ONE OF THE WORST MOVIE EXPERIENCES I have ever had—and I have seen Wild in the Streets—was watching The Maltese Falcon in color. What’s that? You didn’t know it was in color? It wasn’t. Instead, it was colorized. Horrible term, horrible idea. Here’s what happened. In 1986, media mogul Ted Turner, following along from his conquest of cable television, purchased the film studio MGM/UA, giving him access to the libraries of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, some of United Artists, much of RKO Pictures, and the pre-1950 Warner Bros. That sounds as if he owned all of black-and-white movie history, but there were a few other studios in the old days. Still, enough. And he had determined that most modern people (meaning, one assumes, him) would not watch movies in something as stale and stuffy as monochrome.
Part of my problem, I’m sure, was that this Maltese Falcon was not a maiden voyage. I had seen the film a number of times, loved it, knew most of the lines, and here’s what I found: it isn’t the same movie. Yes, the same stuff happens, but it doesn’t look the same, and with movies, looking matters. First of all, the colors chosen are unlikely to be right; in some cases they’re positively garish. Skin tones are all wrong. The colors of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s dress when she makes the curtains flutter at Spade’s apartment are dubious at best. Worst of all, the shadows, conceived in monochrome, simply look faked in color. If you can’t have an honest black, what good is film? Nothing is right with that colorization. Simply put, The Maltese Falcon was conceived for black-and-white shooting, from set design to costumes to blocking to lighting. If you make a change as momentous as adding color (as opposed to shooting in it), the whole visual component goes haywire. Happily, the barbarians have mostly given up on such ventures; happier still, we can still see it in glorious grayscale, as nature intended.
Once upon a time, filmmakers did not have color film at their disposal. They gave us white hats and black hats, but also a whole lot more. Then Dorothy moved from gray Kansas to Technicolor Oz, and before long only artistes shot in black and white. And viewers forgot how to watch monochromatic movies and somebody got the bright idea to colorize the old ones. What a terrible fate for great movies—or even only fair ones. As you might imagine, this did not go down well with film lovers, and especially film lovers who happened to be critics. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave this move two thumbs down, devoting a special episode of the Siskel & Ebert & the Movies to what they called “Hollywood’s New Vandalism.” Ebert asked what was so terrible about black-and-white movies in the first place, adding, “By filming in black and white, movies can sometimes be more dreamlike and elegant and stylized and mysterious. They can add a whole dimension to reality, whereas color sometimes just supplies additional unnecessary information.” He knew full well, of course, that many black-and-white movies were so filmed because there was no other option, but that doesn’t stop his—nor should it our—appreciation.
Actually, it isn’t quite true that color was not available. It was color film that didn’t exist. The impulse toward color was present early on in film history. In fact, right at the beginning, and long before color film existed. Some films by the pioneers of the industry, such as Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), were selectively colorized. That is to say some elements of the movies were hand-tinted. Studios, most notably Elisabeth Thuillier’s coloring studio and, later, Pathécolor, sprang up in Paris (along with the Handschiegl process at Famous Players-Lasky studios in America) to accommodate the desire for at least parts of films to have color. Thuillier employed some two hundred artists, each responsible for a single color to be painted on individual frames one by one. She is said to have produced some sixty copies of A Trip to the Moon, of which only one is known to survive. Because it is in the public domain, we can easily view it online, and we notice instantly that something less than the whole frame is filled with color. When the scientists (looking a lot more like medieval wizards) gather in the opening scene, for instance, only the principals have colored robes; the others are gray imitations. This was typical of early colorized films, where the labor-intensive nature of the process meant that color was used as a condiment, not the meat and potatoes of the flick. Such use made the selected items really pop off the screen compared to their dim surroundings. This was also a process in which the moviemakers had a direct hand, unlike later colorization, so the aesthetics, whatever we may think of them, are in concert with the directors’ visions. And of course when color film technology became available and affordable, filmmakers leapt at the chance to use it. Sometimes. Cost and artistic judgments led to sparing use of color during the early decades of its existence, and only in the mid to late 1960s did color movies become the only sort made.
If you want to talk more about the colorizing debacle, stop over sometime and I can bore you silly. For now, however, let’s focus on happier subjects. Like why black-and-white movies are so great. Because they are, you know. Great.
Here’s a statement you may not like, but that’s never stopped me before: the single most damaging change to the art of cinema was the death of black-and-white film. Yes, I said it. And why not? It’s true. Of all the changes that movies have undergone during their first century, the one that has done the most damage is the end of movies in two colors. This is not the same as the introduction of color film or the rise of really excellent color techniques or anything else. This is about the end of serious moviemaking in monochromatic splendor.
