an absolute
perceptual base nor an absolute emotional
meaning.34 But professional skepticism
notwithstanding, fascination with color
psychology reached across a broad range
of technical, and popular journals. It can
be argued, in fact, that the 50s became the
last decade in which the public shared a
widespread interest in color theory, color
therapy and color ideology. In the sciences,
the medical profession acted directly on
many such claims. For the first time, color
was installed in hospital rooms to speed
recovery: red chambers for depressives, yellow
for hysterical paralytics, blue for the violent.35
Doctors experimented with prescribing
green or blue eyeglasses for patients suffering
certain nervous disorders. [Fig 42]
Hospital clinics replaced white with bluish
green surgical smocks and theatre walls
on the grounds that it helped improve the
concentration of doctors. In the medicine
Detroit hired color designers too, on the
same theory that color made cars more
alluring and more sensuous. By the mid‑50s
the all‑black car was all but dead, according
to Business Week, with sales down from 25%
in 1950 to less than 5% in 1955. The country
had entered the era of the two‑tone, cherry
red, and angel white.38 [Fig 44]
Perhaps inevitably, color entered the realm
of clinical psychology where, it was claimed,
personalities could be categorized according
to color preferences. This notion had already
penetrated the popular press by the end of
the First World War, but by the 1950s had
been incorporated into various psychology
tests.39 [Fig 45]
Fig 42: Color reaction graph from
Popular Mechanics.
Fig 43: Selling Color to People (1956)
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It was in this atmosphere that film directors,
assuming that color would soon be as
pervasive as it was inevitable, cast about for
new color applications in their films.
In Ivan the Terrible’s color sequences,
Eisenstein had already experimented with
Expressionist colors to hint at inner states of
mind, drawing directly on Disney’s early color
experiments in his Silly Symphonies series.40
In the 50s Hollywood started creating color
mood swings of its own. When Captain
Queeg panics during a typhoon in The Caine
Mutiny (Columbia, 1954), red/blue color
shifts indicate danger/fear. [Fig 46; Fig 47]
When playboy Robert Stack tells Lauren
Bacall about the psychic damage his sister
has caused him in Written on the Wind;
the light on his face turns reddish.
[Fig 48; Fig 49]
By the mid‑50s, Expressionist color effects
were common enough that they became
subject to parody. Norman McLeod
acknowledged the convention’s cartoon origins
in a Bob Hope comedy called Casanova’s Big
Night (Paramount, 1954), turning the fake
Casanova’s face red and then purple as he is
being strangled. [Fig 50; Fig 51]
Fig 48: Written on the Wind.
Fig 44: Fitting Personality to Color. Popular Mechanics, Feb 1950.
Fig 49: Written on the Wind.
Fig 45: Color preferences of blondes versus brunettes.
Faber Birren, Selling Color to People (1956)
Fig 50: Casanova’s Big Night.
Fig 46: The Caine Mutiny.
Fig 51: Casanova’s Big Night.
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Fig 47: The Caine Mutiny.
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
In Bell, Book, and Candle (Columbia, 1958)
we learn that Kim Novak is a witch when
with the help of color filters her face turns
frost blue. [Figs 52; Fig 53]
But it is John Huston who develops this
line the furthest in Moulin Rouge (Romulus,
1952) when Toulouse-Lautrec returns to
his garret with the idea of killing himself.
The scene calls for the painter to climb out
of his depression without uttering a word
as he wanders around his room, turns on a
gas lamp, and then sits in a chair waiting to
die. He gazes up at an unfinished painting
(La Goulu) and, distracted from his suicide
attempt, reaches for his paints to color in the
final details. [Fig 54; Fig 58]
The gas lamp, a source of artificial light that
he opens to poison himself, is connected to
the clinically “unhealthy” color combinations
of harsh blues, greens, and pinks. But as
Toulouse-Lautrec starts to contemplate his
painting, unnatural filter combinations give
way to the brighter, sanative palette of the
artist’s own work [bright yellows, vibrant
reds, pure greens] which in turn seems
to draw out the natural light of the sun.
Morning sunlight falls on his paints and his
easel, finally flooding his garret with natural,
refreshing light.
