Gimme Them Olde Tyme Movies…

As posted earlier, I’m in the research stage of my next two big projects; I won’t start writing the first until January 1, 2022 and while I’m shooting for June 1 as the start date of the one after that, don’t be surprised if it gets pushed back to New Year’s Day 2023.

When I’m actively writing a new project I tend to stay up late to work, 10:30pm to 2am being the most productive times for me.

But when I’m researching, well, then I can take time in the late evening / wee morning hours to read or watch TV.

I’ve been watching a lot of old movies in my spare time recently, primarily old comedy shorts plus murder mysteries and horror films from the minor studios of the 1930s such as Monogram, PRC, etc.

Let’s be generous and say a lot of old movies are very deliberately paced.  Watched at normal speed they seem to drag on forever even if their actually running time is only a hour or so (B-movies were frequently only an hour or less in length to fit them easily into double features with previously released A-features).

There’s actually a technical reason for this:
Before television movies were meant to be projected on large screens 20 to 40 feet across.  While the relative image size may be the same as watching on a TV screen, the human mind / eye psychologically reads the image at a larger size when projected in a theater.

The most obvious example I can give of this is It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World which was directed / filmed / edited to be enjoyed in Cinerama.  On even the best home TV system it moves slower and seems less funny than when projected in a theater; on the Cinerama screen the same movie zips along at a breakneck pace, every joke landing perfectly.

Fortunately YouTube (where I find most of these movies) offers a speed option for films:
You can run them slower to study them frame by frame but you can also speed them up to x 1.25 / x 1.5 / x 2 times their normal speed.

This really helps a lot of these old movies, moving them along at a more modern pace.  Seen at x 1.25 or x 1.5, an hour long feature can be enjoyed in only 48 or 40 minutes -- and in most cases that’s a plus.

Silent films often have the opposite problem: They tend to run too fast.  

Most silent films were shot and projected at 18 to 21 frames per second; slower than that and the flicker effect becomes apparent.

Sound movies need to run at 24 frames per second in order for the audio portion to be heard properly, so silent films often appear to be jerky and sped un when run at that speed.

That problem is typically handled in modern transfers by smoothing out the frame rate with additional in-between frames generated by computer.

Of course, the bane of modern audiences is black and white photography.

They’ll forgive it in small doses such as music videos and short sequences within a film, but a typical modern viewer won’t sit through a black and white film, preferring a colorized version instead.

In fairness, colorization has improved dramatically since first introduced a couple of decades ago.  Older films play into colorization’s weaknesses, turning them into assets.

Many older films are now colorized with an eye to making them look like color films from that era, not the lush vibrant 3-strip Technicolor™ of big budget Hollywood productions but the cheaper alternatives.

By leaning into this and giving the movies a faint underlying sepia tone, older films become far more accessible to modern audiences.

And there are a few older films that are genuinely helped and enhanced by colorization.  Laurel and Hardy’s The March Of The Wooden Soldiers (a.k.a. Babes In Toyland) was designed to be shot in Technicolor but last minute budget slashing eliminated that possibility; its colorized version feels like an old fashion storybook and so is perfect for that film.

Likewise Things To Come and a few serials have really benefitted by being colorized with a pulp magazine palette, giving them the garish feel of old school mystery and sci-fi magazine covers, The Crimson Ghost finally seen as red, the Martians of Zombies Of The Stratosphere really being green.

Decades ago a now infamous creep denounced colorization, saying it altered the original creators’ intent.

Well, that was a load of horsesit then and now.

1. The original black and white versions remain for anyone who wants to study them in pristine form.

2. Had they been able to afford it, virtually all creators of black and white films would have shot in color. 

3. Many of these films are now in the public domain, so that means people can do whatever they like with them (because after all the originals are still untouched; see point 1 above)

4. And finally, the creep then and now was a huge hypocrite because one of the creep’s earliest successes was a foreign language film that they erased the soundtrack to and redubbed with American jokes.

Which leads us to another point:  Sound.

Thanks to Sonny Bono’s meddling, there are some sharpies who got their hands on old movies from the 1930s then in the public domain (primarily Westerns, but others as well), added in a few bits of modern synthesizer music in a few places, and copyrighted that version as a “new” work.

Okay, give ‘em that; they kept the movies in circulation among TV stations and home video, so let ‘em rake a few shekels in.

There are several silent films that had original orchestral scores composed for them, replaced by generic organ music when transferred to 16mm for private rental and later kept when transferred to laser disc and VHS.

Since that time the original scores have been uncovered, re-recorded, and added to the silent films.

And nothing precludes adding modern music to old movies, either.  The first time I saw the 1925 version of The Lost World was at a sci-fi convention where somebody played Frank Zappa’s music.

As George Harrison once noted, all music fits any film.  It may provide a counterpoint to the image onscreen, it may boost the intensity, but it will work in some fashion.

The Swedish horror faux documentary Haxan (a.k.a. Witchcraft Through The Ages) is available in several different edits, including one where the original intertitles were stripped out, replaced by William S. Burroughs narrating the film.

In the 1960s Jay Ward produced Fractured Flickers, which overdubbed old movie footage with narration and non-lip synched dialog.  With modern ADR there’s no reason silent films can’t be dubbed well enough to disguise their original limitations.

There are other technical marvels to be applied.  Thanks to high resolution scanning, scenes shot in a single wide angle can now be broken up into closer shots.  Three-D technology can artificially add depth to flat productions.  Vast libraries of sound effects and music can bolster earlier lackluster efforts.

Actors of old can be digitally duplicated and replaced.

None of the technologies above seriously impedes either the enjoyment of an older film or alters its message.

If we’re serious about informing modern audiences of the creative past, we can’t expect them to come to the material first; the material needs to be brought to them.

© Buzz Dixon