Play it again, in black and white

I went to see a lovely film last week called “The Artist.” It’s the story of a silent movie actor (Jean Dujardin) who dismisses motion picture sound, and suddenly finds his career disintegrating before his eyes while the career of an actress that he essentially discovered (Berenice Bejo) has a meteoric rise to the top in the world of “talkies.” The film has received a stunning 10 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor (Dujardin), Best Supporting Actress (Bejo), Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), and Best Original Screenplay (also Hazanavicius). We’ll see how it does in a few days.

The first thing that people point out is that the film is in black and white and that it is largely a silent film. If it wins Best Picture, this will be the first silent picture to win that award since 1927′s “Wings” won the very first Oscar for Best Picture. It’s possible that it’s also the first silent movie to even be released theatrically since 1976 when Mel Brooks released the aptly titled “Silent Movie.”

While I was blown away by the film, it occurred to me that a great many people my age and younger will be quick to dismiss the film (if they haven’t already), for the simple fact that it was shot in black and white (of course the silent factor probably doesn’t help either). Too many people these days who reject films simply because they were not shot in color. They wind up missing out on some classic works of cinematic art and, dare I say, genius.

There was a movement in the 1980s to “colorize” old black and white films. While at the time it may have seemed like a good idea, the results often were less than thrilling. The people who made the films wondered why it was necessary to tamper with classic movies, and many fans determined that it was probably best to have left it alone. It’s nice to see that colorization has more or less been abandoned in the intervening decades.

There are many reasons to shoot a film in black and white. In the case of “The Artist” it’s done for … well, artistic reasons. There are some films that are just better in black and white. Given its subject matter, I don’t think this film could have worked in color. Even after color film became the standard, some directors chose to shoot certain films in black and white. Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece “Raging Bull” (1980) would not have had the same effect in color. I feel the same way about Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic “The Last Picture Show.”

Another reason is finance. During the 1930s and 1940s, color film was very expensive. Many studios limited their use of color to sweeping epics like 1939′s “Gone With the Wind.” And while Kevin Smith had envisioned his first film, 1994′s “Clerks”, in color, it was cheaper to shoot it in black and white, which I feel gave the film character it might not have had otherwise.

This is not to say that I’m against color films. Some films like “Gone With the Wind” and John Ford’s 1952 classic “The Quiet Man” would not have worked in black and white. However, we shouldn’t disregard films just because of they aren’t in color. It’s my opinion that one movie inspires the next. Every film we see in the theaters today is a product of what came before it. To forget about early films would be forgetting not just our culture but also our history. It’s with that in mind that I present to you my …

Top 5 Favorite Black and White Films:

1. “Casablanca” (1942). When asked what my favorite movie of all time is, I have to say that it’s a tie between this film and 1964′s “Dr. Strangelove” (since I’ve written quite a bit about “Strangelove” in the past, I’ve left it off of this list). What’s fascinating about this film is that despite the fact that it’s set (and was filmed) in the midst of World War II and is, to a great degree, focused on various refugees fleeing their homeland in search of a better life in America, the film still holds up 70 years later. At the heart of the plot lies Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) who fell in love in Paris before the Nazi occupation. Once the Nazis march in, they decide to leave together. At the last minute she mysteriously abandons him. They are reunited under extreme circumstances in Rick’s restaurant/casino in French Morocco. And while it’s easy to dismiss this film as just the story of two star-crossed lovers, I contend that the film’s detractors (as well as many of its supporters) are missing what really makes it work. It’s not the chemistry between Bogey and Bergman (although that doesn’t hurt). What I loved about the film was the chemistry between Bogey and Claude Rains, who played Louis Renault, the Prefect of Police. Rick and Louis’s “beautiful friendship” actually began long before the film ended. This is an example of one of cinema’s earliest “bromances,” and it not only holds the film together but it’s one of the elements that makes it a classic that continues to appear on critics’ “best of” lists.

2. “Top Hat” (1935). Possibly my favorite musical of all time. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers just made all those dances look so easy. Fred plays Jerry Travers, an American entertainer who is in London to star in a play produced by his friend, Horace Hardwick (played superbly cluelessly by the wonderful Edward Everett Horton). Jerry’s tap dancing in Horace’s hotel room disturbs the slumber of Dale Tremont (Rogers) in the room below. She mistakes Jerry for Horace who is the husband of her friend Madge (Helen Broderick). Hilarity, singing and dancing ensue as Dale believes she is starting to have an affair with a married man. The art deco sets are a feast for the eyes (even in black and white). It’s no surprise the film received one of its four Oscar nominations for art direction. Irving Berlin’s songs are absolutely timeless and are still being sung today, most notably “Cheek To Cheek” (which also received a nomination for Best Song). And, for those of you who enjoy seeing actors before they were famous, keep an eye out for an uncredited Lucille Ball in a bit part.

3. “His Girl Friday” (1940). Cary Grant is one of my all time favorite actors. When compiling this list, I didn’t want to have more than one film with the same leading actor (I’m particular about that sort of thing). So you can imagine the dilemma I faced when having to choose just one film starring the great Archibald Leach. There are just so many, but if I have to pick one this quintessential screwball comedy is it. The film takes place at a newspaper in which editor-in-chief Walter Burns (Grant) does his best to sabotage the upcoming marriage of his star reporter and ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) by convincing her to write a story on the pending execution of a convicted killer. Probably best remembered for it’s incredibly fast-paced, overlapping (and oftentimes ad-libbed) dialogue, the film is only an hour and a half long, despite having a screenplay that would normally produce a film twice that long. This movie is based on the play “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in which Hildy’s character was originally a man. Director Howard Hawks’s secretary read that character’s lines during auditions. He liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman and changed the part. I think he made the right decision.

4. “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962). When the American Film Institute made its list of the Top 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains in motion pictures, I was pleasantly surprised to see at the top of the heroes list not Superman or Batman or anyone else with supernatural powers and abilities, but an attorney in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, named Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck), whose only superpower was human decency. Finch had the simple decency to defend a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in the segregated South during the Depression. Based on the classic novel by Harper Lee, the story is told through the eyes of Finch’s daughter, Jean Louise “Scout” (played by Mary Badham, who, at the ripe old age of 10, received an Oscar nomination for her first film performance). Scout learns from her father important life lessons about treating every person with dignity and respect regardless of what the general population may believe.

5. “A Night at the Opera” (1935). I had the same problem with the Marx Brothers that I had with Cary Grant — trying to pick only one film for this list. In the end, I have to choose this one (although 1930′s “Animal Crackers” was a tough one to dismiss). I’ve always been a fan of the Marx Brothers’ dialogue, particularly Groucho’s. The contract negotiation scene between Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho) and Signor Emanuel Ravelli (Chico) is now legendary, in spite of the fact that I’m sure it broke the hearts of children everywhere when they discovered “there ain’t no Sanity Clause” (sorry, Virginia).

Runner-up: “Young Frankenstein” (1974). This spoof of 1930s Universal horror pictures is arguably one of Mel Brooks’s two masterpieces (the other being “Blazing Saddles,” released earlier the same year). I once read that the film was released by 20th Century Fox because Warner Brothers (which released “Blazing Saddles”) refused to let Brooks film it in black and white. I also read somewhere that it was shot in black and white because the monster makeup didn’t work in color. I don’t know how much, if any, of those stories is true. But I do feel that, given the fact that it was an homage to those old horror films, particularly 1931′s “Frankenstein,” the movie would have worked at all in color.

This is really only the tip of the iceberg. I’d love to hear from you. What are some of your favorite black and white films?