Incredible color!


One of the main characters of this movie is the Technicolor. At first I thought it was a colorized B&W film, so I came here to check. There's somthing about the color that just doesn't look right - it looks prettier than modern films.

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3-strip Technicolor had a saturation and was "timed" differently from what we see today.
Generally, color today is subdued because audiences tend to feel bright colors are cartoonish, even if they reflect the values accurately.

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Technicolor in the 1940s was truly vivid, almost garish. It gave images a surreal quality.
I was reminded of that while viewing the musical "That Night in Rio" (1941), which benefited from that color saturation.
But color reproduction was not always even, because various studies experimented at the time with different film stocks. This is most noticeable when comparing European color movies with U.S. color movies.

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I've always thought the the 3 strip Technicolor has an oddly dimensional quality to it which seems to make it pop out at you in a very subtle way. Everything actually looks rounded but not as obvious (and garish) as 3 D. I love this look, especially in contrast to the new digital cameras which dulls and blends all colors and looks flat as a tortilla.

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