Film Noir...in Color?

[Doctor Strange]

Correction... the nineties Batman: The Animated Series was not set in the forties or fifties. It was set in an "alternate" present - with VHS tapes, TVs, computers - that still included boxy suits and fedoras, police blimps, tommy guns, night clubs, and big old cars. (The recent five-minute short they made in honor of the 75th anniversary of the character is the only instance of a thirties setting.)

For that matter, none of the Batman films after the forties serials were set in the past either (and the serials were set in the then-present). Not Burton's films, Schumacher's films, Nolan's films, or the current Batfleck. LOTS of noir influence in the production design and lighting/cinematography in all of them, but always set in an alternate present.

(Many of those other nineties films that followed Burton's hugely successful Batman in an attempt to cash in on the comics trend - The Phantom, The Shadow, Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer - WERE set in the thirties/forties. But no Batman projects.)

Sorry to be so pedantic, but I take my Batman adaptations seriously.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Oh, and I've stayed out of this discussion so far, but I side with the folks who think there have been more recent color films that carry on the noir tradition pretty well. Chinatown, Body Heat, Prizzi's Honor, Road To Perdition, Goodfellas, L.A. Confidential, etc., are all worthy descendants of the film noir style, even without the high-contrast b/w, German Expressionist-influenced photography and sets. As several folks said above, use of b/w was mostly a financial limitation imposed on crime films in the forties/fifties, not an artistic choice.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Batman analogy is interesting because the original comic owed much of its visual style to German expressionist films of the 1920s, which writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane had both seen as teenagers. You will find the roots of the "noir" visual style in those films.

 

[BlueTrain]

Correction... the nineties Batman: The Animated Series was not set in the forties or fifties. It was set in an "alternate" present - with VHS tapes, TVs, computers - that still included boxy suits and fedoras, police blimps, tommy guns, night clubs, and big old cars. (The recent five-minute short they made in honor of the 75th anniversary of the character is the only instance of a thirties setting.)

For that matter, none of the Batman films after the forties serials were set in the past either (and the serials were set in the then-present). Not Burton's films, Schumacher's films, Nolan's films, or the current Batfleck. LOTS of noir influence in the production design and lighting/cinematography in all of them, but always set in an alternate present.

(Many of those other nineties films that followed Burton's hugely successful Batman in an attempt to cash in on the comics trend - The Phantom, The Shadow, Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer - WERE set in the thirties/forties. But no Batman projects.)

Sorry to be so pedantic, but I take my Batman adaptations seriously.

Shows you how much attention I pay to movies. Or, alternatively, there's one thing on the screen and I'm seeing something else. VHS tapes?

 

[BlueTrain]

The Batman analogy is interesting because the original comic owed much of its visual style to German expressionist films of the 1920s, which writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane had both seen as teenagers. You will find the roots of the "noir" visual style in those films.

You mean like "Metropolis?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

And "Sunrise," "Nosferatu," "Caligari," "M," and so on and on. The influence those pictures had on many kids who'd grow up to work in comics cannot be overestimated.

 

[Seb Lucas]

There aren't any Batman films I have appreciated, to be honest, but I do appreciate the noir elements that were so self-consciously evoked by Burton.

For a brilliantly staged alternative expressionist future (that looks like the past) there's the extraordinary noir black comedy, Brazil, by Terry Gilliam. It was inspired by Orwell's 1984 although Gilliam hadn't read the book. Brazil is one of the most visually impressive films of the 1980's and another Blade Runner in it's sheer noiresque visual magnificence.

 

[Edward]

I remembrr seeing Blade Runner in my teens and being singularly unimpressed by it. I think I was expecting something else form the Star Wars guy..... Of course, watching it again as an adult was a whole different experience. Brazil is great too. Speaking of Star Wars, to my eye there's something that hints at noir, albeit it in a scifi way, in the early George Lucas Picture THX1138. The ending of that one surprised me, disappointed me, and, ulrtimately, grew on me to the point I rather like it now.

