Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (65 page)

All of this is beyond Ted Turner, who owns Casablanca lock, stock, and barrel, having purchased the rights to it and hundreds of other films with the money of his stockholders. Now he deems it his responsibility to colorize old black-and-white movies in order to maximize the profits of those stockholders, just as other corporations have made their stockholders happy by polluting the environment in other ways.

There is no use trying to convince Turner that colorization is evilthat he is polluting the imaginations of countless young people who will see Casablanca for the first time in a colorized version. You can only see a movie for the first time once. And if your first viewing is colorized, you will never be able to experience the full original impact of the real film. Turner would not understand that. Apparently he has never sat in the darkness of a movie theater and felt in his bones the perfection of black-and-white photography, its absolute appropriateness for stories like Casablanca. When Turner was challenged at a press conference on the issue of colorization, he said he planned to "colorize Casablanca just to piss everybody off." This is a statement which reflects the subtlety of his thinking on the issue.

I have no doubt there are sincere people who believe that colorization "improves" a movie, that a black-and-white movie is somehow missing something. These people are sincere, but they are not thoughtful. They have never looked inside to ask themselves what their standards are, why they enjoy what they enjoy, why certain movies work for them. Everyone has seen many black-and-white moves. Were they not enjoyable? Did they not seem appropriate in black and white? Were they missing something? Were they, for example, missing an ugly overcoat of "colors" slapped on top of the blacks and whites and grays, to provide a tarted-up imitation of color, like cosmetics on a corpse?

There are basic aesthetic issue here. Colors have emotional resonance for us. Reds have passion, yellows speak of hope, some greens are sickly, others speak of nature. On a properly controlled palette, a color movie can be a thing of wonder-although many of the earliest Technicolor movies look silly today because such an effort was made to throw in lots of bright colors to get the studio's money's worth.

Black-and-white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black-and-white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.

In Hitchcock's Notorious, there is a moment when Ingrid Bergman walks slowly through a doorway toward Cary Grant. He is listening to a record of secret testimony, which proves she is not a Nazi spy. At the beginning of the shot, Grant thinks she is guilty. In the middle, he does not know. At the end, he thinks she is innocent. Hitchcock begins with Bergman seen in backlit silhouette. As she steps forward, she is half light, half shadow. As the testimony clears her, she is fully lighted. The lighting makes the moral judgments. To add color to the scene would clarify nothing, would add additional emotional information which might be confusing, and would destroy the purity of the classical lighting.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies in the way that I've looked at the scene from Notorious. But in our subconscious, that's how we see them. In almost all serious black-and-white movies, bands of light and shadow are thrown across the faces and bodies of the characters from time to time, to involve them in a visually complex web. In Night and the City, Richard Widmark, as a cornered rat, seems trapped by the bars of darkness which fall on him. If you colorize the underlying image of his face and clothing, you lose the contrast of the lighting. Since the shadows are pure and the colorization is not, you get an oil and water effect, visually disturbing.

In Casablanca, the Bogart character is developed through the use of lighting. At the beginning of the film, he seems to be a cynical man who cares only about the profits of his nightclub. When he sees Ingrid Bergman again after a long time, he is short and cruel with her, because he thinks she betrayed him. Then he learns more about her marriage to the Paul Henreid character, the Resistance hero, and by the end of the film Bogart has turned from a cynic into an idealist.

This change in his character is mirrored by the development in his lighting. In early scenes he is often harshly lit, or lit from beneath by the light of a lamp or a match, so his facial structure looks sinister. His face is rarely completely lighted. Henreid, by contrast, is usually well-lighted. Bergman's face seems shadowed when we doubt her motives, and becomes more clearly seen as we understand her. If you slap the pinks and tans of the colorizer's paintbrush onto their faces, you add a distracting dimension and you reduce the contrasts between lighter and darker areas. You make the movie look bland, less dramatic. You wash out the drama of the lighting.

The other night I was looking once again at another great black-andwhite movie, It's a Wonderful Life. This is the movie that Frank Capra thinks is the greatest he has ever directed, and Jimmy Stewart thinks is the best he has acted in. Stewart went to Washington to testify against the colorizing of the movie, and Capra, from his sickbed, made a plea that the film not be colorized. But because the copyrights had expired, the film was fair game-and a sickening colorized version has appeared on television and in the video stores.

The movie, once again, is about a moral transformation. In the early scenes the Stewart character is a bright young man who can't seem to stop helping people, until he becomes the moral backbone of the little town of Bedford Falls. In later scenes, after a series of setbacks, he has a long night of despair. He loses hope. He turns bitter. He stands on a bridge and considers suicide.

