Not Black and White

Last night, roaming among the more remote and obscure outlying TV channels, I happened upon that greatest of all the Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, which I happily watched to the end – it never palls. Next up after that was another fine Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers, featuring another extraordinary performance by Alec Guinness, with the young Peter Sellers, still plump and rather sweaty, in his first major film role. As it got under way, I felt there was something wrong – why was it in colour, for heaven's sake? Had it been colorised? All my memories of The Ladykillers are in black and white, as befits a comedy noir, filmed in the smoky, grimy, soot-blackened city that was London in the 1950s. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to colorise it? Well, picture my astonishment when I discovered, this morning, that the film was made in colour, using the three-strip Technicolor process. My visual memories of it were entirely false. I guess they were coloured (or…

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