Fig 52: Bell, Book, and Candle.
Fig 56: La Goulu in Moulin Rouge.
Fig 53: Bell, Book, and Candle.
Fig 57: pink in Moulin Rouge.
In Lola Montes, Ophüls works out a
similar scheme of clinically jarring color
combinations in the phantasmagorical circus
sequences to capture Lola’s response to her
commercial objectification.
But this strain of expressive color was only
one of several directions in which 50s color
went. By the end of the decade, using colors
to set the tone of a scene had become a
commonplace. Huston and Oswald Morris
famously muted the colors in Moby Dick by
superimposing a black and white negative
over a desaturated color master to create a
somber scheme devoid of reds and yellows.41
The effect – highlighting steel greys and mud
browns – was meant to externalize Ahab’s
monomania by extending the bleak tone to
the severity of nineteenth century whaling
life.[Fig 59]
Fig 54: gaslight in Moulin Rouge.
Fig 58: sun in Moulin Rouge.
Fig 55: suicide blue in Moulin Rouge.
Fig 59: Moby Dick.
10
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
Fig 60: Track of the Cat.
Fig 61: East of Eden.
But directors were also foregrounding colors
that did not provide clues to, or mirror, the
psychological states of the character, or even
reinforce in any obvious way the tone of a
scene. William Wellman’s Track of the Cat
provides the extreme example. Although
shot in color, Track of the Cat was processed
entirely without hue and saturation except
for the pinprick of Robert Mitchum’s red
woolen coat. The effect is to suggest an
obscure allegory, putting into the spotlight
an otherwise non‑signifying garment worn
by a supporting character, the protagonist’s
brutish older brother. [Fig 60]. Although still
operating within the context of a narrative
film, Wellman’s red color spot challenges
what Edward Branigan has called “the
tyranny of the center of the frame” achieving
a certain formal independence highly
unusual in Hollywood films – competing
for attention with the narrative focal point
by wandering off to the margins. The red
becomes a non‑narrative element that
neither enhances Barthes’ ‘reality effect’
nor makes any obvious psychological point.
Self‑conscious and mannered, Track of the
Cat is the closest Hollywood gets, as best I
can determine, in opening the gap between
color and object.42
Meanwhile, Elia Kazan and his
cinematographer Ted McCord devised a
highly unorthodox color plot for Kazan’s
first color film, East of Eden, built around
principles of what may be called “psychochromatics,” the arresting idea that some
colors, like human behavior, contain
opposing and conflicting impulses,
depending upon context. For Kazan, the
Oedipal director par excellence, green became
the master color, an integral part of the
psychological texture of the film. [Fig 61]
Green is sometimes considered the great
neutral, the color of repose, of pacifism. But
it is also connected with envy. It combines
associations of growth, with immaturity –
the refusal to grow up. [Fig 62]
In our culture it is also the color of money
and luck. But above all for Kazan, it contains
the associations with both rebirth – freshness
– and decay, sickness [“green around the
gills”], weakness. And the final scene is keyed
to absorb all those contradictions. Whereas
the color plots of Technicolor musicals and
swashbucklers tended to culminate in festive
kaleidoscopic pageantry, East of Eden ends
in monochrome – in a room, seen only at
the end of the film, dominated by luminous
green walls, unevenly lit and crossed with
achromatic, graded shadows for an eerie,
Fig 62: East of Eden.
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
iridescent effect. Raymond Massey, James
Dean’s father, is dying, disillusioned and
alone, while Dean, as his son Cal, tries his
best to tend to him. [Fig 63]
Kazan called the green room “death’s
version of [the old man’s] valley,” the color of
vegetation turned into sea-green sickness.43
But the room is also the nacreous site of Cal’s
reconciliation with his father, and Abra’s
reconciliation with Cal.
Fig 63: East of Eden.
Fig 64: All That Heaven Allows.
With East of Eden we enter a phase of color
development in Hollywood film where
colors can be indexical, iconic, or simply tied
to their symbolic function in a particular
culture. But I want to end on perhaps the
most interesting colorist of all: Douglas Sirk
who, along with his cinematographer, Russell
Metty, created an utterly transgressive color
system. The melodramatic style that has
made him the favorite of directors ranging
from Fassbinder and John Waters to Quentin
Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar is grounded
in his quirky relationship to his material.
