#2388
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by Matt » Thu Jan 18, 2024 4:10 pm
Du Barry Was a Lady: Dire film. Supposed to have been a re-teaming of the gang from Panama Hattie (one of my favorites of the minor Arthur Freed musicals) until Ann Sothern got pregnant. Lucille Ball, ten years into her film career but never really breaking out, took over for Sothern, but she has none of her sassiness and spark. In fact, Ball sleepwalks through most of the picture, sounding like she’s reading her lines for the first time, and her singing voice is lifelessly dubbed. She does come to life in the final “Friendship” number where she is not dubbed and does a comedic dance, but it comes too late.
Red Skelton does his usual schtick. His appeal during the ‘40s reminds me of what Jeanine Basinger said about the similarly zany Betty Hutton and her stardom of the same time: “You had to be there.” “Rags” Ragland is his always reliable second banana, and Virginia “Miss Deadpan” O’Brien has a funny featured musical number. Zero Mostel, in his film debut, has a couple of amusing bits, and Tommy Dorsey and his band show up for a couple of scenes. But the film is thin and unfunny and charmless overall.
The 4K transfer from the original camera negative looks good but not as crisp or as brilliantly colored as the others I’ve watched recently. There are lots of pinks and lavenders and pale peaches and thistles and cornflower blues, none of the dazzling jewel tones one expects from Technicolor. There’s a general pallor to the image, and the skin tones have maybe just a pinch too much redness in some scenes. Perhaps this is all due to the iron fist of Technicolor color director Natalie Kalmus and her demands for softer, more naturalistic color. Or cinematographer Karl Freund, a true genius of black and white, was maybe out of his element here.
I won’t deny that these colors are natural (grapes and apples look like grapes and apples) and reproduced accurately (Warner Archive always does a great job with their Technicolor films), it’s more that the sets and costumes just don’t rise to the potential of the technology. When a rare cherry red or royal blue does appear, it pops as expected.
Neptune’s Daughter: Not much to say about this amusing, diverting, minor MGM musical comedy. More Red Skelton, Esther Williams doing Esther Williams stuff, Betty Garrett doing her man-hungry bit (which, to be honest, I always enjoy), and a young shirtless Ricardo Montalban. This is the film that introduced “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to the world, first with Montalban as the persuader of Williams and then with Garrett as the persuader of Skelton. If all the very online people who think this song is “problematic” only watched the relevant scene of this movie, they would instantly understand what’s going on in the lyrics.
This one looks very nice, better in terms of color than Du Barry Was a Lady, though the sets and costumes are still relatively restrained. What’s remarkable about many of these WAC discs sourced from original Technicolor camera negatives is the nuance with which shades and tones of colors are rendered. There’s a lot of beautiful and subtle variation that I’ve never really seen come through in past home video presentations. Some Technicolor films can seem almost like old comic strips with just one shade of yellow, red, blue, etc. or, if they have the common misalignment of the image, they can seem like looking at a 3-D movie without the 3-D glasses.
I learned, incidentally, in doing a bit of reading on the three-strip process, that Fox junked all their Technicolor negatives in 1978. So if you’re ever hoping for any Fox musicals or other Technicolor productions to ever look as good as these, it won’t happen. Good results can often be worked from interpositives, but not miracles.
Last edited by
Matt on Thu Jan 18, 2024 4:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
