Technicolor: Vertigo

The Movie

    Hitchcock's classic.  For most movie recaps, I don't mind gabbing on about what happens here and there in the movie, but to know too much about this movie before watching it would negate the point of the film, so will keep it brief.  Vertigo (1958, directed by Alfred Hitchcock), is a slow-paced thriller set in San Fransisco. Indeed, the city and the Bay Area are just as much of a star of the film as its charismatic lead (I'm sorry that I can't attribute charisma to Kim Novak in this movie, although she does well enough in the second half).  The movie was not a box-office or a critical success when it was released, but is considered by many people today to be one of his finest.  As for me, I still prefer North By Northwest.
   Jimmy Stewart plays 'Scottie' Ferguson, a former police officer who is forced to take a leave from the police department when an on-the-job tragedy that leaves him with acute acrophobia, or fear of heights.  As he is pondering what to do to fill his empty days, an opportunity presents itself in the form of an old acquaintance, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore).  This acquaintance is very concerned about the mental state of his wife, Madeline (Kim Novak).  As Elster tells it, Madeline may or may not be possessed by the spirit of a Spanish woman who, deprived of her child and love, took her own life a century earlier.  Jimmy is hired to investigate Madeline's activities, but and soon finds himself becoming over-involved and fascinated by the vulnerable blonde...

 Technicolor

   How do you visually and non-verbally represent the state of a disturbed person's mind?  For Alfred Hitchcock, it meant swirling visuals and rapid-fire changes from normal color to color overlay.  The highly saturated look of Technicolor was perfect for these sort of effects, and Hitchcock was familiar with the process having made his first Technicolor picture, Rope (also starring Jimmy Stewart), ten years prior to filming Vertigo.
   Technicolor was formed as a company in 1915 by three engineers, two of them from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the Tech in Technicolor), according to this excellent website.  The intent of the two founders was to devise a workable method for filming and projecting color images.  The first film from the new company was shown in 1917, but the early technology used two separate projectors and the alignment of the two to form a cohesive image proved to be too difficult for frequent use.

The Toll of the Sea:  red, green, no blue. 

   In 1923, the group finally turned a profit with The Toll of the Sea, filmed by a new process that utilized a beam-splitting prism to separate the filmed image into red and blue-green negatives.  Once developed, the negatives were aligned and run through the projector.  Over the next several years, studios would commit to filming partial segments of certain films using the Technicolor process, but held off using the method for complete movies.  In 1926, Douglas Fairbanks commissioned the process for The Black Pirate.  The film was a success, but for Technicolor, it was another learning exercise; after successive showings, the heat of the projection lamp warped the two prints, causing a distortion in the film that caused erratic changes in projection focus.  Each print was sent back to Technicolor to be flattened, an expensive undertaking.
   The Viking, filmed in 1928, was the first full length Technicolor film with sound and using the new dye transfer technique that eliminated the need for back-to-back prints, putting all colors on one film strip, although the technology to capture only two colors was available at the time.  The new process was well-received and several new pictures were commissioned, but with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, business took a hit.  The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) was the last such two-color film.
   Over a period of the prior years, the group had not been sitting on their laurels, and in 1932 they went to Walt Disney to see if his studio would serve as guinea pig for their 3-strip process.  Flowers and Trees, a Silly Symphony musical cartoon, was the result.  In the 3-strip process, a black-and-white receiver film was coated with a film that would allow it to accept the color dyes.  Green, red and blue negatives were also created.  Through a special process involving a gelatin wash, complimentary dye colors to the green, red and blue (cyan, magenta and yellow, respectively) were printed on the black-and-white ground film.  The accuracy needed for this process was printing within 8/10,000 of an inch.  Becky Sharp (1935) was the first full-length, three-strip picture.  The last was made in 1953 after Eastman Kodak developed the technology to replace the bulky three-strip camera with a single-strip.
   In 1952, a camera had been developed that recorded images to film using standard color photography processes.  Although the bright look and high quality of Technicolor remained popular for some time, it was a time-consuming and expensive process, made even more expensive by the requirement that each Technicolor camera was rented from the company and was accompanied by a color specialist and the need for the intricate dye transfer process.  By the time Vertigo was made, use of Technicolor was in slow decline.

Links and Sources

Technicolor, Wikipedia
Most of the material summarized above came from ten pages of easily understood Technicolor history at the American Widescreen Museum website
I tend to agree with several points about the movie noted here (spoiler)

Ghost Towns: The Prowler

The Movie

   The Prowler (directed by Joseph Losey, 1951) stars Van Heflin as policeman and certifiable creep Webb Garwood, who manipulates and cons his way into marriage with a woman he meets on a routine call.  Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) has been taking a shower at night with the bathroom window open and shades up, and is actually shocked when she looks out of the window to see a peeping tom.  Garwood and his partner arrive to log the incident, and Garwood takes a shine to Susan, who is a night widow - her wealthy husband is out late most evenings, fully occupied with his agricultural radio show.  One evening follow-up call by Garwood, a few visits more, and Things Begin to Happen...

California Mining Rush
   Trying not to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, the action towards the end of the film takes place in the California desert, part in an active town and part in the ruins of an old mining town.  As I watched this movie, I started wondering just how many vacant towns sit in the desert after all these years.  The answer is that many still exist, in differing states of repair.  Most mining towns in California came into existence in the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, to exploit rich deposits of gold, silver, borax, tungsten, chrysolite and other minerals.  The towns experienced booms at peak extraction and crashes when the resource was tapped out.  They were either supported by another livelihood such as agriculture or manufacturing, or died out as residents left. 

