795 thoughts on “Site Index”

1. 1 Stewart Granger’s career highpoint was his Hollywood days of the 1950s especially the early part of the decade when he made a string of successful action/adventure yarns such as Scaramouche and Prisoner of Zenda. However he started to go into decline in the late 50s a situation which in your opening quote he blames on his poor choice of roles.

   2 OTHER COMMENTS
   (1) You have covered well all of parts of Granger’s career with some fine selections from his pre-50s work and YOU HAVE produced a good Top 5.
   (2) I’d forgotten that Stew was in Caesar and Cleopatra in which Jean Simmons played an uncredited cameo. Apparently she didn’t much like those stately and devout heroines she was often asked to play in costume dramas, complaining to friends that “They’ve given me another one of those poker up the *** roles.”
   (3) I was pleased that you included the little gem The Secret Partner
   (4) his was such a colourful career that you were bound to get a fine range of posters and it would be overkill to list them all so I’ll just mention the one for the lavish Sodom and Gomorrah and that for the very impressive contrasting low key The Whole Truth (4) super closing posed still of Granger and Kerr but pity you didn’t have one showing their tree-climbing pastime! Anyway 9/10 for very worthwhile video.

   bEST WISHES bob

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   1. Thank you Bob. I had that still of Stew and Deb placed just before the King Solomon’s Mines poster and at the last minute decided it would be more fitting as the final photo on the video. That was the film that made him a star in the US but didn’t rank high enough for no.1.

      On his youtube comment earlier Bruce confesses to having seen just 4 of Granger’s films of the 30 listed, and that may be one of the reasons we haven’t seen a page on him yet. Flora has seen 14 and I’ve seen 17 thanks to my dad being a big fan.

      Scaramouche scoring 8 might make this the lowest rated no.1 in my video series so far.

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   2. Hey Bob and Steve….I only recently saw Scaramouche…..before watching it….I had never even heard of it before….after watching it and really enjoying it….I have been trying to figure out why it rarely gets mentioned. Recently I was watching a Princess Bride documentary….and they mentioned it…..so I guess people in the business know and respect the movie.

      Sadly…I have only seen 4 Stewart Granger movies (probably why I have never done a page on him)…so reading your comment was very educational….thanks for sharing the information.

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2. Steve
   You didn’t ask, and perhaps you know, but here is the list of British three-strip Technicolor films from the 1930’s
   1937
   Coronation of King George
   Victoria the Great*
   Wings of the Morning

   1938
   Divorce of Lady X
   The Drum
   Sixty Glorious Years

   1939
   Four Feathers
   The Mikado
   Over the Moon

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   1. I’ve got The Four Feathers and The Drum, that’s about it. In the 1940s Powell and Pressburger would produce some of the most acclaimed color movies of that era, notably Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

      Thanks again.

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      1. Hey Steve….seems Black Narcissus is everywhere these days….from your You Tube videos to here…..It is a Black Narcissus conspiracy….lol.

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   2. Cool….good information.

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3. Thanks for posting this John. An interesting read. 31 full color (‘colour’ here in the UK) films produced by Hollywood in the 1930s. Is there a list of these films? I want to collect them all. I’d love to see an HD copy of the first full color movie Becky Sharp. I have the two-tone Technicolor Mystery of the Wax Museum on DVD.

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   1. well I can you the list. Flowers and Trees in Dec 1932 was the Disney animated cartoon in three-strip Technicolor. La Cucharacha in 1934 was the first live action short. I’ll list the 1930 features. * indicates only a scene or two, not a full color movie

      1934
      The Cat and The Fiddle*
      Kid Millions*
      House of Rothschild*
      Hollywood Party* (live action b/w–Mickey Mouse color cartoon by Disney featured)

      1935
      Becky Sharp (first full color movie in three-strip Technicolor)
      The Little Colonel*

      1936
      The Dancing Pirate (first 3-strip color musical)
      Trail of the Lonesome Pine
      Ramona
      The Garden of Allah (with Marlene Dietrich–really beautiful color)

      1937
      Ebb Tide
      God’s Country and the Women
      Nothing Sacred
      A Star is Born
      Vogues of 1938*
      When’s Your Birthday
      Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (first Disney animated feature)

