1) Ted Turner is still alive, and somehow, he's only 82. I thought he was already 82 when he first came on my radar back in the 1980s, as the owner of the Atlanta Braves and the guy who was trying to colorize classic films.
2) You can still get colorized movies in 2021.
The example of #2 is Red River, which I watched Thursday night for a viewing series I'm doing through my Flickchart group on Facebook. I wouldn't have chosen to watch the colorized version, of course, but it was the one available on Stan, and the loss in the authentic experience was not enough for me to opt to pay for a rental.
This was actually my very first experience watching a colorized film -- that I'm aware of, anyway.
I had no idea they were still out there, really. Turner was so pilloried and satirized back in the day for his attempts to make older films "easier to watch" -- an admirable goal in terms of converting new cinephiles, if it didn't violate the core principle of appreciating art for what it is, at the time it was created. You can choose metaphors in almost any artistic medium, so I won't bother to provide them here.
Looking into it a little bit, I see that Turner Entertainment stopped pursuing this dubious enterprise because the process was too expensive. Adding to the cost were legal battles, such as the one waged by John Huston (and later his estate) over the attempt to colorize The Asphalt Jungle.
Wikipedia has a list of films that have been colorized, and there are hundreds of films on it. Handily, it also includes who was responsible for the colorization. And though probably half of the films on the list were, in fact, colorized by Turner Entertainment, Red River is not one of those. It was colorized by Color Systems Technology.
Why it's still available as the option a streaming service would choose to pick up is beyond me. My guess is that the color version, acknowledged now as the inferior if not the blasphemous version, has less value and costs less to license.
So really, what did I think of this colorization thing?
Well for one, I thought the technique was well done. I saw when I first looked up Red River on Stan that it was listed in parentheses as the colorized version, but I'd forgotten by the time I sat down to watch. I didn't remember until about 15 minutes in. Once I remembered I started to notice what I thought might be small flaws attributable to the process, but I think it's more telling that it took me so long to notice.
I was a 3 stars out of 5 on Red River, but that was a significant improvement from the gumpiness I felt toward it early on, when it looked to be a textbook example of the kind of western I don't like, John Wayne and all. As it went along I decided it was more complicated than I originally gave it credit for.
It's hard for me to say what role, if any, the colorization played in my thoughts on the film. I think knowing beforehand that a film is colorized could bias you, but I think the greater impact of colorization on a person comes in terms of films you already cherish as favorites that undergo the process. That's where the claims of blasphemy are really most resonant.
I will say that having the film in color clearly went against Howard Hawks' wishes. On the Wikipedia page, the prospect of filming in color is discussed, and Hawks rejected it because he thought that Technicolor, which was the industry standard at the time, was too garish for the realistic style he desired.
It's the type of authorial intent Turner would have clearly trampled all over.
I'm not sure yet whether I will actively resist my next opportunity to watch a colorized film. It will probably depend on the circumstances. In this case, I was under the pump to watch the film in June, and though I probably could have gotten a black and white rental through iTunes, I just opted for the Stan version instead. If it's a movie I could watch or not watch at my leisure, I might be more inclined to scrutinize the decision before making it next time.
I'll just finish by leaving this here:
