A Few Words About A few words re: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1 Viewer)

[Ken_McAlinden]

Robert,
Drifting a bit off topic, but is it too early to estimate when we can expect to see a restored "Story of a Patriot" on display in Williamsburg? My sister lives in Norfolk, so I may have an opportunity to see it while visiting. Colonial Williamsburg is a fascinating place to visit even without the film, though.

Regards,

 

[DeeF]

Thank you very much for your words of wisdom, particularly in their brevity and clarity.

I think the issue about the color change of a 1938 movie falls under the category of "museum purity." As we call for original aspect ratios here in this forum, we feel it important to add original sound mixes and original color timings, etc., for the sake of integrity, even though in some cases, these things are being updated. In addition to restoring the original lustre of "Lawrence of Arabia," I personally believe Mr. Harris and his compatriots have made the movie better than ever, with DTS and other modern improvements.

Unlike furniture and some classical music performances, movies may or may not fall neatly into these museum-quality categories. The original look of the colors of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" may not even be achieveable, simply by the nature of the change in film stock.

It's very nice to have an expert here in the forum that can approve of the current restoration of these things, so those of us with less expertise can relax a little bit.

Another question for Mr. Harris comes to mind:

The restoration of these movies has brought something quite distracting (to my eyes): the heavy makeup can be seen more clearly than ever before. I've noted this in "Singin' in the Rain" and now I can see it very prominently in "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

Is there a way to display these movies, with greater clarity and definition, but continue to hide those things which were meant to be hidden, like wires and other aspects of special effects, and makeup for bright lights, which might have been less obvious under a grainier veneer?

 

[Robert Harris]

Hiding makeup and other details would necessitate a softening of the overall image. Its a trade off.

DTS on LoA does not make tbe film, or its audio better. In the case of LoA DTS is used as a carrier for audio information. It works perfectly in that regard, replacing delicate and expensive magnetic tracks. There is no improvement.

 

[Rob Ray]

I've been curious about the look of 1930s Technicolor ever since reading Richard May's laserdisc insert piece explaining the 1989 restoration work performed on Gone With the Wind. Well, earlier this year at the Motion Picture Academy I finally got to see an original 1939 Technicolor nitrate clip as part of a Technicolor symposium. The scene was the arrival at Twelve Oaks up to the introduction of Leslie Howard. As Mr. Harris says, it was very sepia-like with lots of brown and with all the reds, blues and greens very muted. The closest example I can compare it to is Lumivision's laserdisc of "The Little Princess" (1939) which is also supposedly taken from an original print. Trust me -- a lynch mob would descend on Warner Home Video if they released GWTW looking like it did in 1939.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

GWTW is a tricky one, though, because it was released three or more time under Selznick's supervision with distinctly different looks, IIRC. When timing a reissue, one must consider whether they are going for GWtW circa 1939, circa 1947, circa 1954 (sans cropping )...

Regards,

 

[DeeF]

I've been curious about the look of 1930s Technicolor ever since reading Richard May's laserdisc insert piece explaining the 1989 restoration work performed on Gone With the Wind. Well, earlier this year at the Motion Picture Academy I finally got to see an original 1939 Technicolor nitrate clip as part of a Technicolor symposium. The scene was the arrival at Twelve Oaks up to the introduction of Leslie Howard. As Mr. Harris says, it was very sepia-like with lots of brown and with all the reds, blues and greens very muted. The closest example I can compare it to is Lumivision's laserdisc of "The Little Princess" (1939) which is also supposedly taken from an original print. Trust me -- a lynch mob would descend on Warner Home Video if they released GWTW looking like it did in 1939.

What's funny about this is that this is how I find most movies look today, muted color. Certain movies are so muted, one would be hardpressed to name the color of certain things in the movie (look at Godfather III for an example). If this is just a matter of preference, or taste, then why don't we want the old movies to look this way, too?

I think the old 3-strip Technicolor movies/prints must have had darker, shadowier colors, but also blockier, more unnatural contrast. The shots I have seen of Becky Sharp look this way -- a block of red, a block of blue, a block of green, all bumping up against one another. Perhaps modern film stocks and developing techniques have helped to minimize the contrast limitation.

Really, I don't know what I'm talking about at all, I'm just ruminating. I use Photoshop, but I've never developed a picture in my life, nor shot a movie camera.

I certainly think "The Adventures of Robin Hood" looks absolutely splendid on the new DVD. When I saw this movie on TCM some months ago, over cable, I thought the colors were way too bright, almost neon, not natural, and I wondered if that was the original look. But the DVD doesn't look that way at all -- it's beautifully natural, but vibrant, with incredible detail. I believe it's the best 3-strip color movie we have on DVD, and the movie is good too!

