People who say

I would certainly hope so, swanstep!

I have met a few people -- young -- who flatly state that they won't watch black and white films. Its like a non-starter, a deal breaker . (It is a key reason that Van Sant made his 1998 Psycho in color -- to give young audiences a version that they WOULD watch.)

Personally I think there are different types OF black and white -- at least in the American studio film era. I am speaking of various decades -- the black and white of the forties with films generally filmed on studio sound stages and a whole genre -- noir -- making the most of the look. This is stylish, rather "fake" stuff -- and most on view in the Bogart films of the decade.

Come the fifties, we have black and white often used for "realism" and on location -- rather GRUBBY location in "On the Waterfront" and "Marty" (that Roseland dance club with hundreds of singles in search of love looked DEPRESSING.) Hitchcock used a kind of "classic" b/w at the beginning of the 50's -- for Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, and I Confess, but after I Confess, he only used b/w twice more -- for very specific reasons: The Wrong Man (to give it not only a semi-documentary look, but to fit it in with Marty and On the Waterfront and, unknowingly, 12 Angry Men, released after it.)

The other famous time was for Psycho ("to not show the blood in color," he said.) And now we reach a black-and-white era DIFFERENT from the 40's and 50s.

Psycho and The Apartment, both of 1960, both released the same week in NYC in the summer of 1960, give us a black and white look that is weirdly "modern" and expensive looking. The look of the two films crystallize for me that beloved "50/60s cusp" and speak to exactly how America looked and felt (on opposite coasts -- East and West) in a very important year.

CONT

What do I think of them? As little as possible.

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Ha. I supposed I personally "begged the question" by cataloging the eras of black and white film and why I like them.

I would want to ask the person exactly WHY black and white is unwatchable to them. The lack of color renders the world of the movie fake in some way?

Growing up in the sixties, I will admit that I was often a little depressed if the movie that my family chose to watch at the theater was in "modern black and white." I preferred Technicolor. Black and white meant "Lonely are the Brave" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the twin nuclear terror movies "Dr. Strangelove"(even with the comedy, it was bleak) and "Fail Safe."

When "Psycho" was on TV and forbidden to me on its first showing, I LEARNED it was in black and white, and imagined it as such. (We only had a black and white set, so Rear Window and NXNW I saw in black and white the first time, but I IMAGINED them in color.)

For all of that, black and white movies were a "thing" to me, fully acceptable.

I suppose in an era where young people see ONLY color productions, black and white is "alien" to them. But why not try it out?

I know someone who won't watch any movie from before he was born in 1985. I always tell him he hasn't seen the best movies.

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I think that's even a sadder loss than black and white movies.

At my age, however, I can somewhat identify.


I grew up(in real time) on the movies of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s to today.

I LOVE going back and watching movies from the 60's and 70s -- great movies (and very different from today's movies) and from my past.

However, I will admit that movies of the 30s and 40s are a harder watch -- before my time.

In the 60s, TV had a lot of movies from the 50's, so though I did not see those 50s movies in theaters, I came to love them on TV. Back then, we did NOT get recent movies within months of release. You had to WAIT. So...we watched 50s movies on TV in the 60s. It was in the 60s that I first saw great 50s movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Rear Window, and 12 Angry Men.

I feel very lucky to have a connection to 6 decades of movie making but I must admit: movies of the 30s and 40s are generally too old for me to enjoy. So maybe that DOES track with movies before the 80's today.

Uh oh.