To be clear, I am not a cinematic Luddite. I love nearly all the innovations that have come out of Hollywood over the years. The exceptions being IMAX, which tends to make me ill, and 3-D, which tends to result in dopiness as well as exacerbating my fear of heights (must every 3-D movie involve some dizzying precipice?). But I love color movies. Period. Would I want the yellow brick road to be gray or the ruby slippers to be black? Of course not. Besides, that’s how I saw them on television when I was growing up, and they required just a little too much imagination. Color is a blast. Walt Disney could never have been Uncle Walt without color. The Red Balloon (1956) just wouldn’t be the same if all balloons were different shades of the same dull color; nor could the balloon have contrasted so spectacularly with the rest of the drab city. And the Carnaby Street mod element of Blow-Up (1966) would be completely lost in black and white, even with all the geometric patterns in the clothing. Sometimes you must have the color. See also, Fantasia. Nope, taken any way you want, color movies are great.
So what’s the problem?
Us. At some point, we seem to have decided that black-and-white film is un-American. To be fair, it did seem that way. The only movies that came our way sans colour were brooding Swedish masterpieces or grainy and jumpy French things (but not The French Connection). And when Woody Allen tries to be brooding and Swedish, he only reminds us that he’s Brooklyn and Jewish, not Scandinavian and Lutheran—and we beg him to get back to colorized hilarity. What’s the latest black-and-white American film that most of us will have seen? Maybe a better way to ask that is: when did b&w cease as a part of regular studio production? I nominate 1960, give or take a year: that’s the year of Psycho, followed the next year by The Absent-Minded Professor. Oh, there were a few sporadic contributions after that, even some from major studios, but for the most part black-and-white movies have been relegated to independent filmmakers and foreigners for the last half century. And that, friends, is a darned shame.
Now, don’t start whining. I’ve heard it all before. Movies without color are old-fashioned. Less realistic. Hard to see. Dark. Boring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to the Marines. In fact, Pride of the Marines (1945) was shot in black and white. So was The Pride of the Yankees (1942). So there.
You say there are lots of things that black-and-white film can’t do. That’s true, but there are more that it can. Inky shadows are inkier. Contrasts are greater. But so is the possibility of subtle gradations. Let’s go back to the Psycho example. The decision to use black and white was not based on aesthetics. Rather, it was born of desperation. Hitchcock’s previous two projects had died before being realized, so even coming off the hit North by Northwest, he was on the outs with the studio. Then, too, the studio had already rejected the idea of acquiring the rights to Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title. So Hitch had himself an uphill fight. Even his offer to finance the film himself and shoot in black and white and use his television series studio and crew was turned down. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, he offered to refuse his standard quarter-million-dollar director’s fee in lieu of a 60 percent stake in the negative. In other words, he had everything riding on this particular dice roll. In addition, he was filming a story—laden with sex, graphic violence, and one very disturbed psyche—that would make the censors at the Production Code office blanch. The chances of having this film not be released were great, the financial pressures enormous. So he shot quickly and in monochrome.
Best thing that ever happened to a movie. Maybe second, after Howard Hawks discovering nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall for To Have and Have Not (1944). That, however, is a very different story, although also in black and white.
So what does a one-color palette do for the movie? Just about everything. For one thing, as Ebert suggests, it takes us out of the world of excessive verisimilitude. That will prove a relief when the mayhem gets going. Black and white provides just enough distance from the world as we experience it that, although we have no difficulty identifying Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane or Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates as humans living in something like ordinary reality (except for the homicidal maniac bit), we can stand back just the tiniest step from their reality. That distance will wage battle with Hitchcock’s techniques (subjective camera, steady close-ups) that draw us in tighter, to create an uneasy tension in viewers. Then, too, the darkness of many scenes and the grisly taxidermy seem more foreboding, even ghastly, because of the black and white. She is forced to seek a room at the Bates Motel, for instance, by the darkest, rainiest night in the history of dark, rainy nights. Add to that the reduced visual information the eye receives in black and white—little pieces of data that might announce themselves more clearly were they presented in color—and we know less than we might, although later we will come to understand that we had seen this or that item or person, although it didn’t register at the time. The shadows are murkier, the lake where he buries the car inkier, the darkness more all-encompassing in grays and blacks. Come to think of it, even the daytime is pretty dark at the Bates Motel. All this fits nicely with the ethical murkiness of the tale. Marion Crane is no mere innocent victim of mistaken identity. Oh, she’s a victim all right. Just not innocent. The first two things we see her do are finish off an assignation with her lover, then go back and embezzle forty thousand dollars, enough for a very nice house in 1960. Her moral issues, of course, have nothing to do with Norman’s villainy, but they do taint the sympathy we can have toward her just a little. Those issues all come together in her folding the stolen funds into a newspaper in her room’s wastebasket. Norman, whose real interest isn’t money in any case, fails to notice the paper’s contents in his rush to clear the room of incriminating evidence and buries it with Marion in the trunk of the car. In the final twist of the knife, when the car is dredged up from the tarn, the last thing we see is the newspaper: the answer to the mystery is revealed, as it were, in black and white.