In a famous sequence from All That Heaven
Allows (Universal, 1955) widow Jane Wyman
is in her bedroom getting ready for a dinner
date with a middle-age admirer when her two
college age kids drop in to visit. [Fig 64]
The dialogue and blocking suggest a satiric
scene saturated in irony. Wyman’s daughter
Kay [Gloria Talbot] plops herself down
on her mother’s queen size bed, solemnly
lecturing her mother on Freud and the sexual
anxieties that accompany aging, only to be
startled when mom appears, prepared for a
date, bare-shouldered in red. Kay recovers,
mindful that modern society no longer buries
widows with their dead husbands as they
did in ancient Egypt. Mother, older and
wiser, murmurs her doubts about the modern
world’s acceptance of liberated widows.
But how to connect Russell Metty’s stylized
blocks of color and all that odd back lighting
Fig 65: All That Heaven Allows.
12
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
to the conversation? The blue swatches feel
entirely cut off from the referenced world,
operating entirely within the framework of
what Karla Oeler has called genre pastiche.44
The scene starts with a close‑up of a mirror,
the most traditional trope for artistic
mimesis. But as Oeler has argued in a much
different context, genre pastiche does not
believe in direct mimesis, and here the mirror
introduces a scene defined by layer upon layer
of self‑reflexivity. [Fig 65]
The colors operate to create a self‑contained
Camp universe where, to use Sontag’s
language, everything is now bracketed off
in quotation marks. The room becomes “the
room;” the self‑important daughter “the
daughter.” Most remarkably, light itself –
especially the blue filtered light that streams
from the window when Jane Wyman opens
the shutters – is “light” only in an approximate
sense – an approximation of sunlight and an
approximation of reading light.
Highly respected film scholar Russell Merritt
PhD is Adjunct Professor of Film Studies at
the University of California, Berkeley (USA),
and a welcome friend and repeat visitor
to the National Film and Sound Archive.
A prolific author, presenter and enthusiastic
teacher, his interests are many and varied
including the cinema of D.W. Griffith; national
cinemas (France, Germany, Japan); film
styles and genre; and animation with special
concentration on the works of Disney.
It would be one thing if this were black and
white film and the back lighting that casts
the two women into shadows and silhouettes
created simply a sinister, noirish atmosphere,
appropriate to the talk about tombs and
suffocating social pressure. But the color adds
a perversely playful aspect to the display. The
unnatural blue, red, and gold filters turning
this 50s home and garden suburban bedroom
into something bizarre, vibrant, and strange.
I have yet to discuss Minnelli, who in his
1950s films represents, along with Sirk,
the outer limits of what Hollywood could
do with liberating color from narrative
restraints, setting the stage for the brilliant
international colorists of the 60s – Godard,
Antonioni, Resnais, and Ozu. But perhaps
the essay has already provided a glimpse
of what remains to be done in assessing
Hollywood’s own color revolution.
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
1
The literature on Technicolor is large; for a fine scholarly
introduction to Technicolor’s development in the
1930s that includes an extensive bibliography, Scott
Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color
Design in the 1930s, University of Texas Press, 2007.
For a popularized technical history, Richard W. Haines,
Technicolor Movies, Jefferson, N.C., 1993. Martin Hart’s
remarkable website, The American WideScreen Museum
[http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/] contains much
expert, detailed information about Technicolor, Eastman
Color, and their rivals, and is especially valuable for the
wealth of graphic illustration. Scott MacQueen’s, “Film
Technology: Special Report,” The Perfect Vision 3/10
(Spring, 1991), 24–38, is the single article I know that
challenges the orthodoxy about Technicolor and Eastman
Color. With the technical expertise of a film restoration
professional, MacQueen cuts through the usual cant with
a fresh, provocative comparison.
