Movie Natters: January 3, 2007 Archive

Color me bad

Posted at 4:44 PM on January 3, 2007 by Euan Kerr (1 Comments)

Colorization is a bad idea. It's just that simple.

Over the holiday the family sat down to watch the Humphrey Bogart/Peter Ustinov/Aldo Ray curiosity "We're no angels."

It's a 1955 Michael Curtiz directed story about three laid-back murderers who escape from the Devils Island prison camp. They end up being unexpected guests at the home of an unworldly haberdasher (played by Leo Carroll, the man best known to the Sixties generation as Mr Waverly from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ) He's terrorized by a snobbish miser of a cousin played with sneering glee by Basil Rathbone

The film has a certain stately charm, although the Devils Island here is more like a resort than the death camp described in "Papillon." There are bad jokes about prison life, the shopkeeping life, and the vagaries of the haberdashers daughter's lovelife.

It is not a great film, but could be a pleasant way to while away a couple of hours.

Sadly the tape we had was colorized. It just seems strange that someone felt the need to take a work carefully created in monochrome with its subtle shades of gray to run it through a computer to add oddly inconsistent fleshtones. And then to not do any cross-reference between scenes so that a character's shirt changes color every time there's a new shot? That's just silly.

The arguments about colorization have been made many times before. In a way it's a moot point.

Unless of course you are stuck in a place without a TV signal, a VCR and only one tape.

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