After I got this last weekend, I watched the movie 4 times in 48 hours.

 

[Bill Burns]

Okay, "Mr. Burns" (I loathe The Simpsons, and anyone who references Quentin Tarentino's new film gets a digital black eye ) would like to iron this out, because there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding Technicolor.

Now, first of all, Robert Harris (film restorer, and so the de facto resource for this info) said: "Three strip films produced during the early years of the process generally had an extremely heavy, muted, sepia look with low color levels."

In Roger Ebert's (leading national critic, but not a film restorer) recent "Great Movies" review of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ebert says precisely the opposite. I'm not sure how much of his copyrighted article I can reproduce by fair use laws, so I'll link the complete article here and direct attention to the entirety of paragraph #4 ...

http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/greatm...robinhood.html

... in which phrases such as "a richness of color that modern color films cannot rival" are used in describing the "early" 3-Strip Technicolor process.

At The Widescreen Museum, they offer a registered print example of Technicolor's "Process #4" (the same 3-Strip process -- Technicolor's only 3-Strip process? -- which would have been used on Robin Hood, according to the timeline given on the first page of this section of TWM) as found in the 1934/35 production Becky Sharp:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldc...chnicolor6.htm

While not in keeping with Ebert's effusive proclamations, the image is what I'd expect of color from this period -- rich blues, good skin tone, and good detail; I'd expect rich reds, as well, but the image doesn't contain any; for a sample of rich reds, page 8 of this section of TWM offers a few frames from Disney's 1940 Fantasia:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldc...chnicolor8.htm

For a sample of even richer blue from the above-named Becky Sharp, an image is provided here alongside a vintage lobby card:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldc...chnicolor9.htm

An interior with low "primary color" (and a low incidence, more specifically, of the colors Technicolor treats as primary, red, blue, and the false primary green) saturation follows.

Now, this is around three years prior to production of The Adventures of Robin Hood. If Ebert's comments are misinformation, that's understandable -- he explains elsewhere that his experience with Gone With the Wind began in the 1950's, when Process #4 was at its zenith and/or giving way to Process #5, which would produce some of the most dazzling Technicolor we've ever seen (Technicolor's website says that Process #6, developed in the '90's, bests even the finest color reproduction seen today; is this what was used for prints of Apocalypse Now: Redux? Note also their description of the "purpose" behind dye transfer on that page). But those images on TWM yield what I would expect -- rich primary colors, good skin tone, good detail, and fine non-primary color reproduction as well. The lower the light levels and more drab the environs, the more the image collapses into browns and blacks.

I've seen, and admired, two-strip Technicolor from the 20's, which could achieve very good reproductions of skin tone, reds, and greens. Those that survive in faded prints and faded original negatives naturally look poor, but at their best (The Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I haven't seen, or Toll of the Sea, which I have) the use of a subtractive color system, as opposed to additive tinting, is very clear.

If color reproduction in Robin Hood looks like Singin' in the Rain, it's false to the film. Ditto for GWTW. That's obvious. If it's fundamentally false to what like Technicolor productions of its time looked like at their best (the process was presumably still better refined in 1938 than it was for Becky Sharp in 1934/35), then it's false to the film. If timed correctly, though, and "enhanced" (i.e. more is pulled from the surviving elements than photochemical printing might capture, and digital timing allows for precise color rendition and detail) in a way true to the potential of the negative but false to the potential of the printing technology of the time ... I don't object. I like the idea of that very much, so long as the digital removal of wires and other material hidden in the printing/processing of the day is also accomplished.

I should mention here that one of the loveliest 3-strip films I've seen on disc comes by way of Anchor Bay: The Garden of Allah (another is the later Duel in the Sun). I presume Anchor Bay's transfer is from a photochemical source, an optically combined source, and as such it only remains to determine if their color timing is accurate. If it is, The Garden of Allah, from 1936 (two years prior to The Adventures of Robin Hood), demonstrates that early 3-strip could indeed look phenomenal, with deeply realized color and finely achieved detail. If Anchor Bay has tweaked their release in a way which is not true to its original form, that would be worthy of discussion, but again, if this is an accurate representation of major 3-strip productions two years prior to The Adventures of Robin Hood ... something doesn't add up. Singin' in the Rain, while using color schemes very different, is not appreciably more "modern" in its detail or color dileniation than The Garden of Allah (I've seen both on disc, but haven't directly A/B'd them ... perhaps I will when Robin Hood arrives) -- in fact, there are shots in Allah that absolutely bring tears to my eyes, their use of color is so beautiful, intense, and precisely gradated.

