Film Noir...in Color?

[MikeKardec]

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. - 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.

This is very true, I've always thought that the Noir look was an echo ... Americans picked it up from European silents, bounced it back across the pond as 1930s gangster films, caught the ball from the post war French and then made the great American Noirs of the late '40s and early '50s. But all art works like that film is just a bit faster in it's hand off because of the numbers of people involved in each project and the fact that the same people actually refined their product as they moved from one continent to another. Each bounce refined the aesthetic until it became iconic short hand in the 1980s. That's the way good storytelling works and why children's stories have some of the most refined structure and thematic elements in literature; they have been told rather than written and, because the storyteller wants to please his or her audience, the tale is improved as it's passed along.

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.

Technically, Technicolor could have lent itself wonderfully to dark and moody and possibly very saturated color. It offered a level of control in the color timing that was hard to achieve prior to the digital processes. That's not the "Technicolor Look" but to do Noir in color I personally wouldn't desaturate -- that's just pretending to be black and white-ish -- I'd ramp up the garish color and use the process to buy myself a lot of shadow detail while still letting things be dark.

At the time, however, color was disliked by many directors and cameramen because it was a giant pain in the ass. Different types of film stock and filters had to be used depending on indoor or outdoor lighting (what we now call white balance), make up issues, colors in costumes had to be complimentary, in night or dark shots unwanted things could be hidden under black drapes, shadows easily could be painted into sets (though I saw this still being done in color on the sets to One From The Heart in the '80s), weather and cloud cover had trouble matching and post was also more expensive and complicated. Color slowed production down dramatically. Of course there were plenty who, just like sound, thought it was simply going to be a fad or gimmick.

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....

I completely agree. If one can accept many of James M Cain's novels as Noir then RWAC fits the bill. color or not.

 

[MikeKardec]

⇧ 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.

Two of my favorite films had been The Sweet Smell of Success for it's real life NYC locations and Touch of Evil for a last look at old Venice, CA. More commonly films of the era had only one or two "off the lot" days in the budget and only bigger budget films were allowed to "travel." You see NYC in old films because there was still a film industry there and so the entire film was shot in NYC; the stock footage wasn't needed like it was in places where the whole film wasn't going to be shot.

 

[BlueTrain]

Oh, I know next to nothing about movie making but my son works in the business and naturally, lives in L.A.

 

[LizzieMaine]

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.

"Paper Moon" may be the most gorgeous black and white film ever made. It's as if they hired Dorothea Lange as the cinematographer.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I should point out that not all the European expats were Jewish. Some had been communists or belonged to other organizations forbidden by the Nazis. Others, like Marlene Dietrich, simply despised the Nazis. Goebbels was always trying to seduce her and if that wouldn't make her want to put an ocean between them, nothng would.

 

[Edward]

I should point out that not all the European expats were Jewish. Some had been communists or belonged to other organizations forbidden by the Nazis. Others, like Marlene Dietrich, simply despised the Nazis. Goebbels was always trying to seduce her and if that wouldn't make her want to put an ocean between them, nothng would.

Dietrich was something else again, in every way. The BErlin Movie Museum has a collection of her costumes (they were collected by her and willed to the museum sector when she died), and they are amazing. It also surprised me how incredibly tiny she must have been.

 

[BlueTrain]

Although not the least bit noir-ish, a few movies that were brightly lit in direct sunlight and filmed in color had virtually no color in them. Everything was tan, brown or dirt color. I was thinking of a movie with Jay Silverheels that was, not surprisingly, about Indians and had no European parts at all. The Indians were well tanned, their costumes were brown or tan, the outdoor scenery was drab and dusty Texas (supposedly filmed somewhere near Dallas). I don't remember that much about the movie but I remember noticing that much.

 

[Seb Lucas]

Two of my favorite films had been The Sweet Smell of Success for it's real life NYC locations and Touch of Evil for a last look at old Venice, CA. More commonly films of the era had only one or two "off the lot" days in the budget and only bigger budget films were allowed to "travel." You see NYC in old films because there was still a film industry there and so the entire film was shot in NYC; the stock footage wasn't needed like it was in places where the whole film wasn't going to be shot.

They are two of my favourite films also.

 

[BlueTrain]

In the days of Westerns and adventure movies filmed mostly out-of-doors, the filming was done on movie ranches. Most of them were located within a certain distance of L.A. (don't know where they measured from) because if the locations were further away, everyone had to be paid more. I believe that may still be the case to some extent. My son works in the movie industry and Big Bear is the furthest he's had to travel. As it happened, he actually had to drive a production vehicle there as well as spending a few nights there. But there are still a few relatively close-in movie ranches. Some movies were even filmed in Griffith Park in the middle of L.A. One still that I've seen has a stagecoach and various people on the ground in front of a cave (also used as the Bat Cave) and in the shot, which is a long one, the Hollywood sign can be seen over the hill. But he tells me that sound in movies is always problematic.