Ghost Towns
   The state of ghost town remains is different from town to town, and depends on a lot of factors.  Weather, geographic location, visitors and original construction material and techniques can all play a part in how well a site is preserved.  Eastern California has an ideal dry climate for the preservation of artifacts, and the remote locations of many of the sites keep them from being visited frequently by vandals.  Many mining camps were exactly that - camps - and the major structures were tents;  in many of these locations, little to nothing visible is left.  In other locations, where building materials were wood or stone, remains are still visible.  The modernization of travel by rail and eventually by car also led to the end of many western towns as travel became quicker, requiring fewer stops along the way.

Calico History
   Calico, California, the site of filming for The Prowler, is located west of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert just north of Barstow. 

"There's no argument that Calico is a real ghost town. Established in 1881, Calico produced $86 million in silver and $45 million in borax during its glory years. At its height, the town boasted a population of 1,200, 22 saloons, a "Chinatown," and a well-known red light district. When the price of silver plummeted in the 1890's, the town survived on borax revenues until its official death in 1907."   -Roadtrip America

   The remains of the town were left in peace until 1951, when the land was bought out by an entrepreneur with amusement-park dreams who had previously worked in the mines there himself.  He began to add artifacts and additional buildings, aging everything to add the patina of history until it became difficult to tell the difference between original and re-creation.  In 1966, the land was donated to San Bernadino County and is currently maintained as a historical park.  The Prowler was filmed in 1951, at a time when the location was probably still in its pre-restored condition.

Don't forget to draw the curtains.

Links and Sources

California Ghost Towns
Calico, San Bernadino County, Wikipedia
Calicotown, California
Calico, California

Donnybrook: The Quiet Man

The Movie

   My favorite movie, full stop.  How nice for Sean Thornton (John Wayne), arriving with his baggage (literal and figurative) in his ancestral village of Innisfree to find confidantes, a soul mate, enemies and endearing characters all set up and waiting there for him, in a beautiful pastoral setting.  The Quiet Man (1952, directed by John Ford) tracks the adventures of a man returning after many years to a place his family once lived, and the preconceptions and adjustments that entails.  Maureen O'Hara plays Mary Kate Danagher - a woman with a mind of her own, and Barry Fitzgerald is the matchmaker / shaughraun Michaeleen Oge Flynn.  Red Will Danagher (Victor McLaglan), Mary Kate's brother, provides a good bit of the conflict through his blowhard bullheadedness; Irish tradition and Thornton's past provide the rest.

The Setting

   I'm happy to be tackling this one at last, because I always wondered about the time period, setting and just what the heck was up with Mary Kate and her property.  It was the early fifties when the film was made, but since no date is indicated, I had always had some vague notion of isolated locales within Ireland that still used buggies and Model Ts and had traditional notions of dowries deep into the 1950s.  Well it didn't take much to find that the movie was shot in County Mayo and is set in the 1920s at the time of the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State (rebellion is only darkly hinted at in the film).  During this time in Ireland, around half of the Free State populace was employed in agriculture, and many lived in situations of overcrowding.  While part of the British Empire, Ireland was not permitted to industrialize.

The Set-up

   The main conflict of the film is the understandable reluctance of Thornton to engage in fighting for the money portion of his new wife's dowry.  She is firm in her need to follow tradition and have her husband respected within her family and the community by getting the money back from her brother.  Dowries were of high importance in the 1800s in Ireland, due to land inheritance customs and other sociological issues, and to Mary Kate, the dowry has a worth other than the grasping materialism that Sean thinks is her motivation.  Events are brought to a head when Mary Kate leaves.  Thornton pulls Mary Kate from the train and forcefully walks her back.  The transaction is eventually settled, but Red Will Danagher is feeling put upon, he takes a swing at Thornton and a cathartic donnybrook breaks out.

Donnybrook Fair
   The definition of 'donnybrook', from a local source:

"A 'donnybrook' is sometimes used to describe a general melee or row particularly in 'stage oirish' situations. The scenario seems to be that we all go around wearing funny hats and red beards shouting 'Shure' and 'Begorrah' while we beat one another with small blackthorn sticks." -The Clare Champion, 2010

   The term comes from the Donnybrook Fair, held in the Donnybrook (Domhnach Broc) section of Dublin from 1204 AD until the 1850s, when it was banned.  Originally begun as a fair for merchants and artists, by the 1800s the fair became notorious for its drunken carousing and, above all, its fighting.

(Fanpop)

   Medieval fairs (the source of our modern day Renaissance Fairs) were started by the Normans as a way of promoting trade, and were a good source of funds for the church.  Merchants and musicians would gather to hawk their wares, and all would have to pay fees to the holder of the fair charter, which was originally granted by King John of England and passed from hand to hand for centuries after.  By the 1700s, the focus of the fair was less on trade and much more on entertainment and drinking.  Dublin had expanded, and its suburbs were also encroaching on the traditional fair grounds, which had originally been outside of the city walls.  A campaign was got up by the locals, the charter bought out and the fair closed down.

Links and Sources

if Monet painted drunken fistfights

William Dowling's excellent essay on The Quiet Man, Rutgers
Family and Community in Ireland, Clare Local Studies Project
Donnybrook Fair, Wikipedia
Donnybrook, World Wide Words
Oh, Donnybrook..., Clare Champion
The Irish Family..., Fairfield University