I do not think film noir should be taken too literally. I get it that at the time of its heyday, most films of the genre were in black and white, but as noted that was a by product of the times - most films were made that way for one reason or the other.

I understand how black and while movies (just as with photographs) can be interpreted or viewed as having an atmosphere, a feeling, that differs from colour, but I think the genre (story, character development) is more important than the look.

I agree. I never intepreted B&W as an essential element of the original noirs, simply a coincidence of the time in which they were made.

I think "The Longest Day" was in B&W (1962).

It was. I remember when playground legend had it that it was "the last black and white film made"!

Just imagine a group of young men who looked and dressed like the early Beetles performing "I wanna hold your hand." In black and white.

I understand there are complaints about old films being colorized.

Yeah. I'm not a fan of dabbling with original product, like they're pretending it was never finished or something. Bit too..... George Lucas for comfort. That said, I remember when Shane Meadows put out boxing flick 24 7 , starring Bob Hoskins, back in the 90s, and a lot of the wider cinema audience were refuseniks because they just didn't want to see a film in black and white. (To me that's like refusing to see a film in 2D, but whatever). I can imagine they feel that by colourising a lot of the old stuff, it might just get it to a amrket that would otherwise be uninterested. Strangely, it always seems to me to be adults who don't want to watch B&W; kids don't care if it's entertaining.

I love the idea of "The Great Gatsby" as a noir movie. Maybe that's what it needs to give it life on the screen. I enjoy the Redford version, but in a fan-of-the-book way, not in a it's-a-great-movie way and agree completely with you on the Luhrmann version.

The book, IMHO, doesn't translate well to film or the Reford version would have worked - too much takes place "inside" the character's heads -but tweaked ('cause that's all it would take) to present it from a noir angle, could be powerful.

I dislike the Redford one intensely. The supporting cast were great, but Redford just didn't resemble the character on the page at all. I could have even forgiven the awful seventies wardrobe, but not the casting of Redford. To be fair, though, I hate Redford in *everything*, so......

All the noir elements are there - cheating spouses, tawdry affairs, gambling, bounders, false identities, the powerful pulling strings to protect itself, murder, bootlegging and an ennui with the moral rot of society. Seen as noir, Gatsby appears almost perfect for filming / as a tragic love story, it's boringly lugubrious on film.

Now I want someone to do a noir version of it.

I would like to see that too. The book is out of copyright now, so it's open to all-comers, but I think it'll be a while as we've not long had a successful commercial interpretation in the form of the Luhrman one (not without its flaws, but some excellent castings and I surprised myself by enjoying it very much - I'd been gutted when he was announced as director, as I normally loathe his schtick), and the fashionability of the 20s has slipped again. I think they'll also need to wait for another generation of actors to find as perfect a pair of castings for Gatsby and Nick Carraway (though if they were filming now, Andrew Garfield would be a good choice for the latter; in ten years, perhaps, the kid currently playingSpiderman would be great.) I'm sure it'll come back eventually.

It all culminated in Tim Burton's Batman, a noir, pseudo-cyperpunk, superhero film - ideas stolen from Alan Moore's Dark Knight Returns graphic novel, which almost to this day haunts us through the derivative Nolan Batman films.

The similarities between the Nolan films and The Killing Joke are no coincidence. Nolan ordered Heath Ledger to read TKJ as preparation for playing the Joker. Several of Joker's lines in The Dark Knight are lifted directly from that source material. I wish they'd kept The Red Hood, though.

The first Batman movie came out in the 1940s, live action. Some of the animated Batman films, in color, are still full of long dark shadows and very moody and dramatic scenes. There was also a live action production of The Phantom that was similar but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. I saw it but don't remember enough of it to further comment. I liked it, though. One of the things about all those movies, including the animated version of Batman is that they were all set in the 1940s or early 1950s. The later Superman movies were not, curiously enough.

