Photo by Cynthia Larsen

An outlier goes colorless

By Ed Goldman

In a recent guest editorial in the New York Times, the writer tells how she curbed her smart-phone addiction by switching all of the images on it from full-color to black-and-white, which she finds less compelling. 

This would never work for me. I prefer black-and-white photos and films to those in color, with a few exceptions: cartoons and westerns (though three of my faves, “Red River,” “Stagecoach” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” are in black-and-white).

I wasn’t always this way (or this tall, now that I think back to my earliest memories). When my dad took me to a matinee at the Loew’s American movie theater in the Bronx, there’d always be two feature-length films, as well as a newsreel and at least one cartoon. The main feature—the one listed first in the ads, on the outdoor theater marquee and in the glassed-in lobby posters—was usually in color. 

The second feature, which was called the “bottom half” of the bill, was frequently a black-and- white “B” movie. I never cared much about watching that one, even though some films, later acclaimed as great (like Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil”), might have been lurking there, almost daring you to seek them out. But most of the bottom feeders would rank as “B” movies only if they were subjected to grade inflation.

I came by this opaqueness honestly. In those days, the 1950s, very few TV shows were broadcast in color and very few people had color TVs. This made going to the movies a special event. I can still recall stifling tears of joy the first time a Popeye cartoon (in color!) burst onto the screen, wedged between the features. I was addicted to all-things-Popeye in those days. I begged my mom to buy spinach even though I was the only one in our home who liked it; I still keep a fresh bunch of it in my fridge most of the time, and I’m still the only one in my immediate orbit who loves it. I had a Popeye doll and Popeye decals: little anchor tattoos that could be slid onto my arms in the morning then washed off during my nightly bath.

Popeye was the first cartoon character I learned to draw (on my bedroom wall, causing appropriate parental consternation) and I sadly admit that my rendering of him hasn’t improved with age. I’d like to pretend that my mediocre drawings of him are a sort of homage, though to exactly what I’m still puzzling on. (My childhood? Primitive imagery?)

It’s unclear to me when I made the leap to liking black-and-white movies on the big screen but I suspect that one movie in particular effected the conversion. It was a 1963 mystery called “The List of Adrian Messenger,” starring George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Dana Wynter and a roster of then-major movie stars in cameo roles—as well as in tons of makeup and prosthetics to disguise their familiar faces: Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum (who was virtually undisguisable) and Burt Lancaster (as a woman!).  

The great Scott, an American, played the retired English spy so well that the next time I saw him in a movie and he didn’t sound like a Brit I thought he was faking an American accent, the way the late Peter Sellers (a Brit) as well as contemporary actors like Christian Bale (also a Brit), Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and the late Rod Taylor (all from Australia) can and could do so flawlessly.