I was thinking of other movies in color with very little color, though they weren't film noir but horror movies. Fog and darkness were themes in those films. In one sense, nothing in a film noir is black and white; everything is gray.

 

[MikeKardec]

In the days of Westerns and adventure movies filmed mostly out-of-doors, the filming was done on movie ranches. Most of them were located within a certain distance of L.A. (don't know where they measured from) because if the locations were further away, everyone had to be paid more. I believe that may still be the case to some extent. My son works in the movie industry and Big Bear is the furthest he's had to travel. As it happened, he actually had to drive a production vehicle there as well as spending a few nights there. But there are still a few relatively close-in movie ranches. Some movies were even filmed in Griffith Park in the middle of L.A. One still that I've seen has a stagecoach and various people on the ground in front of a cave (also used as the Bat Cave) and in the shot, which is a long one, the Hollywood sign can be seen over the hill. But he tells me that sound in movies is always problematic.

There is an area, a 30 mi. radius extending from the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega in LA, that has been agreed upon as an acceptable "production zone" to the entertainment unions. Within the zone crews are expected to drive and house themselves. Outside the zone production companies need to transport and house their cast and crew; thus it's MUCH more expensive. Outside the zone it's often a significant savings to shoot in a different state, especially one that offers tax rebates. Some of the studios had extensive back lots, some did not. In more scenic areas sets for specific productions were occasionally build on land bought or rented. Sometimes these were augmented and maintained by their owners for additional productions. A few have lasted until today. Though it has probably happened, few sets were ever built except for specific productions, there is no upside to it.

Filmmakers are very talented at converting LA into the location of their choice and making it's many areas work as exotic environs ... this has been one of its many up-sides over the years. It's my opinion, sometimes looked on as crazy by producers addicted to tax rebate money (which sounds good but can be a problem), that as long as you can make LA work for you there is no place in the world cheaper to shoot a conventional movie than inside the zone. The housing and transportation line items in film budgets can break a production and absolutely everything you will ever need is available or can be fabricated in LA.

I don't believe that the "zone" goes back to the early days when the studios chose their locations but its central point does reflect the most common places to shoot.

 

[MikeKardec]

Dietrich was something else again, in every way. The BErlin Movie Museum has a collection of her costumes (they were collected by her and willed to the museum sector when she died), and they are amazing. It also surprised me how incredibly tiny she must have been.

I have also seen this, it's an amazing museum. A lot of Germans left during their depression, which predated ours by a few years. By the time the Nazis came into power they had been steeled in Hollywood for a long time. There was something about the educational systems in Eastern Europe (a very practical emphasis on science?) that pumped out extraordinary movie craftspeople from around the turn of the century to the final closing of the communist borders around 1960.

 

[blueAZNmonkey]

When you move away from the plot details and consider the quintessential noir criterion: high contrast lighting, it seems like you drastically reduce the noir elements of a film if you placed it in color. Certainly you would still have the noir plot, but I can't imagine any of these great films having the same resonance if they were in color, and it sounds odd to say given that they actually took place in color. Imagine any scene from your favorite noir in color--colorful suits and ties, colorful dresses, colorful interiors, soulful streets, etc. The color simply removes you further from what we identify as noir.
How do you all feel color alters the noir qualities of a film?

I'm personally opposed to colorizing classic film noir movies... However, I have been amazed by modern colored noir movies. One of my favorite films in recent years was Brick by Rian Johnson (director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi). Trailer below:

I highly recommend checking this movie out.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think some sets were built for specific movies but they continued to be used for other movies, including TV, for as long as possible, sometimes with remodeling, sometimes not. Generally speaking, outdoor movie locations are usually pretty bare when not set up for shooting, without signs and all the other things you would see on a street, even to include lampposts and doorknobs.

One of the things about the L.A. area is that it offered a lot of varied outdoor locations, although there are fewer such places today because of development. The movie ranches in the Simi Valley have all but disappeared for that reason. Most studios had their backlots and some had movie ranches, too. Other movie ranches were privately owned, some by enterprising actors, although some never really took off as successful locations. There are a few interesting websites hosted by individuals who researched movie locations and did a lot of field work scouting out the locations as they appear today. But one commented that visiting those places is about like visiting a cemetery. A surprising number of movie ranches burned in the frequent brush fires that Southern California has, sometimes more than once.

All in all, the backlots were fantastic for realism for TVs and movies, I always thought.

 

[BlueTrain]

On the subject of so-called movie ranches, Warner Brothers still has one several blocks to the northwest of their studios in L.A. It hardly looks like a ranch but it does look like there are filming locations there.

 

[Edward]

I think some sets were built for specific movies but they continued to be used for other movies, including TV, for as long as possible, sometimes with remodeling, sometimes not.

Very common on Star Trek TOS - indeed, several notable episodes were written entirely around the availability of certain sets, including Native American and WW2.