2
In his intellectual history of color reproduction,
Neil Harris sees an analogous decline. For him, the early
1950s are stigmatized not by Eastman Color but by color
television whose anticipated rise was accompanied by
an intellectually impoverished level of discourse, limited
to technical and commercial issues. Harris contrasts this
with the lively multi-layered debates that accompanied
the rise of Technicolor in the 1920s and 1930s. Harris,
“Color and Media: Some Comparisons and Speculations,”
Prospects 11 (1987) 7–28; reprinted in Harris, Cultural
Excursions (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 318–336.
3
For Eastman’s problems with color instability and the
corporate cover-up, Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower, The
Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional
and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and
Motion Pictures (Preservation Publishing Co., Grinnell,
Iowa, 1993), 305–328.
4
Technicolor’s biggest year was 1952, when no fewer
than 85 Hollywood features used the 3-strip camera.
It meant that in the following year audiences were
flooded with Technicolor releases including The Band
Wagon, Shane, 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes, The Caine Mutiny, and Magnificent Obsession.
The studios released almost one hundred Technicolor
features in 1953 [95 by my count, including three shot
overseas] and distributed another 23 foreign films shot
in Technicolor.
But the tide quickly ebbed. In their rush to wide-screen in
1953, the biggest studios switched away from the 3-strip
process, leaving the cameras to Columbia, Universal,
and RKO for budget product. In early 1954 Paramount
made Technicolor’s final Grade-A picture, The Bridges
at Toko-Ri, but by then prestige Technicolor productions
had become an anomaly. Paramount itself had already
begun using VistaVision for its other color releases, a
widescreen process that depended upon Eastman Color.
Three-strip was phased out on a schedule of low-cost
westerns, sci-fi, and musicals. The last American
Technicolor features were Seminole Uprising, Man
Without a Star, Shotgun, and, finally, Universal’s Fox
14
Fire, filmed July–Sept 1954 with Jane Russell and Jeff
Chandler.
My statistics derive from an amended list of Technicolor
films compiled in Haines, Technicolor Movies, pp. 37–47
which in turn derives from Fred Basten’s filmography in
Glorious Technicolor (Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1980),
169–187. The difficulty with these lists is that they do
not distinguish between films shot in 3-strip and those
simply processed by Technicolor. Nor do they distinguish
Hollywood product from foreign-made movies, nor
Hollywood productions made abroad [which relied on
Technicolor technicians in London and Rome] from those
made at home. In my statistics, I have siphoned off the
non-three strip productions and foreign films.
I have drawn production dates from the American
Film Institute Catalog, 1951–1960, Chadwyck-Healey/
American Film Institute, 2003–2008.
5
In this case, the Technicolor credit is doubly misleading.
Although Rear Window was processed by Technicolor,
Eastman Color film was used not only as the negative,
but also for the prints. The Technicolor lab, still learning
how to cope with the new Eastman monopack negative,
discovered that Eastman’s own print film produced
sharper results than Technicolor’s dye transfer process.
So, while the lab took a crash course to improve its own
system, it quietly used Eastman print film for features
such as Rear Window, A Star is Born, and How to Marry
a Millionaire. Robert Gitt, interview with author, Pacific
Film Archive, Berkeley, CA 20 Feb 2005.
Paramount’s advertizing also created the illusion that
Rear Window was shot wide-screen. But cinematographer
Robert Burks confirms that the film was shot standard
aperture with standard lenses. Arthur Gavin, “Rear
Window,” American Cinematographer (February, 1954),
76–78, 97. Following the practice Paramount started with
Shane, the aperture plate was masked to simulate widescreen in some [mostly first-run] theatres.
6
MacQueen, “Film Technology,” 27–28.
7
For the technical challenges of shooting Rear Window,
Robert Burks, quoted in Gavin, “Rear Window,” AC
(February, 1954), 78.
8
Warner Brothers’ experience shooting A Star is Born in
1954 provides the classic example of the incompatibility
between three-strip Technicolor with CinemaScope. After
several weeks of shooting, Cukor was obliged to abandon
the Technicolor cameras and start over with Eastman
Color film. Ron Haver, A Star is Born (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1988), 134–136.
anywhere near 600 pounds but it surely tipped the
scales at 300 pounds or more. Lead was a common
component of camera blimps…. Huston and Jack Cardiff
shot most of The African Queen with an unblimped
camera and the dialog was looped in London.”
