Glorious Technicolor

This entertaining documentary is now available on Disk 2 of the 2003 re-release of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Angela Lansbury narrates a history of color in the movies. The emphasis is on the development of the Technicolor process. Clips of dozens of feature films and shorts are featured.

Glorious Technicolor (1998)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely entertaining documentary from Turner Classic Movies tells the story of Technicolor. We start off getting some early examples of color including films that were hand tinting frame-by-frame and then we get to pictures like THE TOLL OF THE SEA, which made good money at the box office but not enough for the added expense. From here we see how 2-strip Technicolor was produced before finally getting to the three strip. The documentary does an extremely good job at giving you all the details that you could hope for. We learn about its creator, Herbert Kalmus, who wanted to credit for what he did and in fact he hired a publicist to keep his name out of the media. We learn how many of the studios felt that color had no place in movies and it's funny because many of the comments sounded just like the ones we heard when sound was coming into play. Many actresses didn't want to be filmed in color and we even hear how MGM kept it away from their features and only OK'd it for short films. Ester Williams, Arlene Dahl, Evelyn Keyes and John Alton are just a few of the people who are interviewed. Some of the best moments in the film are of course the scenes that really show off the color and everything it was capable of doing. We get clips from the major titles like THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD and THE WIZARD OF OZ all the way up to some of the very last films to use the process including the Michael Powell pictures. If you're unfamiliar with the process then this is the perfect place to learn about it and get some good ideas for rentals.

This 1-hour documentary details the history of this most famous of color processes, still considered the most satisfying - and durable - ever devised for purposes of filming. It also provides biographical data about the two people most important for its development and promotion - Dr. Herbert Kalmus and his wife Natalie; their thorny relationship and hers with the various studio bosses, when she eventually took Technicolor under her wing, is a great story in and of itself...but the documentary pays tribute as well to the many film-makers and auteurs who adopted the color system as their ideal mode of expression. There is a bit of an over-insistence on musical extravaganzas of the 1940s and 1950s but, then, it also affords reasonable time to classic illustrations of Technicolor on the screen - in particular, GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and other David O. Selznick productions - and even touches upon how it fared in other countries, primarily Great Britain (where the process was perhaps seen at its best advantage in the idiosyncratic visions of The Archers' films).

This is a documentary on the history of Technicolor, starting right from the inception and through until recently. It consists of clips from films, interviews, rare footage of stars in two colors, stills and voice-over by Narration She Spoke. We see the progression(early on, flesh tones weren't deemed important! Instead, focus was on the backgrounds, set and FX) and the early skepticism... not only did people in the business not believe that we didn't want to hear the actors speak, they didn't think that it should go beyond black and white, either! Hearing from the people who experienced it first-hand(and some of them even worked with it, directly) is quite interesting, and any film geek will enjoy the one-hour running time of this. It's well-edited and thoroughly researched. If you aren't already into this subject, however, this isn't likely to win you over and get your attention. There is no offensive material in this, except for the old gender roles and the like... the one bit of strong language is carefully bleeped out. I recommend this to those who want to know about it. 7/10

Now available on DVD, this documentary looks at the ups and downs of Technicolor and the importance of film milestones such as 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'; 'Becky Sharp'; 'The Black Pirate'; and 'Gone With The Wind'. It shows how colour in films grew from experiments in two-strip and three-strip bits to full-length mistakes, travelogues and total triumphs.

It makes interesting points about the fear of actresses that colour would remove their mystique (until Dietrich and 'The Garden of Allah' that is); about the constant interference of Natalie Kalmus ('creative consultant' on all Technicolor films); and about the eventual acceptance of the process as industry standard worldwide. The examples shown prove that the colour palette available to films in their heyday enhanced the 'golden age' - later films in Eastmancolor and the like look washed-out in comparison.