…or more accurately, no memories at all. The still-lovely Isabella Rossellini laments:
Rossellini admitted struggling with being known largely for her parents at first, but now she wishes more young people appreciated her parents.
‘I used to be introduced as “Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s daughter,” and it bothered me, because I would think, “I am my own person,”‘ she admitted.
‘But now, the younger generation doesn’t know them, and it breaks my heart. Their reputations outlived them, but fame is very brief,’ she added.
I’m keenly aware of this, because my own kids, all in their mid-thirties, have not the slightest interest in watching any movie — no matter how much I extol its virtues — if it was filmed in black & white. They claim that they just can’t get past the “unreality” of the B&W monochromatic colors.
This is like refusing to read Shakespeare because it wasn’t written in modern-day English or in text-speak [spit].
What’s worse is that while there are a huge number of old movies that are, well, crap, there remains a body of work which is so much better than anything being released by the movie studios today that it scarcely needs an exposition — and that even allowing for the clunky special effects of those old movies which used them.
Side note: That’s not always the case. I remember an occasion when the original (and restored uncut) King Kong was shown to a group of movie students in Scandinavia somewhere, and the gruesomeness of the scene where giant spiders eat the hapless sailors actually caused half the audience to flee the theater.
What’s even worse is that the oldies were made for grownups, yeah, actual adults, before “adult movies” became a euphemism for thrusting naked buttocks and gynecological close-ups of female pudenda. I guess that part of this can be blamed on my Baby Boomer generation [sigh], when “young people” became a distinct market of “teenagers”, whose enormous buying power caused movie makers to make crap like Beach Blanket Bingo or Wild In The Streets, whereas ten years earlier such shallow and simplistic fare would have been roundly decried and boycotted. Throw in the Playboy ethos of the 1950s and, well, you know the rest. (I’m not decrying Hefner’s magazine for causing the sexual revolution, but it no doubt facilitated it.)
It pains me that B&W movies per se are going to disappear, not because of the propensity of generations to denigrate the output of their parents and grandparents (in the case of movies), but because so much incredible artistic work will disappear along with them.
And you’ll forgive me if I would be somewhat unimpressed by the efforts of some modern director like Michael Bay or Christopher Nolan to do justice to Hitchcock’s Rebecca., or a Quentin Tarentino redo of Casablanca.
I think I threw up in my mouth a little, just thinking of that. My heartfelt apologies.
Here’s Isabella’s mom, to atone:
“Dear Mr. Rossellini,
“I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’, I am ready to come and make a film with you.” — Ingrid Bergman
Worry not. I remain convinced true geniuses like Keaton, Chaplin, Kurosawa, are destined to live forever. I still read Euripides and Plautus, and those guys are really old school.
We once had a gorgeous cat named Bella (beautiful), short for Isabella Rossellini. Just lamenting to my wife yesterday how I still miss her. The cat, not the wife. :-/
At least 80% of everything I watch on TV MUST be in black n white. Last night my wife said she was longing for an old, 40’s-50’s, BnW movie of some kind to watch this weekend. Pizza and a Movie!
And there were Ferraris! Rossellini drove a 250MM in the 1953 Mille Miglia. https://simanaitissays.com/2016/09/29/rossellinis-and-bergmans-ferraris/
Yup .. nothing quite like a good showing of Young Frankenstein
.. Brad
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was what disabused me of the notion that B&W was old and stuffy, back when I didn’t know better.
The kids, unortunately, won’t know what they’re missing if they refuse to watch black & white movies. I just re-watched Dr. Strangelove for the umpteenth time. In my not-so humble opinion it’s almost a perfect movie – great writing, casting and directing. Every scene pulls you right into the next scene. Even the special effects hold up after all these years. A black & white classic. Now what classic b&w comedy should I watch next? I’m thinking the Marx Brothers. Maybe Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera…
Thirty years ago I was dating a woman who didn’t want to watch films in B&W. We were in the theater to see “Ed Wood”, and after the prelude the film was in black & white. I turn to her and say “I’m sorry, it’s in b & w”!
It was puzzling to me that she liked Cary Grant movies, but apparently hadn’t seen any of his many b & w ones.
We did manage to see Gregory Peck in Twelve O’clock High.
Needless to say, we never saw Orson Welles’s “A touch of Evil”
Her mother’s version, now . . .
Just from my Christmas list, here’s some B&W to watch:
Christmas in Connecticut
The Shop Around the Corner
We’re No Angels
It Happened On Fifth Avenue
Others that come to mind:
It Happened One Night
City Lights
Philadelphia Story
A Stranger In Town
My Man Godfrey
Recently viewed by me:
Merrily We Live (Hal Roach riffing on My Man Godfrey ft. Constance Bennett)
Back when high school newspapers (remember them?) and year books were printed on actual paper, I was loaned a 4X5 Speed Graphic to go forth and make pictures. I also had a 120 roll film back for the Graphic and that made the darkroom work a lot easier than the old sheet film. Working in black and white taught me lots about textures and light and shadow.
I think that horror and early science fiction works very well in black and white. The old classics like Frankenstein and Dracula take you back to the days when the unknown was hidden in the shadows. The 1951 version of The Thing still frightens me. You never see the alien until the last scene, but he’s always there in the dark, ready to kill. That treatment is so much better than John Carpenter’s bloody gore fest.
Nothing puts mysterious and threatening shadows on film like Black & White.
Orson Welles liked to shoot in Black & White, and once, when an actor he wanted in one of his movies complained that it would not be in color, told him, “Black & White is the actor’s friend.”
I was going to recommend a modern classic, Schlindler’s List, that was B&W, but I checked Wiki to see if my memory that it was B&W was correct. About the B&W part it was; about the modern part, not so much. It was from 1993, the year I turned 50 and the younger kid left home. I think that’s still modern but can understand some disagreement on that point.