So black and white can be useful for distancing us from psychopaths. Does it have other uses? How about nuclear annihilation? Four years after Psycho, Stanley Kubrick released the black comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964). The story encompassed in the film is dirt-simple: a paranoid, renegade American general launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, which leads to deliberations by various parties, all of whom are more than a little mad. There’s an inept, indecisive president, the title character, a partially paralyzed expert in nuclear war who seems to be inherited from the Nazis, a British RAF officer (these three all played by Peter Sellers), a jingoistic general (George C. Scott) who is terrified of letting the Russians know our plans, even when those plans will destroy us all, the paranoid general (Sterling Hayden), and the most motley bombardier crew imaginable, with Slim Pickens as the wild cowboy who ultimately rides the bomb to perdition. The film begins with this terrible scenario of a mistaken or unauthorized nuclear strike and ends with picture after picture of mushroom clouds to the strains of “We’ll Meet Again.” The movie is one of the funniest and scariest ever made precisely because it was so entirely possible. Other books and movies—Fail-Safe, Red Alert (on which this movie is partly based)—were coming out in this same historical period about the very real possibility of what we called “mutual assured destruction” happening at any moment. As a child growing up ten or twelve miles from Strategic Air Command headquarters at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and practicing air raid and duck-and-cover drills at school, I can promise you it wasn’t all that comic. Now, satire or not, do you really want to see that in color? “Some sunny day,” indeed.
Black and white is also excellent for fantasy. Think dream sequence. Think things that can never happen. Now, this is not mine. This is from Werner Herzog, so pay attention:
Arguably, or for me, the greatest single sequence in all of film history [is] Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadows, and all of a sudden he stops and the shadows become independent and dance without him and he has to catch up with them. It’s so quintessential movie. It can’t get more beautiful. It’s actually from Swing Time [1936]. And when you look at the cave and certain panels, there’s evidence of some fires on the ground. They’re not for cooking. They were used for illumination. You have to step in front of these fires to look at the images, and when you move, you must see your own shadow. And immediately, Fred Astaire comes to mind—who did something 32,000 years later which is essentially what we can imagine for early Paleolithic people.
Herzog is speaking about Astaire in the context of his own documentary about the Lascaux cave paintings in France, and the scene he describes is truly remarkable: Astaire, in bowler hat and blackface as a tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Astaire’s own former dance teacher John W. Bubbles, dances to the up-tempo “Bojangles in Harlem” with his own shadow, times three. Through the magic of film and the brilliant choreography of Hermes Pan—one of the great names in the history of film, or of anything, for that matter—the shadows take on a synchronized life of their own, so that when Astaire pauses, they continue making the human and the simulacra fall out of sync; the human dancer then races madly to catch up with his shadows again, but they’re never entirely in sync again, although they’re close enough that it seems a sort of race or contest where no one loses. Certainly not the audience. At the end of the routine, the shadows become disgusted with Astaire’s antics and walk off the screen, but he keeps going. When someone says, “They don’t make movies like that anymore,” this is exactly what they mean.
Were this an Ingmar Bergman film, the scene would be a commentary on alienation and dislocation of sensibility. But it is not. Because it is a George Stevens film, the scene is joyous, celebratory, frenetic, and a little goofy. It’s less a statement about life than one about art: you can’t have this experience anywhere but at the movies. What isn’t said but that I would assert is that you can’t have that experience anywhere but at the movies in black and white.