11
The great advances in lighting equipment, in dye
transfer processing, and in Technicolor film speeds and
exposure latitudes that made possible new techniques
in photographing color in the late 1930s are described
in Higgins, 80–89 and 176–180; and summarized in
Edward Branigan, “Color and Cinema: Problems in the
Writing of History,” Film Reader, vol. 4 (1979), 27–28.
But by the mid-40s, the Technicolor system still had an
effective speed of around 12 ASA compared to Eastman
Kodak’s Plus X and Super XX negatives 80 ASA and 160
ASA. With a system that required so much light, it was
impossible to close the lens aperture enough to extend
the depth of field. Even by the early 50s, Technicolor
ASA did not rise above 24. Adrian Cornwell-Clyne, Colour
Cinematography, 132, cited in Higgins, 177; Barry Salt,
Film Style and Technology (London: Starword, 1983),
257. Interview with Richard Dayton, YCM Laboratories,
Los Angeles, 28 March 2005.
12
For Natalie Kalmus’ background and her importance to
Technicolor theory and early practice, Higgins, 39–47.
13
Natalie Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” The Journal of
the Society of Motion Picture Engineers [hereafter SMPE
Journal] (August 1935) 146, 142; revised as “Colour,”
in Behind the Screen, ed. Stephen Watts (London: Arthur
Barker, 1938), 122, 118. For Herbert Kalmus and the
cardinal importance attached to accurate reproduction,
H.T. Kalmus, “Technicolor Adventures in Cinemaland,”
SMPE Journal (December, 1938), 576, 579.
14
Edward Branigan, “The Articulation of Color in a Filmic
System,” Wide Angle 1/3 (1976), 25.
15
Kodak Color Data Book E-74 [Color as Seen and
Photographed] (Rochester, NY, 1950), p. 56.
16
H.T. Kalmus, op. cit., 576, 579. Cf. article by Technicolor’s
chief lab technician in the 1930s, Winton Hoch, “Technicolor
Cinematography,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers (August, 1942), 97–98; and an article by
Technicolor’s vice president and technical advisor, J.A. Ball,
”The Technicolor Process of Three-Color Cinematography,”
SMPE Journal (August, 1935), 134.
17
Ferguson, “New Wine and Old Bottles,” The New Republic
(26 June 1935); reprinted in The Film Criticism of Otis
Ferguson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971),
81.
9
Gorham Kindem, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: the
Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,” Journal
of the University Film Association, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring,
1979), 35.
18
James Peterson, “Fireworks: The Spread of Spectacle
in the Fifties Film,” unpubl. seminar paper CA958
(American Films of the 1950s), University of Wisconsin –
Madison, 17 May 1982.
10
Martin Hart, e-mail to author, 20 Sept 2005: “My best
estimate of the weight of the unblimped Technicolor
camera would be about 120 pounds with a full load
of film. I don’t think the blimped camera weighed
19
Haver, A Star is Born, 155.
20 Branigan, “The Articulation of Color,” op. cit, for an
important positioning of Godard’s Deux ou trois choses
que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know About
Her] within Hollywood’s color conventions. Nicholas
Paige, “Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the
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Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
Postmodern Image),” Representations 88 (Fall 2004),
1–25 contains a nuanced analysis of Godard’s Le mépris
[Contempt] and Technicolor.
The relationship between Technicolor and the emerging
art house cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s is
especially complex. One way of formulating it is to see
European directors – particularly Godard and Resnais –
unmasking the formal contrivances lurking behind the
narrativized conventions of Technicolor and adapting
them to their own purposes. But between Technicolor
and the New Wave, as we will see, lies a decade of
American films that chart their own individualized, even
experimental, course in exploring color.
21 Higgins, 46–47 and 208–213. See also Higgins’ “Color
at the Center: Minnelli’s Technicolor Style in Meet Me
in St. Louis [1944],” Style (Fall, 1998), 653–56, where
he makes a similar argument, presenting a picture of
diverse color styles “co-existing within the borders of an
overarching set of aesthetic principles.”
22 For Ansco Color Film and MGM, American
Cinematographer (February, 1950), p. 42; Arthur
Rowan, “’The Wild North’ Introduces MGM’s New Ansco
Color Process,” AC (March, 1952), 106–107, 122–124.
