B&W

You probably wrote this before you saw it?

So, Americans according to Airbnb are flocking to Atrani because of this series as if they haven’t already flooded Italy since COVID so much so that the locals don’t know what to do. They are ticketing tourists taking selfies on the Rialto Bridge in Venice because there are just too many people standing around blocking the walkways. And I was just there and there were too many people. But according to travel sources, because of this series, people are going to where Ripley was. And that’s because of this great visual never before seen in this black and white masterpiece.

Noir or Film Noir is the French word for black, but also a style of movie or novel. The blackness refers to things that people do "in the shadows" when no one can see, or in another way to think about it, in the darkness of their hearts. These movies arose in the late 40s and 50s when almost all films were in black and white, and they took advantage of this in the look of the movies, using shadows heavily and interesting effects with cigarette smoke, for example, which tends to look better in a black and white background. The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and Shanghai Express are some of the more famous films that have elements of this style.

These movies probably got popular because people were tired of the always cheerful, "good guys always win" movies of the 1930s. By this time so many had experienced the horrors and tragedies of World War II that they no longer saw the world that way. They were ready for stories that better reflected their own experiences. In the '50s these films became more tragic in nature. The characters seem doomed to fail no matter what they do.

Patricia Highsmith wrote the Ripley novels in this period and they tend to have this Noir quality so I'm guessing that is probably why they decided to make the series in black and white.

Another reason might be to avoid comparisons with the 1999 film.

I thought the Italian architecture looked spectacular in b&w!