      1938
      The Adventures of Robin Hood
      The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
      Gold is Where You Find It
      The Goldwyn Follies
      Heart of the North
      Her Jungle Love
      Kentucky
      Sweethearts
      Valley of the Giants
      Men With Wings

      1939
      Dodge City
      Drums Along the Mohawk
      Hollywood Cavalcade
      Ice Follies of 1939*
      The Women*
      The Little Princess
      The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
      Swanee River
      Gulliver’s Travels (second animated feature–by the Fleischers)
      Jesse James
      The Wizard of Oz
      Gone with the Wind

      Hopes that helps. These are the 39 American features.

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      1. Thanks John, a useful list. Let’s see I’ve got.. 14 of these in my collection so 25 to go. Early Technicolor films seemed to ‘glow’ with color and sometimes when they get remastered on DVD the color is muted to make it more ‘acceptable’ to today’s audiences and that makes me mad.

         I bought The Gang’s All Here on blu-ray a few months ago, it looked pretty good but I have a feeling it was a lot more colorful on it’s original release.

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         1. Hey Steve…. I agree with you 100%….I am so glad you told John about this website….he has become on of my favorite commenters. Thanks for pointing him in our direction.

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            1. Cogerson

               Thank you for not focusing on my awful typos and writing screw-ups. I just have to learn to be more careful on a blog in which I can’t edit out my numerous mistakes.

            2. Hey John….working on finding an edit button for comments….I thought I found one…but it kept messing up the entire comment feed so I am headed back to the drawing board….as for your typos….no worries….Nobody is Perfeckt….lol.

               Wow…typing Nobody is Perfeckt….brought back the memory of really bad Gabe Kaplan movie….http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082822/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_8 maybe after 35 years that one has aged nicely…lol.

         2. 🙂

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      2. Hey John…thanks for sharing this list….good to know….so you would think the success of 1939 (considered by many to be the greatest movie year ever) and with so many color movies that movies would have gone to “color” much sooner.

         Thanks again…for all of the shared information that you have provided.

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         1. Cogerson

            “with so many color movies that movies would have gone to ‘color’ much sooner.”

            I mentioned but didn’t dwell on it being physically impossible in the early years. Three-strip Technicolor required a special camera and special three-strip film, one with each of the primary colors which were then joined to produce the full color effect. There weren’t all that many Techniclor cameras available so Hollywood was restricted in how many Technicolor films they could produce. Of course, just as things were beginning to roll, WWII hit. The war certainly slowed down the process.
            Eastmancolor could be used in any camera so it opened the door to producing many more color films. The 57% of color films produced in 1954 would have been an impossible percentage to hit if only three-strip Technicolor was available.
            There were some other factors at work. Apparently many older actresses were reluctant to chance appearing in Technicolor. They had become stars in black and white and were worried about how they would look in color. Perhaps even more surprisingly, many creative artists looked down on color in comparison to black and white. I recall Orson Welles disparaging color in an interview in his later years. He felt that color distracted the audience from the actors, plus it was impossible to control mood as well. I do think it true that black and white in a mystery or horror film could create a mood that color still can’t match.

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            1. Hey John….thanks for the information on the 3-strip technicolor issues. I guess like lots of stuff….it takes awhile for companies to catch up with technology. Even more interesting is how stars would not want to make color movies. I imagine some stars first had to deal with sound and then color…..I can only imagine somebody like Bette Davis dealing with High Definition. And you wrap it up with another great thought… I love black and white horror movies….Psycho in color….no thank you. Thanks for the feedback.