 

[Doctor Strange]

An outstanding site I stumbled onto a while back about the Columbia Ranch, with loads of detail about its history and the films and TV shows shot there:

http://www.columbiaranch.net/map.html

 

[MikeKardec]

On the subject of so-called movie ranches, Warner Brothers still has one several blocks to the northwest of their studios in L.A. It hardly looks like a ranch but it does look like there are filming locations there.

An outstanding site I stumbled onto a while back about the Columbia Ranch, with loads of detail about its history and the films and TV shows shot there:

http://www.columbiaranch.net/map.html

I suspect that you guys are talking about the same place. I actually grew up playing on the Columbia Ranch lot and making Super 8 films there when I was a kid in the 1970s. A good friend of the family was an executive at Columbia.

Back lots were a great resource and the Southern California climate (with the exception of fires) allowed many to last a long time whereas sets in other places often collapsed or were otherwise damaged by weather. However, they always used to look sterile ... a problem that modern art directors have overcome to a great extent in the few instances that they are still used. Part of that was that Hollywood really liked life to look clean and well organized in the old days.

The great crime that the sets for Westerns perpetrated on our sense of reality was that Western towns were solid blocks of board and bat buildings jammed together. This was true in a few places but in the movies it was usually to control the sight lines leading to other sets. I was heartbroken to visit several Western sets in New Mexico many years later and find that even though they had completely empty sight lines all the way to the horizon they still build a town that looked like a Hollywood set. Thus Hollywood Westerns become the model for the historical west.

Likewise, movie towns never had residential districts, which were usually houses with a coach house or stable, a chicken coop, a plot for kitchen crops and a separated cook house or kitchen shed ... wood stoves were often "on" all the time and so would overheat a house if they were attached or not well ventilated.

Just like the sets on the movie lots many real Western town succumbed to fire and when rebuilt blocks were often made of stone or brick with steel fire shutters. You rarely see that sort of architecture in films unless the production bravely chose to shoot on a real life location. The original Young Guns used wonderful "real" locations and it looks utterly different from most Westerns because of it. I worked on a terrible Western pilot for CBS many years ago and we shot on the Back to the Future set, which was supposed to look hokey, rather than a actual 1850s era Western town that was part of a state park not far away. We shot there because "That's where Westerns are made." I did, however, manage to get us into a real old roundhouse nearby for a few scenes. The difference was night and day.

One of the great things about many Noir movies was the real locations and the occasional lack of that clean and well organized aesthetic. They were truly a step more realistic than most movies.

 

[BlueTrain]

One reason they may have looked sterile, a word I wouldn't have used, is because everything is removed when nothing is being filmed. But otherwise, they never looked all that bare or sterile on the screen.

A western cow town probably never had much in the way of a residential section, as you put it. The biggest difference, though, was imagining that the west looked like the way it did just north of L.A., where the big movie ranches were, although they weren't backlots (as the Columbia/Warner Brothers ranch is). One came away thinking that the west was hilly and covered with huge boulders. I've been to Kansas and Oklahoma and those places don't look like that. But some places in California sure do. I can think of some towns in the East that were little more than a crossroads, which may have even had a courthouse and at one time a stable and blacksmith and maybe even a mill. But aside from a couple of houses, there was no residential district. Parts of Arizona have a western movie feel, though. But it is true that some western boom towns, mainly mining, were rather larger and did have substantial buildings, sometimes pretty fancy, too, and early on. But even though they had houses where people lived, they were still small and were not large pieces of land with barns or gardens. The "downtown" was nice and compact, too, for one reason was that people walked or rode horses. Distances seemed greater then. All that describes the original parts of my hometown, huddled around the train station.

It is true that many Westerns, both movies and television, were set in some vague period in the Old West, usually sometime in the 1880s. But some of the B-westerns were set in another fantasy world in which cars and horses seemed to coexist and sometimes stagecoaches and busses. They were generally set in the present (that is, say, 1940), but there was otherwise little difference in the movies and the way people were dressed had the movie been set fifty years earlier, before Gabby Hayes had ridden his first horse. No complaints from me, though, even when they break into a song every ten minutes.

Sometimes a movie manages to combine everything. Gangs of men on horseback roaming the countryside while another gang of men are trying to get an oil rig in place.

 

[BlueTrain]

Not to change the subject but were the film noir productions of the 1940s as dark on the screen as the appear now when seen in a DVD? I realize film-actual film--will deteriorate as it's used but I just wonder when it looked like first time around.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What you get on DVD depends on the film elements used. If it's a murky 16mm dupe of a dupe print, it will look much much darker and murkier and contrastier than it would have on its original release. Most of the public-domain poverty row noir films you see tend to be like this, but they were sharp and clear when originally exhibited. But a noir made by a major studio and restored from the original nitrate 35mm negative for DVD release will look almost as good as it did on the big screen.