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fpbBritish and other TV networks have a pleasant habit of broadcasting old and famous movies on early Sunday afternoon slots. Today ITV scheduled the legendary Western Red River, which, as it happens, I had never seen.
I switched the TV on. I saw what was being shown. I was horrified. I tried to hold on for a few minutes, but I was forced - literally forced - to turn the horror off, with bitter curses at the filth who had allowed such debauched filth to be broadcast.
It was colorized.
I have no words to describe the visual ghastliness of this obscenity. The best way I can hint at it is to think of an old, cheap postcard, of the kind in which blotches of violent colours have been cheaply overlain on a black-and-white photograph; and then imagine it stretching on in time, minute after undendurable minute.
It is not just that it looked wrong: that the sky, the grass, the flesh of the protagonists, their jeans and shirts and Stetson hats, wore tinges that no sky or grass or human flesh (except, perhaps, one in the advanced stages of some foul disease) is capable of wearing. It is that it wholly destroyed the work. One does not have to be a competent artist to know that black-and-white cinematography is worked differently from colour; for one thing, it lays greater emphasis on contrast, which the colorization simply murdered. The work of the best that Hollywood had to offer at the time, an outstanding director (Howard Hawks) and his equally brilliant cinematographer, not to mention poor old John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, have been butchered, mangled beyond description and repair. And for what reason? Is there any movie or TV executive with brains so feeble - however feeble the average of brains in that world may be - as to seriously believe that a person who would not watch a black-and-white movie could be convinced to watch this pasty, cancerous horror instead?
I am still not settled down. I wish there were words in the English language, or in any, to say just how furious I am. I could vomit, I really could.
I switched the TV on. I saw what was being shown. I was horrified. I tried to hold on for a few minutes, but I was forced - literally forced - to turn the horror off, with bitter curses at the filth who had allowed such debauched filth to be broadcast.
It was colorized.
I have no words to describe the visual ghastliness of this obscenity. The best way I can hint at it is to think of an old, cheap postcard, of the kind in which blotches of violent colours have been cheaply overlain on a black-and-white photograph; and then imagine it stretching on in time, minute after undendurable minute.
It is not just that it looked wrong: that the sky, the grass, the flesh of the protagonists, their jeans and shirts and Stetson hats, wore tinges that no sky or grass or human flesh (except, perhaps, one in the advanced stages of some foul disease) is capable of wearing. It is that it wholly destroyed the work. One does not have to be a competent artist to know that black-and-white cinematography is worked differently from colour; for one thing, it lays greater emphasis on contrast, which the colorization simply murdered. The work of the best that Hollywood had to offer at the time, an outstanding director (Howard Hawks) and his equally brilliant cinematographer, not to mention poor old John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, have been butchered, mangled beyond description and repair. And for what reason? Is there any movie or TV executive with brains so feeble - however feeble the average of brains in that world may be - as to seriously believe that a person who would not watch a black-and-white movie could be convinced to watch this pasty, cancerous horror instead?
I am still not settled down. I wish there were words in the English language, or in any, to say just how furious I am. I could vomit, I really could.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-24 10:21 am (UTC)I think it's completely stupid. As you said, filming in black and white is much different from filming in colour.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-24 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-24 05:11 pm (UTC)