4. Color in movies
   1950’s

   Thanks to a academic treatise I stumbled onto, I have exact figures for color in the 1950’s.
   There were 2922 feature films produced in the USA in the 1950’s. 1245 were in color. Technicolor had required a cumbersome special camera to film, and in the early days Hollywood making more than a dozen of so Technicolor films was impossible. Also, the filming itself was very expensive, about double black and white, and reproducing the film for distribution was also expensive. So while color films grossed more, their expense badly cut down the profit margin. In the early fifties, Eastman Kodak introduced Eastmancolor, a process in which any camera could be used for the filming. Everything became much easier and somewhat cheaper. But reproducing for distribution was still more expensive. The cumbersome and expensive three-strip Technicolor process was quickly abandoned for Eastmancolor (individual studios gave this process a house name when they used it–for example Metrocolor) By 1954, 57% of Hollywood films were in color. But the studios found that while color was a big advantage for some genres–musicals and westerns and costume pictures, it did not pay for itself with others like comedy and serious drams. By 1957, the percentage of color films had dropped to 31%, But obviously there would be a slow comeback.

   so to sum up.
   1930’s—5039 features, 100 in color, or about 2%
   1940’s–4080 features, 330 in color, or about 8-9%
   1950’s–2922 features, 1245 in color, or about 42%
   total of the classic era–12,041 features, 1675 in color, or 14%

   *I don’t have figures for the sixties, but my academic source state 25% as the percentage in black and white during that decade.

   **of course there were foreign films made in color. There was a Technicolor branch in Britain, and the British color films, although not in number a match for the American in the 1940’s, on the whole might have been a more distinguished group. Joseph Goebbels was also backing a color process in Germany during this era, and my want to study that.

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   1. Hey John….and we make it to the 1950s….so even in the 1950s black and white was still more popular than color….at least when looking at tally counts. Though as you wrote…by the the mid 1950s black and white had finally lost the battle but not the war as they bounced back in 1957….though that was the last hurrah for black and white movies.

      If you look at the 10 Best Picture Oscar winners from 1950 to 1959 the breakdown was 6 color and 4 black and white. As for the final stats….only 14% for the entire beginning of the “sound era”…..which is way way lower than I thought it would be.

      Glad you shared your research here…..it is greatly appreciated….I might borrow your numbers heavily for a future UMR page.

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5. Color in movies
   1940’s

   There were 4080 feature films produced in the United States. It is very difficult to nail down the exact total in color because of the obscurity of the numbers on Cinecolor, but my estimate is about 330 had color. 260 were three-strip Technicolor. 27 by Republic in their process, Trucolor (mainly Roy Rogers, Monte Hale, and William Elliott westerns) and probably around 40 odd in Cinecolor, exlusively cheaper productions, again usually westerns. Randolph Scott made several westerns in cinecolor. Gene Autry made his only two color movies in Cinecolor.
   While color became much more common in American movies, none of the color films had quite the long-term impact of the 1930’s color classics. Few lists of the best 1940’s American films I have seen list any color films among the top ten, except in few cases Disney cartoon features.
   Cartoons in the early 1940’s went completely to color. I don’t know of a black and white cartoon made after WWII.

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   1. Hey John….it is interesting to see the amount of color movies growing…but even in the 1940s the totals were still less than 10%…..I would have thought by the 1940s it would have been getting closer to 25%. Roy Rogers leading the way with Trucolor movies…did not see that coming. I imagine that had to be a box office draw….Rogers and color…especially with so few movies coming out in color.

      Good trivia on Randolph Scott and Gene Autry….as well as that the color 1940s movies did not register like some of the 1930s classics like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Good points about how cartoon features realized the power of color.

      Thanks for sharing…..good stuff….because it is informative and interesting.

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      1. Cogerson

         “I would have thought by the 1940’s it would have been getting closer to 25%.”

         This might reflect that a higher percentage of color films are likely to be shown or made available.

         “Roy Rogers”

         I am also surprised that Roy with 14 tricolor films had more color films than any other male star prior to the 1950’s. Of course these were all B westerns, and they were released to TV in b/w and in many, and perhaps most, cases the original color prints are lost.

         Of all performers, so far it appears to me that Betty Grable leads in color (all Technicolor) movies up through 1949. She had 16. Jon Hall had 12. Randolph Scott 11. Judy Garland 10. Maria Montez, one of the queens of Technicolor, had 8.
         I haven’t gone through Carmen Miranda but have to as soon as I can.

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         1. Hey John….a very interesting list….with Betty Grable leading the way. Have to admit…not to familiar with Jon Hall’s career….but color movies had to have helped his career. Scott and Garland are classics…..surprised about Scott….but not about Garland on this list. Good stuff!

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