Also Robert A. Mitchell, “The New Ansco Color Film and
Process,” AC (April, 1953), 166, 177–183.
23 “New Eastman Color Film Tested by Hollywood and
Film Labs,” American Cinematographer (March 1950),
95, 102. Thomas Brady, “Big Color Rush On,” New York
Times (17 June 1951), X 5. “New Color Deal,” American
Cinematographer (May, 1952), 206, 215–216, and
Frederick Foster, “Eastman Negative-Positive Color Films
for Motion Pictures,” AC (July 1953), 322–323, 348–349.
Time Magazine (2 June 1952), Production and release
dates are provided by The American Film Institute
Catalog, 1893–1972.
Barry Salt [Film Style, p. 310] claims that The Sword
of Monte Cristo, filmed fall 1950, was in fact the first
Eastman Color film, secretly shot and printed on Eastman
Color positive and negative, but given a SuperCinecolor
label. I have not been able to confirm this.
24 Likewise, budget color films could be processed as
TruColor, CineColor, or Pathé Color, depending upon the
lab that was used. For an example of a technical journal
treating Eastman Color as a studio creation, Edwin
DuPar, “WarnerColor – Newest of Color Process,” AC
(September, 1952), 384–385, 402–404.
25
Barry Salt, 310. Leigh Allen, “New Technicolor Lighting
System Tested by Top-Flight Cinematographers,
International Projectionist (January, 1951), 20–21.
Interview with Scott MacQueen, 28 March 2005.
26 Derived from amended lists in Basten, op. cit and Haines,
op. cit and in The American Film Institute Catalog. See
footnote 3.
27 James Agee, Time Magazine 7 January 1946, reprinted
in Agee on Film (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1958),
360.
28 Eastman Color western and melodrama counts derive
from The American Film Institute Catalog, ibid. The rise
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of the color western in the early 1950s was particularly
dramatic. By my count, a total of twenty westerns filmed
in color were released from 1940 to 1949, none during
America’s war years. At the end of the decade, the
number shot up from three in 1949 to 11 in 1950, then to
23 in 1951, 21 in 1952 , 21 in 1953, and 20 in 1954. In
short, as many color westerns were shot each year in the
early 1950s as were shot in the entire preceding decade.
29 For Minnelli and Technicolor, Scott Higgins, “Color at
the Center: Minnelli’s Technicolor Style in Meet Me in
St. Louis [1944],” Style (Fall, 1998). For Minnelli and
his color 1950s melodrama, Minnelli with Hector Acre, I
Remember It Well (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974),
288–290.
30 Minnelli, in fact, resisted Eastman color for Lust for
Life because in its first years the Eastman color style
so closely resembled Technicolor’s that Minnelli
assumed Eastman could not reproduce subdued tones.
Its palette, he claimed, came “straight from the candy
box, a brilliant mixture of blues, reds, and yellows”
[I Remember, 288–89]. So he used Ansco Color along
with the single color consultant with no Technicolor
background, Ansco’s Charles Hagedon.
31 Derek Hill, “Moby Dick Sets New Style in Color
Photography: On Oswald Morris’ Cinematography,” AC,
37/9 (Sept, 1956), 534 ff. Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons
(New York: Avon Books, 1989), 423–424.
32 Michael Stern, “Interview,” Bright Lights 6 (Winter,
1977–78), 33; Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames,
“Entretien avec Douglas Sirk,” Cahiers du Cinema 189
(April 1967), 23, 25. Cf. Mike Prokosh, “Imitation of
Life,” Douglas Sirk, eds. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday
(Lancashire, England: Edinburgh Film Festival 72/ NFT/
John Players & Sons, 1972), 90.
33 Kalmus, op cit., 144. For a history of color psychology
in modern painting, John Cage, Color and Meaning: Art,
Science, and Symbolism. Berkeley, Calif: University of
California Press, 1999.
Related articles include “Color in Industry,” Fortune,
vol. 43 (June, 1951) 122–128. A.A. Goldsmith, “Putting
Color To Work,” Photography, 34 (May 1954), 62–65.
