Whatever Happened to Black and White?
In the 1950s, the film industry began abandoning black and white for color, the competition of television being the primary cause for this nearly wholesale conversion. With people having an "entertainment box" in their own homes, movie producers had to come up with new ways of getting people out of their houses and into movie theaters. Some innovations were merely passing novelties, such as 3-D and Cinerama. Others, such as wide screen and a new, cheaper color process, changed the face of the movies forever.
People have done wonderful things with color over the years - from the subtle cinematography of the GODFATHER films to the simple, cartoonish palette of Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY. Still, I often mourn the death of black and white, especially in the light of some extraordinary films that were shot in the past few decades.
It is hard to imagine Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1961) in color, though stupidly Hollywood remade the film in color in 1998. At the time, Hitchcock was already revered as a superb director and was making his mark on television with ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. PSYCHO is something of an offshoot of Hitch's television work, shot quickly on a low budget. It is almost the polar opposite of Hitch's previous film, NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Where NORTHWEST presented a fun adventure that took us from cornfields in the middle of nowhere to a chase over the face of Mount Rushmore, PSYCHO was a disturbing psychological drama which took place in a motel and a creepy house on a hill. The black and white photography emphasizes the starkness and hopelessness of the circumstances various characters find themselves in. The combination of the choice of black and white plus Bernard Hermann's minimalist score is just one of the things that made PSYCHO a landmark film. (Cinematographer: John L. Russell, Jr.)
Martin Scorsese, perhaps our most talented director since Hitchcock, filmed his classic RAGING BULL (1980) in black and white. The story of boxer Jake LaMotta, it is a riveting, if not pleasant, film. LaMotta, as played by Robert De Niro, a self-destructive, violent man, who makes his own life and the lives of everybody around him unbearable. Brilliantly, Scorsese uses a touch of color in the film, by showing us some home movies of LaMotta and family. In the color scenes, everybody is smiling and happy, while in the black and white scenes, LaMotta is usually beating or kicking the hell out of somebody or getting pummeled himself in the boxing ring. The contrast is remarkable. The boxing scenes themselves are beautifully composed and filmed. Significantly, Scorsese, not a
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