But at any rate, The Garden of Allah addressed ... Process #4 was in use, according to TWM, until 1955 (dye transfer Process #5 did away with 3-Strip, did it not? I believe so), which would place it in the rounds for early 50's productions such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Scaramouche, both on disc, and indeed Singin' in the Rain, from 1952 (whose specific timing is entirely different from that of a period adventure film, of course, but whose "intensity" and detail were "improved" in its new digital incarnation in the eyes of its co-director, presumably the same process now applied to Robin Hood). I'm not sure about Scaramouche, which looks astoundingly good, but the restoration info on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes suggests that its registry has been improved, but its fine detail and full contrast may have been hampered by the nature of surviving elements (I'm reading that into the brief info provided on the disc; it doesn't say this directly, and if I've misunderstood this, I invite correction) when considered alongside the very best the film could have looked when originally printed. I've never seen this film in theatres, but some of us may have during its original release, and if anyone here has, comments about the color reproduction would be very welcome.

While Process #4 was continually refined (according to TWM) throughout its life cycle, I'd generally expect films from the late 30's (a number of years into the cycle) and the early 50's (the end of the cycle) to demonstrate a ballpark similarity in color depth and range, allowing for improvements in stock (and of course improvements in registration, which can now be all but perfected digitally and, reportedly, with Technicolor's Process #6). Looking at the images of Becky Sharp, or indeed The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia, I see a color intensity most assuredly in the same ballpark with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

UR (which creates, according to a passing reference on DVDFile, a full digital record of each film strip) and anything LDI has done to further polish those digital files might bring forth, as it did for animation with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a depth and intensity not possible in a film print, but if they've kept tonal values constant to original timing cues, and if the value of what they've accomplished is not additive (if they haven't leant the film an apparent depth or pasted atop it a color scheme never intended and never to be found in its original form, tech hurdles or no tech hurdles in processing), I believe I'm going to be very pleased with the result, but not because it looks "good" -- rather, and only, because it evokes what I've seen in other Technicolor transfers of the day, transfers I haven't heard criticized in this fashion. It brings us closer to the potential of the product, as it were. To legalize what I'm saying, it would be true to the "spirit" of the film (that which it has the potential of being without changing its original values) despite being, in some ways, false to the "letter" of the film (how it could have looked with the printing technology of the day). If it doesn't capture that look, that "spirit," so far as I can tell as a casual viewer, I won't be terribly happy. I'll know in a few days! DeeF says it looks very natural -- well, so does Scaramouche. They shouldn't look alike -- aside from the differing approaches in cinematography, the process itself presumably developed significantly in the more than a decade between them -- but if we're considering only what the negative could produce, and not what printing technology of the day could produce, and judging this along with artistic intent evident in surviving records and the negative itself ... well, there's some wiggle room, I imagine. But I'm puzzled by claims that a true representation of a release print would look muted and perhaps even a short throw from sepia-toned, given the above ... I wonder if Robert Harris is referring to material like the interior shot of Becky Sharp linked earlier when he refers to a sepia-toned quality? Other shots from the film, also linked above, leave sepia tone far behind, and some of the "sepia quality" in the shot that demonstrates it (allowing for low light conditions, as mentioned earlier, which invariably reduce color registration) might be color fading in a vintage print, might it not? The negatives are B&W registers very resistent to fading, but a print from anyone's private collection could exhibit any number of color problems, could it not?

I hope Robert Harris understands that my questions are not intended as doubts in what he says, but rather as a means of exploring precisely what does and does not register as "true" in the transmutation of a film print into a DVD transfer (or indeed any home video form, whether low or high res), and how much is opinion versus how much is fact -- I believe I can safely assume that few if any of us were adults in the 1930's, and so few or none of us attended the premieres of any of the above-named films of that era; a few here might have seen a premiere of an early 50's film. If there is anyone on the board who attended a first run showing of any of these films, recollections of that experience would be most welcome.

Those bored by such debates/discussions need not participate, of course (I'll say "excellent!" if I love the transfer when this arrives, just to play along), but I hope I'm not the only one who finds this exploration valuable. There's as much compliment in a thoughtful discussion as there is in a sentence or two of praise, after all -- one usually doesn't discuss and debate matters with those whose opinions and experience they do not value.

So naturally my feelings will be very hurt if no one responds ...

...

...

No, no, I'm only kidding. (deafening silence ... gulp ...)

 

[Robert Crawford]

Bill,
Thanks for such a concise explanation about your point of view. Also, though, I respect Roger Ebert as a film critic, I tend to place more belief in a person's argument about the Technicolor process that actually practices film restoration as his life work.




