Harry-N
Senior HTF Member
Good questions - and I tend to agree with you. I'm just playing a bit of "Devil's advocate" here, trying to rationalize what can clearly be seen as a yellowish color to that scene.
So, I dug out my copy of the "red velvet box set" and played the scene in question. What I observed on my TV was a lot less yellow looking than on these screen grabs, for sure. In fact, it looked (on my Sony 55" HDTV) like the set was indeed intended to look like that. The whole of "Mama's house" looks a bit tired and dingy, like the old white paint had yellowed with age. Look at the light switch near the front door. It's got dirt and greasy fingerprints all around it, as if it hadn't been cleaned in years. Hitchcock didn't show us that for no reason. All of his shots and sets are meticulously plotted out, so that tells me that perhaps he wanted this scene to look a little like it had a "waxy yellow build-up", to use the vernacular of the TV commercials of the era.
Still, the screengrab of the salt and pepper shakers sure looks like it's tinted funny, or that the color timing is off.
But then again, take a look at this screen grab from the same scene:
Notice the shiny silver-colored pot on the stove. If the color timing were skewed to the yellow side, wouldn't that gleaming silver/steel look a bit yellowish too?
Harry
...with more questions than answers, onlilne...