Basil Rathbone, as Pontius Pilate, and Preston Foster in THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (1935)
One of my biggest pet peeves are colorized Black & White movies. They almost always look horrendous. I would rather watch a B&W movie as it was originally made. Well, this colorized copy of THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII I recently got sorta made me change my mind. For this movie at least. This is without a doubt the best colorization I've ever seen. Very nice and subtle. Not garish or tacky. An improvement over the original (I'd never thought I'd say this...). Now if this movie gets a HD release hopefully it will include a nice colorized copy too.
Nice!
Looks good!
The statue during the climax.
ReplyDeleteI strongly disagree that colorization - even if well done - is ever acceptable.
Grey scale represents the original artistic vision of the director. Furthermore it has a 1950s newsreel like credibility.
Originally RKO planned to film the movie in Technicolor (and the 1935 version of SHE as well) but they cut the budgets at the last minute.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was the usual peplum films from the 60s onwards just looking at the pictures. Colorization brings old pictures/films closer to our times.
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