The Phantom, 1996, starring Billy Zane. Looks like it didn't do outstandingly well at the box office - http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=phantom.htm I seem to remember it coming off the back of the success of the Saturday morning cartoon, Flash Gordon and the Defenders of the Earth, which featured the Phantom as part of a supergroup of sorts. It was a pretty good film, and I think it would have dome much better had it come out ten years later, in the moder superhero genre era kicked off with X-Men and Raimi's Spiderman.

Correction... the nineties Batman: The Animated Series was not set in the forties or fifties. It was set in an "alternate" present - with VHS tapes, TVs, computers - that still included boxy suits and fedoras, police blimps, tommy guns, night clubs, and big old cars. (The recent five-minute short they made in honor of the 75th anniversary of the character is the only instance of a thirties setting.)

For that matter, none of the Batman films after the forties serials were set in the past either (and the serials were set in the then-present). Not Burton's films, Schumacher's films, Nolan's films, or the current Batfleck. LOTS of noir influence in the production design and lighting/cinematography in all of them, but always set in an alternate present.

(Many of those other nineties films that followed Burton's hugely successful Batman in an attempt to cash in on the comics trend - The Phantom, The Shadow, Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer - WERE set in the thirties/forties. But no Batman projects.)

Sorry to be so pedantic, but I take my Batman adaptations seriously.

It's a significant point. That's what makes the B:TAS world so close to the one I want to live in. (My ideal would have less crime, Obvs!)

And "Sunrise," "Nosferatu," "Caligari," "M," and so on and on. The influence those pictures had on many kids who'd grow up to work in comics cannot be overestimated.

Even on those who never saw them, but were indirectly influenced: the whole vibe, look and feel of the Universal monster series, which defintely also had an effect, was significantly affected by the German-Jewish fiml industry refugees who got out of Nazi Germany when they could and fled to the US to work in cinema there. As memory serves, Nosferatu and the original Bela Lugosi Dracula picture shared a cinematographer for that reason.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Edward is correct: the exodus of Jewish creatives from Germany to Hollywood when Hitler came to power is one of the major reasons for what we consider the film noir look and its doomed fatalist approach. The influence first appeared in the Universal horror films of the early thirties: Edward's talking about Karl Freund, who photographed many of the most famous German silent films... then Dracula, The Mummy (which he also directed), etc. (And later in the fifties, he was the cinematographer on I Love Lucy, where - along with Desi - he perfected the live audience/three-camera sitcom production method used by every multi-camera sitcom thereafter.)

There have been a number of good documentaries on this subject: the writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, composers - people like Freund, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Curt and Robert Siodmak, Franz Waxman, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, etc. - who fled the European film industry for Hollywood in the thirties and became major contributors to film noir, horror films, psychological dramas, and other genres that flowered soon after.

And as Lizzie pointed out, the influence of the German Expressionist films of the twenties on all the future comics creators who saw them as kids cannot be overstated. For example, Finger and Kane freely admitted that the appearance of the Joker was based on Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs.

 

[Fading Fast]

In earlier posts, Lizzie explained that Technicolor basically had a monopoly on color film in the '40s and into the '50s and that the company opposed "desaturation" as it wanted its color to be super bright, "to pop" (in truth, over stylized). Okay, I just watched "Meet Me in St. Louis" (I have no idea why) and there is no way film noir was taking off with that kind of color.

It's very hard to look dark and brooding / for life to look angry and oppressive when everything looks like it was colored in from a box of Crayola crayons. No doubt, there have been some outstanding noir films done in color and more will be, but could noir have been fully birthed and flourished in '40s Technicolor - I doubt it.

Separate somewhat related question: I just recorded "Youngblood Hawk" the '64 film based on the Herman Wouk book which seemed to be a big budget production chock full of stars, so why was it shot in B&W? From the few minutes I watched, the B&W is gorgeous, rich, deep - just beautiful - but why would the director have chosen to have this not-noir - basically a glamours soap opera - movie shot in B&W?

