COLOUR POSSIBILITIES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

COLOUR POSSIBILITIES

THRILLING AVENUES TO EXPLORE

One of the more familiar sights of dramatic London at the moment is Sit 1 Cedric Hardwicke holding a little black box up to the light and squinting into it with one appraisive eye, while an interested film director, or agent, or critic, hovers near, writes Miss C. A. Lejeune in the London Observer. The peculiar interest of Hardwicke’s black box for show people at the moment is that it contains “frames” from the new colour film, “Becky Sharp,” which promises to .be something of a test case for the whole question of colour in the cinema. The film has just been finished in Hollywood by Pioneer Pictures, the company that made “La Cucuracha.”

Hardwicke’s enthusiasm over “Becky Sharp” is unconditional and infectious. “I never believed,” he says, “that colour in the cinema could be so exciting and lovely until I saw what an artist like Robert Edmond Jones, the stage designer, could do with it. Look at this close-up of Miriam Hopkins—see the flesh tints—see the colour of the hair —and the red glass on the table (standing out like a ruby.) I believe colour is going to take the films into an entirely different plane—something like the difference between a newspaper story and a great novel.” One by one the little pictures came up into the. peep-hole window of Hardwicke’s black box—Miriam Hopkins and Frances Dee, Becky and Amelia, side by side in warm candle light at the piano— Nigel Bruce as Joseph Sedley, pompous in gleaming satin—Hardwicke himself, as the Marquis of Steyne, a little sinister in the moonlight. “Look at that scene,” he exclaimed. “See the green lime effect on the villain, just like a spot ’in the theatre? And now see this balcony effect, when the mood is blue. Yes, I’m .sure we’re on the verge of something tremendously exciting. Colour wifi heighten everything—intensify all the emotional values. And it will give the film a new kind of permanency. It has always been terrible to me, the way last week’s film is as dead as yesterday’s newspaper. AIJ. the work and enthusiasm that goes into it, and in a week it’s forgotten. That’s because : a - monochrome picture is necessarily journalistic: it has topical values. When, people see a black-and-white picture they say, ‘How realistic! How like life!’ ' When they see a colour picture they lose that sense of immediacy. “The highbrows think black and white is the artistic medium for the cinema because they are afraid of their emotions. They don’t want to be persuaded by colour. They want to think academic-

ally in black and white. Colour is disturbing. It creates a mood, just as the coloured line’ creates a mood in the theatre. You can sense the mood of a theatre scene before a word is spoken. But you’ve never been able to do that in the cinema before.

“Colour, as some maintain, is not bound to be limited to costume pictures and children’s fairy stories—subjects with what Goethe calls the pathos of distance. It would not be dull to have it in a modern everyday story, with you and me in clothes like we’re wearing now. That is just where colour gets interesting. Drab clothes, black and grey costumes in a commonplace world are the perfect basis. The carnation in your buttonhole becomes important at once. The red hat over there becomes dramatic. You shift your dramatic values,' it is true, but you heighten them enormously. “The cinema is going to be 100 per cent, colour in a few years’ time. Mind you, I don’t think there will be a revolution, like the talkie revolution of 1929. I fancy colour will come gradually, probably by way of the short film. But I shall be surprised if in three years’ time the monochrome picture isn’t an exception. And I think people will look back to ‘Becky Sharp’ as the turning point in the colour business, just as we look back to ‘The Singing Fool’ as the beginning of sound.” Mr. Robert Edmond Jones, holds much the same views as Hardwicke.

“I shall never forget the evening,” he said, “when John Barrymore consented to act two scenes from “Hamlet” for the new tests, or the excitement of seeing his black-robed figure on the parapet of Elsinore, silhouetted against a cold, green sky, reciting “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” Or Katherine Hepburn, as Joan of Arc, wrapped in the flag of France, watching her soldiers from the ramparts and listening to the voices of her angels—all seen fitfully through drifting smoke and the red flare of battle. Such rare moments are turning points in one’s life. “Colour is on the screen to stay. The promise that it holds out to the producers of ’motion pictures is that their films (in the proper hands) may become not only more beautiful but incomparably more powerful than ever before. There is really no limit to the potentialities of colour on the screen. But colour is of value only when it is handled by colourists. Black-and-white thinking is of no use here. Where are we to find the artists who will explore this new dramatic medium? Only time can answer.”

Edgar Allan Poe For Screen. Two works of Edgar Allan Poe, author of “Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” will bo used in a film in which Boris Karloff and Bella Lugosi will have the leading parts. They are .“The Raven” and “The Gold Bug.” “Murder in the Fleet.” Jean Parker plays the feminine lead in M.G.M.’s “Murder in the Fleet.”

iniiiiiinitisiiSHittiiinn mini tiniiiiitiiiini mini mini iiinini “Prisoner of Zenda” with Songs! An all-singing version of Anthony; Hope’s famous novel, “The Prisoner of Zenda,” may be among this year’s screen offerings from M.G.M. Irving Thalberg has engaged Earnest Vadja, the scenarist, to make a screen adaptation of the book, And reports from the studio state that Thalberg is considering turning it into a musical film, with Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy starring.