Black and White Films

We Americans are uncouth heathens. Sometimes I wonder if any of us are Anglo-Saxon.

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I want to recommend Day of Wrath (1943) original title: Vredens Dag, I don't believe it's been mentioned yet.

I agree completely. The Haunting is absolutely the most frightening film ever made, especially considering you never really see anything horrible in it. It's all left up to your imagination to scare the hell out of you.

Another great B&W scarey film is Night of the Demon shot in England but starring Dana Andrews. It would have been even scarier if as the director wanted, the demon is never seen. But the front-office boys insisted on having the boogey-bear in a couple of scenes at the start and end of the film. Too bad, because I can imagine a better demon than they could build.

There are lots of great B&W films from the 1930s-1960s. Many of the best have been mentioned, especially Double Indemnity, Street Car Named Desire, On the Waterfront, Dr. Strangelove, and of course Citizen Kane.

But there are some films that just need to be in B&W to get the kind of stark gritty look that they need to depict bad times and bad places. Like Grapes of Wrath, Dead End, The Ox-Bow Incident, Blackboard Jungle, Love with the Proper Stranger, A Face in the Crowd, The Men (one of Brando's earliest films), The Hill about a British stockade in North Africa in WWII where it's all sun and sand. Could say the same thing about Beau Geste (with Gary Cooper) one of the classics as well as They Made Me a Criminal or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Roaring Twenties, and The Maltese Falcon. War can look better in B&W as with From Here to Eternity, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Story of GI Joe, Battleground (snow and mud), The Steel Helmet. Lots of good B&W Westerns--High Noon, Yellow Sky, The Gunfighter, Red River, Along Came Jones, They Died With Their Boots On, The Virginian. My two favorite comedies were shot in B&W, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both of which deal with WWII issues that no other director ever touched at that time--girls dating soldiers and getting pregnant by someone she doesn't know, and young men spurned for not being in uniform because they were 4F--disqualified for health reasons). Also Sullivan's Travels and A Horn Blows at Midnight which Jack Benny turned into a running joke for years. Also Benny's best film, the original To Be or Not to Be.

This thread will eventually devolve into listing just about every B&W film there is, but don't let it get any further without Chaplin's pictures--City Lights, The Great Dictator, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, The Kid. For me, the man himself does not exist in color.

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Haxan and The Phantom Of The Opera are two recent B&W films I saw, both of which are mesmerizing. I love how much attention they force you to pay

Most people say Nanook of the North was the first documentary ever, but Haxan began filming a year prior to Nanook, and was released either a year after or the year of, I forget. So...which is the real first one? Obviously they had no knowledge of each other, probably even after release

I remember seeing them when I was 8 and giggling maniacally. I plan on rewatching all of them right after I rewatch the Marx Bros films

I'd recommend reversing the order. You'll be all laughed out after the Marx Bros, and Chaplin's pure slapstick isn't nearly as funny as a Harpo and Groucho tagteam, let's be honest.

Casablanca, Psycho, On the Waterfront, Schindlers List, High Noon- this is probably my top 5 B&W as of now in no particular order.

Eh?

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Though you prefer them with sound. Most of the film conventions we know of today were actually made in the silent era. Even things like "Ramping" that you see in movies like 300 can be dated all the way back to a movie called Down the Hudson which was made, (I believe), in 1903. Jump cuts, which are often credited to Jean-Luc Godard, are often reworkings of cuts, (and even mistaken edits), in the silent era. I could list more but I think I've illustrated my point. If you really want to indulge in an era that "changed how movies were seen or made" you have to go beyond Black and White... you have to go silent.

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage

Forgive me, I meant organized docs, I tend to forget these guys' early work.
But it still belongs to the French, Georges Melies

Actually that would a a "Scenic" Harry my good man. Early film, (as far as we know from the limited information we have, since many of the early films didn't survive... I think we only possess 40% of what was actually shot then), had three character types of films.

"Scenics" depicted distant lands or filmed "happenings" around town. (Some American filmmakers would film the industrial coast of Manhattan from a boat for example, an early example of the first "moving camera", [though that's credited to a Lumiere operator and film maker by the name of Eugene Promio]).

"Topicals" depicted news events, such as the San Francisco earthquake, and the devastation of it's aftermath. These "Topicals" could often be reconstructed takes on actual events too. Such as the sinking of the Maine.

Finally, "Fiction", which goes without saying as it's had a stronghold on film ever since it's initial creation.

Where "Scenics" and "Topicals" differ in the documentary film is in the simple case of the edit, and to another large degree, it's devotion to the subject matter through the preproduction process.

Milies' contributions are innumerable in early film, but even his "unfortunate accident" in the camera is not so much a jump cut as it is a trick editing. (Or I should say he utilized it for 'trick editing'). I'm referring to jump cuts that were achieved post-The Great Train Robbery/modern editing. These edits happened all over the world at the time and I'm usually convinced when I'm exposed to them that they were unintentional, (the reason I believe this is because they seem to be completely phased out once the industry becomes more stable in the 1910's, [at least when Hollywood sets up it's dream factory], and they don't appear again until Godard's Breathless.)

Favorites:
His Girl Friday (1940)
The Hustler (1961)
Gilda (1946)
Notorious (1946)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Classics: All of the Above

Must-See: There are just too many to name, darling. But any of the above will do

Special for the Screen: Mirage (one of the last classic black & white mystery movies and a good picture) and She Done Him Wrong (one more famous films that continued trying to push limits of the Hollywood code)

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Favorites/Classics:

(Directed by Frank Capra) It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Meet John Doe (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Lost Horizon (1937), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)

(non-Capra) My Favorite Brunette (1947), Psycho (1960), Young Frankenstein (1974), The Ghost Breakers (1940), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

And many, many, many more...

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