3-strip Technicolor, year by year (1 Viewer)

[benbess]

Some 3-strip Technicolor movies released in 1946. There's a good HD master of Caesar and Cleopatra up at Netflix....

 

[Matt Hough]

1946's The Harvey Girls has beautiful Technicolor if the DVD is to be taken at face value.

 

[John Morgan]

FRONTIER GAL played recently on the Encore Western channel. It is a Universal film right before they went to Universal-International (1945). It looks like a new and beautiful transfer. Wish they would include this one in one of their Western box sets.

 

[benbess]

A few from 1947....Black Narcissus is on blu-ray and looks terrific. Wonderful film.

 

[Matt Hough]

My favorite Betty Grable movie is from 1947: Mother Wore Tights. Of course, it's a Fox film, so chances for a staggering Blu-ray are, I guess, slim to none?

 

[benbess]

Some Technicolor films from 1948. We already have The Red Shoes, in a spectacular release from Criterion. We are getting Garland in Easter Parade early in 2013. Looking forward to that one! A lot of other good titles are owned by WB or Columbia/Sony today, and so perhaps there's hope we'll see some of these. Any thoughts about these films? Other nominees? We did get Hitchcock's Rope from Universal, but not surprisingly they did an only so-so job on it.

 

[Matt Hough]

The DVD for The Pirate featured mediocre color. The print they show on TCM is more vibrant, but we still haven't seen it at its apex. I think the laserdisc comes closest to the vivacious color that The Pirate is capable of generating.

 

[benbess]

A few from 1949. My top pick would be She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which is one of the finest Westerns ever made. Magnificent Technicolor cinematography by Winton Hoch. Anyone else have any picks for this year or comments?

 

[Alan Tully]

A few from 1947....Black Narcissus is on blu-ray and looks terrific. Wonderful film.
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[/QUOTE]The Universal DVD of Unconquered looks fantastic, you'd think it was a Blu if you didn't know.

 

[Matt Hough]

The DVDs of some of MGM's 1949 output look very colorful: In the Good Old Summertime (especially warm and inviting), Little Women, On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame (two Gene Kelly hits with the latter even more colorful than the former).

Any of them on Blu-ray would be most welcome.

 

[Alan Tully]

The DVDs of some of MGM's 1949 output look very colorful: In the Good Old Summertime (especially warm and inviting), Little Women, On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame (two Gene Kelly hits with the latter even more colorful than the former).
Any of them on Blu-ray would be most welcome.

Yep, it's easy to forget how good some of the DVD's of three strip Technicolor films look. The Warner DVD of MGM's Scaramouche '52 looks really good.

 

[benbess]

A few from 1950....

 

[benbess]

documentary on Technicolor....

 

[Matt Hough]

The color on the DVD of Annie Get Your Gun is very nice. Ditto Summer Stock and Three Little Words. Very disappointed in the DVD of Two Weeks With Love: looks too dark though color is OK, deeply saturated. That last movie would need a redo if it ever made it to Blu-ray (which I think is doubtful, and I think I remember George Feltenstein saying that the elements they had to work with for Two Weeks were in very poor condition).

 

[John Morgan]

Before the day of computers and the internet and information, lots of Technicolor films were shown with black & white prints on television. It was sometime before I realized ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD and DODGE CITY were filmed in color. Even when color television came in, they still occasionally used the old black and white prints for many television showings. And you wouldn’t know it from the credits. It seems at least those two films were briefly rerun in the cinema in the early 50s and only in black & white prints. Warners rejiggered the credits to eliminate any mention of technicolor. In that regard, they did a professional job.
Another oddity was that in many color films that were printed black and white for television had various ways of hiding the color credits. Some would have a nice black square obliterating the credit and in other cases, it looked like they just scratched the emulsion to eliminate the credit...looking more like a result of Flash Gordon’s ray gun output.

 

[Matt Hough]

Our local ABC affiliate back in the day shared affiliation with NBC, so quite often ABC shows were shown on a delay (sometimes up to a week after the original broadcast). To punish the affiliate for not showing their programming on the network's schedule, the delayed broadcasts could only be shown in black and white even if they were in color. Thus, my first exposure to the movie Carousel shown on the ABC Sunday Night Movie was in black and white. Batman's first season was broadcast in black and white (though when it became this smash hit, the affiliate quickly changed over the summer to showing it at its scheduled time and we got to see the reruns in color).

 

[benbess]

There were about 70 3-strip Technicolor features released in 1951. We have a few of these already out on blu-ray, including An American in Paris, which is truly stunning, The African Queen, which also looks fantastic given the conditions under which it was filmed, and Quo Vadis, which looks quite good for most of the way. These are all from WB HV. If you don't already have them, pick them up! If anyone has ideas on which of the other 1951 Technicolor releases might be worthy, please feel free to suggest them and post a poster. The 1951 Show Boat is maybe not as good as the earlier version, but is still worthy, and being owned by WB seems a good bet at some point. Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo seems to get good ratings on imdb, as is also owned by WB. When Worlds Collide is a George Pal production that still stands up....

 

[Matt Hough]

True, the 1951 SHOW BOAT isn't as faithful to the stage version as the 1936 James Whale film, but it is certainly a feast for the eyes in Technicolor. I would love to see it (and the other SHOW BOATSs) on Blu-ray in my lifetime.

 

[benbess]

The musical fantasy scene with Oscar Levant in An American in Paris is hilarious. Here's a still that also shows you a bit of the pq....I can't recommend this blu-ray highly enough.

 

[benbess]

PQ is 100 times better on the blu-ray, but this gives you a taste of Oscar Levant doing Gershwin's Concerto in F in the film...