THE COLOUR FILM

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2670, 15 September 1937, Page 8

THE COLOUR FILM

SOME NEW PORTENTS A LEISURELY REVOLUTION INCREASED PRODUCTION COST. An American firm’s decision to make all future films in colour and the release of recent American and English feature films in technicolour have not set either the film industry or the filmgoer bustling so busily or so noisily as did the “Singing Fool” in 1928 says a writer in the Manchester Guardian.

Sound came on film-making like a thunderclap; colour has been creeping in (and out) since the hand-tinted films of the nineties and is still a rarity. But there has been in the last two years a more determined, more rapid, and less fitful increase of colour in the cinema.

“Becky Sharp,” “The Lonesome Pine,” and other films were commercially successful enough to cover the increased cost of production, and the recent announcement is a symptom of a more widespread willingness on the part of the industry to make serious use of colour processes. For* two or three years colour has been increasingly used in short films, and it is rare now to find black-and-white cartoons and a commonplace to see the übiquitous travel film in every variety and quality of colour reproduction. In England “Wings of the Morning,” the first English feature-length film in technicolour, has been released and well received, and the technicolour and Dufay pictures of the Coronation proved that grey English weather is more kind to colour film than the hard sunlight of Hollywood or Bali. Technicolour laboratories have been opened near London, and shooting begins shortly on “The Beggar’s . Opera” in chemicolour, an English process first seen publicly in parts of “Pagliacci.”

The producers’ attitude to colour is a reflection of the public’s. The recent full-length colour films have been modest successes compared with the first sound-films; “Becky Sharp” did not empty cinemas with black-and-white programmes as did “The Singing Fool” those with silent films. This may be partly because sound sprang fully grown from the secret laboratories of America, whilst the public have grown used to and spectical of colour in its forty years of open experiment and only qualified success. The Public Conviction.

Then too it appeared — perhaps erroneously—to both public and producers in 1928 and 1929 that no film could be other than improved by sound. Nineteen thirty-six and 1937, besides witnessing a revived interest in colour, have also seen a series of popular successes of a kind that would appear still to be inappropriate vehicles for the use of colour. The rare fairy tale—“ Green Pastures” or parts of “The Lost Horizon”—might gain by the tactful use of colour, but even the filmgoing public, avid of new things, fail to see what colour would help sophisticated, wisecracking comedies such as “After the Thin Man,” “Libelled Lady,” or “Mr Deeds,” the gangster film, or such unclassifiable films as “The Informer,” “Winterset,” or “Louis Pasteur.”

Colour in cinema is still rare enough to be obtrusive and to be used obtrusively, and a colour film is a colour film first and only secondarily, if at all, a witty or a poetic, or an exciting

film. (Only Disney, who abides few questions, has gracefully absorbed colour). So long as public taste for wit or poetry or excitement outweighs the taste for colour there will continue to be black-and-white box-office record-breakers, and the coming of colour will remain a slow and gradual process. Business First. Major technical changes in film production are exploited by business men first and by creative workers only after much argument and experiment. This was clearly demonstrated in the change-over to the sound-film. For long enough sound was used for .round’s sake rather than for cinema’s. Even now the imaginative manipulation of the sound-track is sufficiently rare to provoke admiring comment from the tourists and bewildered resentment from the general. Too rapid a conversion to colour would mean another sterile period in the cinema similar to that which followed the introduction of sound.