Color

Something that is rather curious to me is the art of colorizing movies, if it can be so called. I recall the story that is told of Orson Welles, who when near death was said to ask only that his films be protected from the intentions of Ted Turner. Turner would have had Welles' movies rendered into color, but it was not to be. This is perhaps as it should be, and yet one cannot help but wonder what might have been if such classics as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Magnificent Ambersons' were colorized.

There's little subtlety in colorizing a film after the fact. This is something that maybe can't be said about doing the same thing with 3-D. A movie may be the worse off for having been made into 3-D as an afterthought as opposed to having been conceived as such from the start, but it does not wind up being built up into utterly cartoonish dimensions as a result. This is often the case with colorizing, or with any early form of color film prints.

You wind up with something rather like the exercise I once had to go through.We had to take a black and white photograph and colorize it. I took a portrait photograph of Joseph Stalin, for some reason. I must have thought that it would be easy to turn that picture into color, because I swear to you that I have no affinity for the man. He was in reality every bit the monster that his rival in Germany was, or so I gather.

I get off track, don't I? I had gotten started on this whole subject as a result of watching 'The Adventures Of Robin Hood'. It's a classic film, or so I was led to believe before trooping off to the library and checking out a copy of same with the intention of filling in another gap in my education. It's also a film that has no shortage of color in it. I was under the impression that it was purely a black and white film. As I write this, I am under the impression that it is in fact in color. It's vivid color, to be sure.