I said earlier that black and white had mostly vanished from the scene in the contemporary era. But it isn’t as if no one has been making monochrome movies since 1960. Indeed, some of our most significant films have exploited the device. In the list of greatest black-and-white movies compiled by the Internet Movie Database, for instance, the first three entries are completely predictable: Citizen Kane, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. The most recent of those, Wyler’s film, was 1946 (Renoir’s appeared in 1937). Then the list jumps forward forty-seven years to 1993 with Schindler’s List. Director Steven Spielberg labored under none of the financial or technical exigencies that affected the other directors, certainly not the ones that would have inhibited Orson Welles had he wished to shoot Kane in color, so shooting Schindler in black and white was clearly a choice. In this case, the use of monochrome (shot on sepia stock) not only imparts an old-time movie look, it also creates the atmosphere of a documentary. One has only to think about that footage of the liberated camps that has made so many of us queasy down the decades to see that connection. Then, too, detractors and supporters alike admit that black and white has a distancing effect—we live in a world full of color, however drab our lives may seem to us at any given moment, so stripping away the colors automatically makes a film feel a little less real. In this case, that distance is a great relief; the movie is so unsettling that any small respite from the horrors of Nazi rule is welcome. Finally, there is the fact that this is not a black-and-white film. There is a scene in which Jews are being herded down the street, among them a small girl wearing a vivid red coat. Every other thing in the scene is monochrome, so the coat really stands out. In rounding her up, the movie asserts, the Nazis have obliterated the last remaining color from the world. And when Oskar Schindler comes across her murdered body a bit later, you don’t need advanced degrees to understand the meaning of the red coat by which we recognize her. Spielberg has said, “For me, the symbol of life is color. That’s why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white.” Except that it isn’t. Not all. Besides the red coat, the opening scene of an ordinary Shabbat meal affords some color before fading out, as the life of European Jewry was about to do. At the end, when Oskar Schindler organizes another Shabbat meal, the warmth of the candles again slips into the film’s palette.
There are, naturally, other reasons for a filmmaker to select black and white. Pleasantville (1998) plays with the very idea of monochromatic versus color media as its central premise. Twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), who live in the colorful age of MTV, find themselves whisked into the black-and-white world of a 1950s sitcom that gives the movie its title. Well, what other color scheme could such a movie employ?
When we discuss the use of black and white, we tend to think of the classics and especially of certain genres: silent comedies such as Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Keaton’s The General (1926) or Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), or Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, noir mysteries on the order of Little Caesar or The Public Enemy (both 1931), Scarface (the original, 1932), The Maltese Falcon, or The Third Man. But of course all genres were filmed in monochrome before the advent of color, and many were afterward. The year that gave us full-color spectaculars in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, arguably the greatest year in motion picture history, 1939, also gave us black and white in the adaptation of Kipling’s poem “Gunga-Din,” Garbo going comic in Ninotchka, everybody’s favorite bell ringer in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, and arguably the first truly great Western, Stagecoach. And that barely touches the surface. Some of those films, like Ninotchka, hardly needed color, others seemed unworthy to studio heads of the expense, and some were done quickly and didn’t allow for the time. Watching them, we discover things we didn’t know. For instance, while I have nothing against Monument Valley in color, and I definitely want it in color if I visit in person, and John Ford certainly made good use of it in color in later films like The Searchers, as a cinematic proposition, it views much better in black and white. I think that has to do with what monochrome presentation does for stark landscapes. They take on an almost nightmarish unreality. The same can be said for John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), whose landscape looks like nowhere you’ve ever been and especially like nowhere you wish to live.
Happily, the form has never left us entirely. Contemporary filmmakers occasionally turn out work in black and white for a host of artistic reasons. They may be striving for starkness, as in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013), starring Bruce Dern as a cantankerous old man, or Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005), an adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel, although to be fair, some elements of the latter film are in color. Still, the effect is chiefly monochromatic, which also has the advantage of distancing the audience from the action, which is stylized and brutal. The attempt at providing distance can also be seen in such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), where the story is sufficiently vicious that a less mimetic, more stylized approach can make it slightly more palatable. Sometimes, however, as with Schindler’s List, nothing can make a movie’s subject matter palatable. Only less sickening.
Filmmakers may be attempting to match period styles, as with George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), or Mary Harron’s film about an erotica model and actress, The Notorious Bettie Page (2006). Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), about the cult film director, both invokes the era and the format in which Wood’s sensational (and generally quite awful) movies were themselves shot. This impulse ties the movie to Pleasantville: there are times when one wants to shoot a film in the format of its historical moment because that’s how the films or television shows would have appeared. The champion of the mode would have to be Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011); the choice clearly makes sense in this instance. Perhaps Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992) would have fared better had the director made the same choice, although color film is not the movie’s only misstep.
And sometimes, black and white is just about mood and tone. That tone doesn’t have to be somber or horrifying; it can be wistful, elegiac, even comic. It can be anything you want it to be. I made fun, some little time ago, of Stardust Memories, the Woody-Allen-impersonates-Ingmar-Bergman film of artistic angst. It’s not really that bad, only not him at his Woodiest. On the other hand, it is the second b&w film in as many years, following the huge achievement of Annie Hall and the subsequent success of Interiors (1978). The first was Manhattan (1979). It was magnificent. If the entire history of cinema in black and white existed so that we could have Schindler’s List and Manhattan, they would be reason enough.