 

[Edward]

Here's a one.... Rebel Without a Cause has a noir feel for me. No detectives, but it has that darkness, the anti-hero, the meaningless death, the slightly risque (for the times) element (implied homosexuality).... and yet not only is it in colour, but the biggest visual impact in it is that very red of Jim Stark's jacket....

The neo-noir Sin City films are interesting in their limited use of colour in a mostly B&W universe, emulating not only the comic books but also their ultimate source material.

 

[Doctor Strange]

There were still quite a few b/w films made into the mid-sixties... and then, very quickly after they ended, Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon had critics thrilled to see b/w return.

And FF, re Youngblood Hawke, I don't know how much of a prestige production it really was: it starred mostly TV actors (and long-past-stardom folks like Mary Astor), which wasn't exactly a mark of distinction at that point.

 

[DesertDan]

....... As several folks said above, use of b/w was mostly a financial limitation imposed on crime films in the forties/fifties, not an artistic choice.

I would say that it was an artistic choice even if an imposed one, the film makers knew the canvas they had to work with and the good ones used it to full advantage.

 

[BlueTrain]

It just occurred to me that, in the same way that silent films, when being filmed, were created in a world of sound, black & white films were produced when everything that everyone saw--except in the finished product or the rushes--was in color. So maybe they didn't conceive of things the way we think.

 

[Doctor Strange]

As I always point out about b/w photography and films: because it reduces what we usually see to just light and dark (and highlights compositional form), these forms are already VERY stylized by their very nature in a way that color photography isn't. That is, a b/w image is ALREADY quite different from reality - and akin to art - just by being b/w.

And silent films, by removing sound, are just as stylized and different from reality. And also being b/w, they are doubly stylized! Since "silver screen magic" wasn't supposed to be reality but dreamlike fantasy, these multiple aspects of stylization worked big-time.

 

[Fading Fast]

It just occurred to me that, in the same way that silent films, when being filmed, were created in a world of sound, black & white films were produced when everything that everyone saw--except in the finished product or the rushes--was in color. So maybe they didn't conceive of things the way we think.

Good point, but it also brings up a difference between sound versus color. Once sound was "invented," silent died out very, very quickly. Color, however, took decades to dominate and, to this day, hasn't completely done away with B&W. IMHO, and stealing a bit form Doctor Strange, the artistic / creative value of B&W's "limitation" or "reduction in reality" is much greater than that of silent film.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Another budget factor: B crime films always made extensive use of stock footage. In the '40s almost all of this was B&W. Cityscapes, establishing shots, downtown street scenes, almost all of this was stock footage, which cost a fraction of shooting those scenes for the movie.

 

[BlueTrain]

Another budget factor: B crime films always made extensive use of stock footage. In the '40s almost all of this was B&W. Cityscapes, establishing shots, downtown street scenes, almost all of this was stock footage, which cost a fraction of shooting those scenes for the movie.

That was true of a lot of mostly low-budget movies. Few movies were made entirely on location then, too, for budget reasons. Also, most if not all of the studios in Los Angeles had extensive backlots that duplicated jungles, European cities, New York streets, Southern plantations and the like. Of those remaining, Universal City probably has more than any other now. Warner Brothers has one, too. Most disappeared because of development, as did most movie ranches. Even now, movies are a combination of studio and location shooting as well as back lot, which could be called a kind of outdoor studio. This was true of all movies, not just low budget movies. But some movies were made on location outside of the country even before WWII.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Along those same lines, for a long time pretty much all the color stock footage you saw of Hollywood came from the 1937 Technicolor version of "A Star Is Born." The same clips were still being recycled over and over as establishing shots well into the 1950s.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ You guys know a lot more about movie making than I do, but some number of noirs were shot on location in NYC because I am always amazed at how many places I recognize the action taking place - not just stock background shots. Again, I am not arguing with what is said above as I'm sure it's true of much of noir, but just saying that there are certainly a not-small number that were shot in NYC in the '40s and '50s. It's one of the best ways to time travel back to this city.