One of the big misconceptions of many a casual movie fan is that "Gone With the Wind," released in 1939, was the first film made in color.
Some folks even have suggested that it originally was shot in black and white and later colorized by computer.
It might surprise some of these people that, as was the case with sound, experiments with color began almost the first day the movie industry came into being 100 years ago. Those pioneering efforts were crude, to say the least. The first color on film was painstakingly applied by hand, frame by frame.
The results were unappealing and movie producers resorted to tinting to evoke mood. For instance, aqua and dark blue were used for night scenes. Golden and sepia tints usually were used for daylight. Various shades of red were used for fire sequences or other moments of terror. Green was used most often for jungle scenes.
Many of those early tinted efforts are available on video, including "The Last of the Mohicans" (1920), "The Lost World" (1925) and "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925). Even D.W. Griffith used tinting in his famous "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.
Tinting, of course, was not the same as color. In the early 1920s, technicians devised a two-color process that used two strips of film, one red and the other green, to achieve some degree of color. The first feature film in the process was a British effort called "The Glorious Adventure" (1923). No prints of the film are known to exist.
Several silent films used a few color sequences. Both the "The Ten Commandments" (1923) and "Ben-Hur" (1926) did so and are available on video with the added hues. The two-color process lasted into the sound period.
Pinks, browns and light blues seem to dominate two-color films.
MCA/Universal Home Video offers "The King of the Jazz" in this process. Released in 1930, it's a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra and Bing Crosby and his Rhythm Boys, with a memorable rendition of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." The last film to use the old two-color process was "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933) starring Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill. It's available from Warner Home Video. The movie was remade as "House of Wax" starring Vincent Price 20 years later.
In the early 1930s, Technicolor developed the three-strip color process, with a blue strip added to the red and green. The results were incredibly lifelike; in fact, the colors were richer than life itself. It was an expensive process at the time and a hard sell. But Walt Disney, always in the forefront of new technology, took a chance and was awarded an exclusive three-year deal to use the process.
His first Technicolor effort was the 1932 cartoon "Flowers and Trees," which won him an Academy Award. In 1935, Disney's exclusive rights had expired, and Pioneer Pictures made "Becky Sharp" as the first feature film to be produced in the three-color strip. Released by RKO, the film stars Miriam Hopkins and is based onThackeray's "Vanity Fair."
For years, the film was available on video in a horrendous public domain print. However, the movie was recently restored to its original brilliance by the UCLA Film Archives and is now available on video the way it was meant to be seen.
The next big color film was Paramount's "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" (1936), billed as "the first outdoor picture in Technicolor," starring Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray. Unfortunately, Paramount has yet to release the movie on video.
Other early Technicolor efforts included:
"Ramona" (1936). Don Ameche, Loretta Young. A half-breed girl and an Indian fall in love. Fox. Not on video.
"Garden of Allah" (1936). Charles Boyer, Marlene Dietrich. A socialite falls in love with a renegade monk in the Algerian desert. Selznik-United Artists. Not on video.
"A Star Is Born" (1937). Fredric March, Janet Gaynor. Some great shots of 1937 Hollywood. Selznik-United Artists. On video.
"Nothing Sacred" (1937). Fredric March, Carole Lombard. A great screwball comedy. Selznik-United Artists. On video.
"Ebb Tide" (1937). Ray Milland, Frances Farmer. Strange, anti-romantic movie based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story. Paramount. Not on video.
"Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938). Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland. The best and most exciting version of the Robin Hood legend. Warner Brothers. On video.
"The Divorce of Lady X" (1938). Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon. A successful British attempt at screwball comedy. London Films. On video.
"Kentucky" (1938). Richard Greene, Loretta Young, Walter Brennan. This horse racing story won Brennan his first of three Oscars. Fox. On video.
"Sweethearts" (1938). Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy. Technicolor never looked so good in this lush musical. MGM. On video.
"Men With Wings" (1938). Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland. The color aerial scenes are the stars of this one. Paramount. Not on video.
"Drums" (1938). Raymond Massey, Sabu. In this adventure story, British soldiers aid a young Indian prince in a battle against his evil uncle. London Films. On Video.
"Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1938). Tommy Kelly. Mark Twain's beloved tale. Selznik-United Artists. On video.
By 1939, when "Gone With the Wind" was released, Technicolor as we know it had been around for a while and more and more movies were using color. Betty Grable would soon become known as the Queen of Technicolor. Other processes such as DeLuxe Color, MetroColor and Ansco Color would come along, but all would use the three-color method pioneered by Technicolor.
There also would be new (and cheap) two-color processes such as Cinecolor, Magnacolor and Trucolor, but none could match the quality of the vivid Technicolor efforts.