LizzieMaine
Bartender
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
Watching "Nothing Sacred" (1937) on TCM right now - Carol Lombard looks great, the Technicolor looks absolute horrible, absolutely simply horrible. It's so loud and forced, that it's killing the movie for me.
They really hadn't figured out yet how to handle the three-color process at that point, and Natalie Kalmus's rather philistine tastes didn't help much with the color design.
For a long time all you could see of the color in this film was a queasy Cinecolor reissue print made in the 1940s that converted the image to a blue-orange two-color process, and made it look awful, so there was a lot of anticipation when a proper three-color restoration was done. Unfortunately, the restoration was done in 1999, when digital restoration was in its infancy -- and the restorers may well have done as much harm as good, since all they had to work from as a color guide was a degraded 1937 nitrate release print I think it's safe to say that even with the restoration nobody's really seen the film as it was intended to look since it was first released. But even if a pristine original print turned up, it would still look garish -- because that's what Natalie Kalmus thought the process should look like.