James Stewart's face is one of the most open and trustworthy faces in the history of the movies. In early scenes, it is fully lighted-and the light of his moral character almost seems to shine through his skin. In the shocking later scenes, as he despairs, Capra shoots him in shadow, and seems to have even used makeup to darken him, make him look more ravaged by the night after he has walked out into it. Do we need to know, as he stands on the bridge, that his face is pink and his coat is brown and heaven knows what color his shirt is?

There are two arguments here, one positive, one negative:

i. Black and white is a legitimate and beautiful artistic choice in motion pictures, creating feelings and effects that cannot be obtained any other way.

2. "Colorization" does not produce color movies, but only sad and sickening travesties of black-and-white movies, their lighting destroyed, their atmospheres polluted, their moods altered almost at random by the addition of an artificial layer of coloring that is little more than legalized vandalism.

Some small steps of progress have been made in the struggle against colorization. Recently the National Film Preservation Act was passed by Congress, in the face of expensive lobbying by Turner and the Hollywood studios. It would authorize a panel of experts to designate twenty-five films a year as "national treasures," and anyone colorizing or otherwise materially altering them would have to add a warning on the film and on any cassette boxes that their work had been done without the consent of the original filmmakers. This warning is likely to be as about effective as the health warnings on cigarette packages-but it is a step in the right direction.

Does Ted Turner care that Congress has stated that what he does to movies is a form of artistic desecration? I am sure he does, because additional legislation may someday prevent colorization altogether. In the meantime, the Film Preservation Act is a moral victory. And there is a way that you, dear reader, can share in that victory. Do not support the broadcast, the rental, or the sale of colorized films.

APRIL 1990

he distinguished British actress Helen Mirren was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and has played most of the Bard's major women's roles. So when director Peter Greenaway called from England to ask her to testify on behalf of the movie they made together, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, it was partly because she would make a most respectable witness.

Greenaway's film had been denied an R rating by the movie industry's Classification and Ratings Administration, and so Mirren took the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York to appeal the verdict before the system's Appeals Board. At the hearing she was asked a curious question:

"What would your comfort level be if you were sitting next to a nine-year-old during this movie?"

Mitten couldn't believe her ears. "I told them a person would have to be insane to take a nine-year-old to a film like this," she told me. "It's intended for adults, not children."

But that hypothetical nine-year-old stands at the center of the current controversy over the nation's movie rating system, which-strange as it seems-has no practical way of declaring a movie for "adults only." The implication of the R rating-which says those under seventeen can be admitted with a parent or adult guardian-is that the Ratings Board must consider the possibility of underage viewers in making its decisions. They're not supposed to be there, but they might be. And without a workable "adults only" rating, the system provides no way to keep them out. No way except the discredited and disreputable X rating, which is identified in everybody's mind with hard-core pornography, and is the kiss of death for any movie seeking broad commercial distribution in the United States.

The implications of the R-rating trap are disturbing for anyone concerned with freedom of speech and artistic expression in America. Under the guise of providing voluntary guidance for parents, the Motion Picture Association of America is actually operating an unofficial censorship system. The addition of an A rating for adults only would give the system flexibility and filmmakers more breathing room, but the MPAA and its longtime head, Jack Valenti, remain inflexibly and uncompromisingly opposed to the A rating.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which was denied an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America's Classification and Ratings Administration, is one of many pictures to fall into the R-versusX twilight zone in recent months. It is a shocking satire using nudity, sex, and cannibalism as its weapons. Some viewers, myself included, think it is an important work. Others do not. Almost everyone would agree that it is not a film for children. But there is no way for the MPAA to classify it for "adults only." Under the Alice in Wonderland logic of the ratings system, it either gets an R or it gets no rating at all.

The MPAA's R-rating category is theoretically intended to steer children away from certain movies. But there is a hole in it as wide as the swinging doors in a movie theater: it provides only that those under seventeen "will not be admitted without a parent or adult guardian."

Half of all the American movies made since 1968 have been rated R. And anyone who has been under seventeen during those twenty-two years knows from personal experience how easy it is to get into an R movie. The "adult guardian" can be an older brother or sister, a friend, or simply someone standing next to you in line. Many theaters, staffed by employees who are themselves teenagers, do not even bother to check.

Aware of this, the MPAA looks at R movies as if it were the theoretical adult guardian-which is why Mirren could be asked the schoolmarmish question of how she'd feel taking a nine-year-old to her movie. Isn't it clear that some movies are just plainly and simply not intended for children, no matter whom they go in with?

When Valenti's MPAA first teamed up with the National Association of Theater Owners in 1968 to install a voluntary national ratings system, there were dozens of local movie censorship boards in America. Some of them were standing j okes-like Chicago's, which provided patronage j obs for the widows of policemen. Valenti thought a voluntary industry-wide system would replace the local bluenoses and head off threatened national legislation, and he was right: "Today," he boasts, "there is only one local censorship board in the country-in Dallas."