Was this ever colorized?

As a film maker, it would be like making a beautiful painting and finding it's being shown with somebody else's colouring in all over it.

Laura has never been colorized.

Sorry, I'm one of those who, in Gubbio's words, "rails against" colorization. Actually, I'm not at all sorry.

Now, the OP says Gene Tierney looked good in color in Leave Her to Heaven. True. But the huge difference is that that was real color. "Colorization", by its name and by definition, is NOT real color. It's fake, invented, and cannot possibly duplicate the nuances, subtleties and accuracy of actual color.

(I loved the comment by the poster who said they never realized what color the costumes were in Casablanca before seeing it colorized. Sorry to inform them, they still don't. And how seeing the actors in The Maltese Falcon colorized makes the poster realize how young they were? The actors actually weren't all that young there, but I never heard that colorization made you look younger.)

For all his acceptance of colorization, even Gubbio admits that colorization technicians simply make up the colors they slap on costumes -- and everything else -- in a b&w film. Very little you see in colorized movies reflects what colors things actually were...and even in the extremely rare occasions when they have some clue of the real colors, they still cannot duplicate them.

The colorization process requires that a b&w film be, in effect, "washed out", lightened in order to apply the fake colors. This in itself mars the basic film. Then a technician puts on artificial colors that almost never reflect what the actual colors were. And unlike real color, where the shadings and variations of natural colors show up, in colorization the colors are simply uniform and flat -- everything is just yellow or blue or green or whatever, with none of the differentiations seen in the real world.

Also, if you look in the backgrounds of colorized films you can see they often don't bother colorizing things in the distance (people, cars, etc.), or just smear on some colors (like blobs of green on tree leaves) without making any distinctions. Interiors of things like cars when seen in the background are never colorized. Objects that actually were or might have been black or white, such as telephones, are not colorized (a black phone is not painted black by a colorizer), and as such they look faded and unreal amid an otherwise colorized scene.

And if you want to see a colorized Gene Tierney, be prepared for the usual sight of pastel skin with dead pupils in her eyes -- unless it's a close-up, in which case all of a sudden ray beams of unnatural color bobble around the eyeballs. Oh, and gray teeth and a tongue with no color when she opens her lovely mouth.

Have any of you colorization fans considered that movies like Laura are called film noir for a reason? They're supposed to be in black and white. Any movie, color or b&w, is designed and shot to take advantage of its way of being filmed. A b&w film is not simply a color movie shot with b&w film. The whole point is to convey a mood or feeling that only b&w can convey. (Just as a movie filmed in color looks bad in b&w.) Colorization destroys the whole point of making a film in b&w -- and nowhere more so than in film noir. (This also goes for horror films like Frankenstein or Night of the Living Dead. B&W isn't simply a budget choice; the picture only really works as it was filmed.)

In short, colorization has consequences. It isn't merely putting fake, inaccurate colors on a movie. It's changing the movie. The film isn't the same any more. I love this cop-out caveat: "As long as we still have the original." Unhappily, you may not always have access to the original.

One last thing. If you like colorization and don't think it means anything, then why not change a film's music score? Why not remove scenes or add new ones? Why not digitally alter scenes? Why not change dialogue? Why not change colors in color movies? This isn't theory: all these things have been done to many films. If you justify changing a film in one way, you cannot in logic not justify other kinds of changes. And you can't say, well, colorization doesn't change the film, because obviously it does -- otherwise why do it? Where does this nonsense about "having a choice" stop?

Gubbio and others may scoff at "the artist's intent", but despite that opinion, this is indeed a legitimate factor. No one has the right to change another's work.

In any case, one basic question...why are so many people so uptight about black & white?

It is a terrible idea to colorize this film. This film has wonderful black and white cinematography.

You make a very good point, and with that in mind, I propose the following movie channel: Colorized Classic Movies, aka CCM.

"No, I don't like to cook, but I have a chicken in the icebox, and you're eating it."

[deleted]

B&W is unnatural.