Is this "anti-B&W" thing really true?

There's a funny commentary on Dickens - Great gargoyles, lousy architecture.

And someone seeing a Shakespearean production for the first times, thinking Shakespeare must have been quite a plagiarist, because there were so many familiar phrases in it

 

There is also a matter of style. I remember being a young kid and the family was watching some old 30s or 40s film on TV, and I took notice of something that hadn't occurred to me before - virtually all of the women in these old movies looked exactly alike, with the same exact hairstyle.




I know they're not exact, but they all had the same effect: long curls that reached to their back. And the fact that all of the movies were in black and white, they all had those pasty-looking faces that they used to show up better in black & white.

My point is, I could take one look at a movie and see an actress with a pasty-looking face and long-ish curly hair and immediately determine that the movie was before my time. And they all looked the same to me.

That was then, though and this is now. Today, I can immediately spot the difference between Greer Garson and Ingrid Bergman - or any other of the actresses of the black & white era. But as a youngster - it was a great clue that "I wasn't interested."

I hear a number of younger folk who when faced with watching something from the 60s or 70s, they'll always make some comment about the garish clothes, furnishings, set design of the films and TV shows of that era. It's unfamiliar to them and like all of those copycat, pasty-faced actresses I looked at, they cannot imagine living in a world of orange sofas and green shag carpeting, let alone a world of black & white.

It's my opinion that given time, the younger generations will grow up and have a better appreciation of what had gone before, much like we did. How much stuff will be lost to history? That we can only speculate about.

Harry

 

Sure, that's pattern recognition. The more you see of a particular actor, the more easily you can recognize them. Go the Andrews Sisters!

 

I never really appreciated black and white films until they started appearing on Blu-ray. I'm often amazed how good they look all these years later.

 

I'd say a good 70-80% of the movies I watch are in B&W which is kinda ironic because when I was a kid and all we had was B&W, I was sure I wouldn't be watching any B&W once I had color but these days...since I mostly watch movies on TCM...all the best are in B&W. The golden age of Hollywood is mostly B&W.

 

I avoided B&W movies as a kid because they just seemed old and boring. Of course, I didn't want to watch Hawaii Five-O or Mannix, either, so maybe it just had more to do with not appealing to a child's sensibility. After all, the cartoons that I was enjoying so much came out of the 40's and 50's.

Reruns of "I Love Lucy" and "The Munsters" made me realize that I could like something in B&W.

 

"After supper (the Widow Douglas) got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

This level of disdain for what came before is probably as American (and laughable) as Huck Finn.

 

My only thought now when watching black & white film is "I see dead people".

 

Always under 90 mins.
No waste, just good taste.

 

"Im 37??" just doesnt translate well in a color movie.

 

Translate"?
Neither does westerns & musicals.
But, no biggie.