January 10, 2024: AmericanStudying Columbia Pictures: Technicolor

[January10th marks the 100th anniversary of the renaming,rebranding, and relaunchof Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconicAmerican film studios. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful ofColumbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to aspecial weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21st centuryFilmStudiers!]

On threefilms through which Columbia finally entered the 1930s-40sTechnicolor age (it was the last major studio to do so, forfinancial reasons):

1)     The Desperadoes (1943): Columbia’slong-awaited and much-ballyhooed first Technicolor film was this epic Western,directed by the prolific and starring a who’s who of 1940s actors, including Randolph Scott,Glenn Ford, Claire Trevor, and many more. It’s pretty interesting that thestudio’s first use of this innovativenew technology was for a film in one of the most consistently historicaland nostalgic genres—Desperadoesspecifically is set during the Civil War, as many famous Westerns were; butwhatever the particular moment, the Western is a genre frequently dedicated to imaginedversions of the past, no small factor in its increasingly popularity in1940s and 50s America. Sothe cinematic future met the imagined past here in 1943, you could say.

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

3)     The Jolson Story (1946): Despitesuch successes most of the studio’s films in this era continued to be filmed andreleased in black and white, and that was initially going to be the case forthis musical biopic, starring Larry Parks as Al Jolson.But studio head HarryCohn (the source of the studio’s initial reluctance to use Technicolor) wasimpressed enough by the early work on the film that he changed his mind, andthe final product was entirely filmed and released in Technicolor. There’s aparticular irony in that, given that it was Jolson himself who famouslyperformed the first line of spoken dialogue in an American “talkie,” his “Waita minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in TheJazz Singer (1927). By the 1940s, film audiences had heard and seen agreat deal—but there was always more to see, in Technicolor and every otherway.

NextColumbia context tomorrow,

Ben