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November 08, 2005
Giddins goes goofy for Technicolor
In NY Sun, Gary Giddins is goofy for krazy kolor in a DVD round: "The three-strip Technicolor process, introduced in the 1930s, flourished for nearly 20 years, bringing to fulfillment the idea of painting with a camera. Doomed by a bulky system of prisms, high cost, broiling lights, and subsequent innovations that resulted in a simpler, more natural-looking solution, it left an uneven legacy of movies defined by aggressively splashed and deeply saturated hues... The luscious artificiality... combined with soundstage fakery, banished realism... By the early 1960s, filmmakers as different as Jerry Lewis (The Ladies' Man) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Deserto Rosso) were painting sets and spraying lawns to drench images in color. Today's color photography is so accomplished that almost any effect is possible, including wistful replication of Technicolor's heyday... yet it isn't the same. The three-strip process produced an effect hovering between rank vulgarity and sensual dazzle - Hollywood's dreamscape." Giddins considers 1953's The War of the Worlds, Criterion's release of Powell-Pressuburger's The Tales of Hoffman, and several titles held by the John Wayne estate, as well as State Fair and Oklahoma!. Giddins likes State Fair and Leon Shamroy's images "with a three-strip richness more caloric than the songs... The close-up of Crain at 19:10 exemplifies the Shamroy touch - her lips, scarf, complexion, the night sky all imbued with deep, tactile colors, as if by a brush... The DVD includes the atrocious 1962 remake, an example of color photography sagging into anonymous flatness.... You can go directly to 49:30 for its one compensation: Ann-Margret's disrobing and dance frolic."
Posted by pride at November 8, 2005 03:09 PM
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