January 10, 2024: AmericanStudying Columbia Pictures: Technicolor

[January 10^th marks the 100^th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding, and relaunch of Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconic American film studios. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Columbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21^st century FilmStudiers!]

On three films through which Columbia finally entered the 1930s-40s Technicolor age (it was the last major studio to do so, for financial reasons):

1)      The Desperadoes (1943): Columbia’s long-awaited and much-ballyhooed first Technicolor film was this epic Western, directed by the prolific Charles Vidor and starring a who’s who of 1940s actors, including Randolph Scott, Glenn Ford, Claire Trevor, and many more. It’s pretty interesting that the studio’s first use of this innovative new technology was for a film in one of the most consistently historical and nostalgic genres—Desperadoes specifically is set during the Civil War, as many famous Westerns were; but whatever the particular moment, the Western is a genre frequently dedicated to imagined versions of the past, no small factor in its increasingly popularity in 1940s and 50s America. So the cinematic future met the imagined past here in 1943, you could say.

2)      Cover Girl (1944): Desperadoes seems to have done fine, but Columbia’s first Technicolor hit was a much more modern film: this 1944 musical romantic comedy, once again directed by the talented journeyman Vidor and starring two of the period’s premiere screen icons, Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. As illustrated (literally and figuratively) by the film’s eye-popping poster, Cover Girl made much better use of the new technology than a historical Western ever could; it’s difficult to imagine just how much such vibrant colors would hit audiences used to watching black and white films, but I’m sure the experience was quite striking, and one foreshadowed nicely by that poster.

3)      The Jolson Story (1946): Despite such successes most of the studio’s films in this era continued to be filmed and released in black and white, and that was initially going to be the case for this musical biopic, starring Larry Parks as Al Jolson. But studio head Harry Cohn (the source of the studio’s initial reluctance to use Technicolor) was impressed enough by the early work on the film that he changed his mind, and the final product was entirely filmed and released in Technicolor. There’s a particular irony in that, given that it was Jolson himself who famously performed the first line of spoken dialogue in an American “talkie,” his “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in The Jazz Singer (1927). By the 1940s, film audiences had heard and seen a great deal—but there was always more to see, in Technicolor and every other way.

Next Columbia context tomorrow,

Ben