Crawdaddy

 

[Bill Burns]

Hey, for me, that is concise, Robert. I mentioned that a film restorer's POV would be the de facto one, so we agree there, but discussion and debate ("exploration") yields the sort of info I mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs (opinion vs. fact, specific applications of principles, etc.). Ironing this stuff out, clearing up misconceptions, making clear the rocky paths, noble causes all.

What I'm always looking for is detail, as if my post's length doesn't make that clear. Heh. But if my interest isn't shared, it wouldn't be the first time! No worries.

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Well, I think I'll get the whole box.....

 

[Robert Crawford]

After viewing "The Adventures of Robin Hood" dvd, I can state to the world that I'm a very happy camper. Next up is "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" which will followed by that little film that has Cagney doing a some dancing in it.






Crawdaddy

 

[Edwin-S]

Are you guys watching pre-street date copies or has this film hit the stores? I went looking for a copy at the local Future Shop and couldn't find anything. They did have "Singing in The Rain" but I don't really care for tired old musicals.

 

[Robert Crawford]

:rolleyes

 

[Edwin-S]

I'm sorry you feel that way Mr. Crawford, but we cannot all have the same tastes. I just happen to feel that way about "SiTR". When I turn 50 maybe I will feel differently. Stranger things have happened. If anyone had told me a few years back that I would buy 'CITIZEN KANE' or 'DOCTOR ZHIVAGO' -I could never figure why my Dad liked the movie so much-, I would have laughed in their face; however, I do have copies of both films and think they are good movies. CITIZEN KANE is definitely not the Number one all time greatest movie ever made but, for me, such a thing doesn't exist.

You're really going to be rolling your eyes now, because I feel the same way about 'IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE' as I do about 'SiTR': only more so.

A rolling eyes smiley, however, didn't answer the question I asked in the original post; although, your smiley was quite eloquent in its own right.

 

[Rob Ray]

The thing to remember in any discussion about the proper "look" of Technicolor at any historical point is that one of Technicolor's biggest strengths was its flexibility in achieving any look the director and the director of photography wanted. It's entirely possible that "The Adventures of Robin Hood" originally had color values resembling those on the DVD. Ditto "The Garden of Allah". 20th Century Fox in the 1940s used the most garish Technicolor in films like "The Gang's All Here" and "Diamond Horseshow".

I've seen "The Adventures of Robin Hood" many times theatrically over the past thirty years (sorry, my original-run movie-going goes back to "The Alamo" and no farther...) and it's always had the lush, colorful look that we commonly attribute to classic Technicolor today. Scott MacQueen screened "The Garden of Allah" at a Cinecon about 5 years ago and while the picture is terrific eye-candy serving a dull story, the visual presentation was stunning, as is the DVD.

However, it's apparently true, judging from that clip I saw, that "Gone With the Wind" was originally printed in a soft, muted color scheme for fear that audiences accustomed to seeing their feature films in black and white could not comfortably take nearly four hours of all-out "TECHNICOLOR!!" without eye strain. (My grandmother, who was of that generation, refused to buy a color TV set for years for this reason.) In subsequent re-releases, Mr. Selznick did not have these concerns and had the film's color retimed.

The bottom line is this: Technicolor has, from the beginning, been able to look pretty much any way you wanted it to. (Look at John Huston's "Moby Dick" for confirmation of this point.) This was the biggest immediately apparent drawback in the switch to Eastman Color in the 1950s.

So what did "The Adventures of Robin Hood" look like in 1938? Find an original print from the initial release, I suppose. But I suspect I'm going to be thrilled by the DVD. I can't wait until Tuesday.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Edwin,
Taste in film has very little to do with age and more to do with subjective taste in film as one of our youngest members on this forum is one of the biggest proponents of silent films there is on this forum. Furthermore, I could careless if you don't like "Singing in the Rain", but I felt your remark was unnecessary and was only meant to attract reactions from those members that do appreciate titles such as "Singing in the Rain" because this thread is basically about "The Adventures of Robin Hood".





Crawdaddy

 

[Robert Crawford]

To answer your edited post, I can see why some of us haven't answered your question.





Crawdaddy

 

[Edwin-S]

Okay. You are right maybe I shouldn't have made the comment considering the thread subject; however, I didn't do it to deliberately attract response. It was off the cuff. Sometimes a person treats posting too much like a general conversation. A person starts skipping around too much. I apologize. Would you like me to edit out the comment?

Getting back to the original topic. Has this movie been generally released. I cannot seem to find it.

 

[Robert Crawford]

There is no need for any editing since we both made our points. The dvd is being released this coming Tuesday.





Crawdaddy

 

[Edwin-S]

Okay...Thanks. Now what I would like is the release of "THE DAWN PATROL". Preferably, both the 1938 and 1930 versions but especially the '38 version.