New York times: Scorsese, MoMA, and The Third Man

I don’t know that I always appreciate my New York experience as much as I might, and that may be because my idea of going outdoors is to bury myself in a movie theater for two or three hours at a time. Every once in a while, though, events conspire to remind me I don’t live in just any city. I live in New York City. Thanks to Martin Scorsese, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Film Forum, yesterday was full of those events.

Scorsese is probably the highest-profile leader of the film preservation movement, spearheading The Film Foundation, which is dedicated to keeping the history of the medium alive in an ever-evolving landscape. The organization’s top priority has been the restoration of classic films shot on highly volatile nitrate film stock, but the movies themselves are not the only precious evidence of the art form.

In that vein, the New York Museum of Modern Art is hosting “Scorsese Collects,” an exhibit of 34 classic film posters from the Scorsese Poster Collection. The pieces run the gamut from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s gorgeous The Red Shoes to John Ford’s The Searchers to Scorsese’s own Mean Streets. The beautiful collection is a tribute to an increasingly lost and marginalized art.

Though small, the exhibit is a must-see for any film fan. I was absolutely giddy with delight to be within inches of each well preserved artifact of film history. There were a number of highlights, including a dangerous, sexy one-sheet for Jacques Tourneur’s classic Cat People and a wonderfully impressionistic take on Elia Kazan’s Best Picture-winning On the Waterfront that foregrounds the violence and brutality of the film’s story. Perhaps, though, the most essential work is the simplest: the iconic “Veronica Lake’s on the take” poster for Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, as perfect now as the day it was designed.

In the center of the room, there hangs a 6- or 7-foot tall poster for Carol Reed’s magnificent The Third Man, the imagery for which focuses on the stunning climactic foot chase through the Vienna sewer system. I have seen The Third Man five or six times, though never on the big screen, and while staring at the film’s promotional art, I remembered the NYC Film Forum was screening the film through the end of the week. That was all I needed, and I headed out the door of the museum, caught the train downtown, and settled in for two hours of one of the greatest mystery movies ever put to celluloid.

If pressed to name the top 10 films of all time, I would put The Third Man right there in the conversation, and its wonder only grows in proportion to the size of the screen showing it. The stark, Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography still stuns, the writing is razor sharp, and Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles provide two of the great screen performances of the sound era. Welles, in particular, is just luminous, a true movie star, as commanding a presence today as he was when the film was released in 1949.

After the film, my girlfriend – kind enough to indulge me in a day of classic film nostalgia – and I strolled over to Washington Square Park, where to our surprise, the New York Jazzharmonic was giving its debut performance as part of the Washington Square Music Festival. All in all, I am not sure there was a more New York way to close out an art-filled day. It cannot happen every day for everyone, but sometimes, man, New York City really comes alive.

On the color version of Alexander Payne's Nebraska

Bette Davis wears a red dress to the ball with Henry Fonda in the classic Jezebel.

“Keep Ted Turner and his God damned Crayolas away from my movie.” – Orson Welles on the possible colorization of Citizen Kane

The dress is brown. In an iconic moment from a near-forgotten classic, a Southern belle wears a red dress to the ball. She means it as an act of defiance but quickly regrets this decision. To prove a point, the target of her defiance – and the object of her affections – forces her to dance with him. The floor clears, and all the attendees watch the shameful display of the woman in red who has crashed their party.

The film is William Wyler’s fantastic Jezebel, a Best Picture nominee in 1938 for which Bette Davis, the belle, won her second Best Actress Academy Award. Henry Fonda plays the love interest. It is a classic epic romance of the time period, preceding even Gone with the Wind by a full year. The performances are grand, the scenery is lush, the racial politics are suspect, and it is, of course, shot on black and white film stock.

Colorization is a tragic business-over-art decision that has thankfully been avoided throughout the years, though there are any number of classic films available as candy-colored nightmares if you look hard enough. The true artists of cinema have always fought back against this kind of commerce-first decision making, including people such as Orson Welles, as evidenced by the quote that heads off this article.

It is hard to blame the money men. Black and white is a tough sell. I once knew a girl who refused to watch Casablanca because she did not like black and white movies. Best Picture winners The Artist and Schindler’s List are among the few exceptions, and for every one of those, there is a Good Night and Good Luck or a Nebraska the studio heads look at and say, “What if they had been in color?”

Well, this weekend, they get their wish. Epix, a cable movie channel you may or may not be familiar with, will air the colorized version of Alexander Payne’s wonderful Nebraska. It is a version that exists as a compromise between the filmmaker and the studio, which ever-concerned with its finances wanted a more commercial option. It is not the version anyone should see, nor is it the vision Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael intended to communicate.

I urge you to avoid this version. Do seek out the film. You will not be disappointed. It is witty, charming, a little sad, and ultimately uplifting. It is a great film that landed firmly in my top 10 of last year, but what it is not is a color film.

The truth is: Red does not really read on black and white stock. The blood in Raging Bull is chocolate sauce. The same is true of the black and white sequences in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. And so too is Davis’ dress in Jezebel. The dress is brown because that is the art of shooting a film in black and white. The technology exists to make it red, but it would be nothing more than a coloring crayon representation of a classic film. The money men will always color their pictures, but that does not mean we have to hang them on our fridge.