Mary Davis Gillies, “Our Color-Happy World,” McCall’s
(Oct 1954), 38–43. “Getting Final Word on Color,” [on
color and carpets], Business Week, 14 December 1957,
124–129.
37 Faber Birren, Selling Color to People (University Books,
1956), 164. “Reading Minds Thru Color” Design, 54
(March, 1953), p. 132. “Shirts to Match Blue Mondays,
Pink Fridays,” Science News Letter, 70 (8 Sept 1956),
152.
38 “All-black Car is a Dying Breed,” Business Week (18 June
1955), 130. This was especially good news for teenagers,
because police departments were the among the last
holdouts against the color revolution, making their cars
especially easy to identify in rear view mirrors. Teens in
Greenwich Connecticut, where I spent my adolescence,
were unusually blessed. There the cops used black and
white Edsels for their unmarked cars.
39 For popularized accounts of these studies: Clifford
B. Hicks, “Your Color Type and How to Live With It,”
Popular Mechanics, Vol. 93 (February, 1950), 97–106;
“What Color Suits You Best,” House and Garden, vol. 108
(September, 1955), 78–87. Faber Birren works this line
in Creative Color (Reinhold Publishing, 1961), 21ff.
For earlier writings on color psychology: “Emotions
Due to Colors,” Literary Digest 85 (April 25, 1925),
25, a discussion by Matthew Luckiesh, then director
the Lighting Research Lab of General Electric. “Making
People Do Things by Wall Colors,” Everybody’s 34
(March, 1916): 398–99.
For a recent article making the similar assumptions,
Kim Anderson, “The Power of Color,” (TC)2 Bi-Weekly
Technology Communicator (June 2005) http://
www.techexchange.com/thelibrary/powerofcolor.html
34 For scientific accounts of how the brain processes different
frequencies of light in order to interpret color, Jacob Beck,
“The Perception of Surface Color,” Scientific American
(August, 1975), 64–75. Hans Wallach, “The Perception
of Neutral Colors, Scientific American (January, 1963),
107–116. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art
and the Brain, Oxford University Press, 2000.
40 Eisenstein himself compared Vladimir’s famous “blue
blush” in Ivan the Terrible Part II to Flower the Skunk’s
turning red in Bambi; the debt is analyzed in Anne Nesbet,
Savage Junctures (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 194–195.
The convention’s origins can be found in Disney’s Three
Little Pigs, Lullaby Land, The Flying Mouse and other Silly
Symphonies. Cf. Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman, The
Silly Symphonies (Gemona, Italy: Cineteca del Friuli Press,
2007), passim.
35 Harris, “Color and Media,” op. cit., 336.
41
36 The attention paid to color in industry was widely
reported. As early as 1941, Reader’s Digest reprinted
“Meet the Color Engineer,” (June, 1941), 134–35,
describing the work of Faber Birren, a color specialist
living in New York. By the 1950s, Birren’s career had
taken off, publishing books that encouraged innovations
in color management in the factory, the restaurant, the
hospital, and the schoolroom. He also described how
color could be an effective marketing tool in self-service
stores such as supermarkets, automobile dealerships,
and liquor stores, where customers often made impulse
decisions.
Derek Hill, “Moby Dick Sets New Style in Color
Photography: On Oswald Morris’ Cinematography,” AC,
37/9 (Sept, 1956), 534 ff.
42 Branigan, “The Articulation of Color,” 28–29 shows how
Godard transforms this strategy into a full-blown radical
system.
My analysis of Track of the Cat derives from Branigan’s
study.
43 Kazan to Michel Ciment in Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (New
York: Viking Press, 1974), 123
44 Karla Oeler, A Grammar of Murder University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming.
15
Crying in colour: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolour died
Cf. Sirk to Stern in Bright Lights, op. cit.: “Throughout
my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.
Often the window will be here and the light from there.
With color, too, I did this, to attain a lighting that is
almost Surrealistic. As Brecht has said, never forget that
this is not reality…. The distancation must be there… You
have to shoot it through a dialectic.”
NFSA Journal
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Volume 3, No 2/3, 2008
ISSN 1834-0970
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