Why Do Older Color Movies Look So Vibrant?


Published on Jan 4, 2025
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is uncompromising in its colors, treating skintones with the reddish blush of a Norman Rockwell, with cutting yellows and clear blues.

What Is The Look?

The look I'm talking about is a look of sweet artifice in colored films during Golden Era Hollywood. It's a treatment that runs through earlier films like
Wizard of Oz (1939)
and
Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)
, and later films like
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
and
Suspiria (1977)
. Its saturation looks candy-like but not garish (the sort of painful deep-fried look from cranking up an image's saturation), creating an image on screen that feels somehow larger, more vibrant, than life. Like so many iconic treatments of art, this brilliant artifice is a look shaped by negotiations with its technology, in this case, a color film process called 3-strip Technicolor. I'll attempt to break down the components of this look without diving into the technicalities.
The Technicolor camera mounted on a crane. The camera itself is incased in a much larger soundproof box, as the camera was so loud from its many moving parts.

3-Strip Technicolor

Technicolor is one of few color-film techniques in this era, the first to introduce the groundbreaking 3-strip technique, marking a major
leap of color fidelity
The dulled colours of the previous 2-strip technique
. This technique is named 3-Strip from its core feature of filming on three strips of film at once. When the specialized
Technicolor camera
George Eastman Museum
films a shot, it
splits the incoming image
George Eastman Museum
into separate paths, through three different colored lens (red, green, and blue), onto three strips of film, to create
three black-and-white reels
George Eastman Museum
of the same footage, but
only capturing its specified colour
George Eastman Museum
.
HomeTheatreHiFi "How Three-Strip Technicolor Worked"
These three reels are developed in a Technicolor lab and undergo a dyeing process to invert their colours (from Red/Blue/Yellow into Cyan/Magenta/Yellow), and glued overtop one another, creating a final coloured film strip. There is an excellent video by The 8-Bit Guy who approximates this process digitally. The color-inversion process in merging CMY films instead of RGB films creates vibrant colours in itself (
this lecture elaborates on additive (RGB) vs subtractive (CMY) color theory
Link to Youtuve Video on Additive Vs Subtractive Colour Theory by Greg Danbrooke
), but the key is in the downstream effects to this lengthy and specific process.
From the George Eastman Museum, a diagram demonstrating the image (as dotted lines) passing through the lens and split onto three reels of black and white film that capture only the Red, Green, and Blue rays of the image.

Lights, Lights, Lights, Camera, Action!

For film to capture an image, the film has to be exposed to enough light coming into the camera to "see" the image. At its
basic
Ignoring the concept of aperture
, this is controlled by how long the film is exposed to the light, or how bright a scene is to begin with, so you don't have to look at it for long. This is the concept of exposure. Because the Technicolor camera splits the incoming light into three, to reach three separate reels of film, each reel is exposed to a third of what one would expect from a typical one-strip process. This led to sets using more and stronger lights which, combined with bright vibrant surfaces, created a bright enough image for the camera, altering any realistic natural lighting into stage-like spotlights. The set of The Wizard of Oz (1939) sometimes exceeded 100 degrees fahrenheit, costing
$225,000
Apparently $5.7 Million in 2024
in electricity bills and required an everpresent fire inspector. Luckily, the cast only came close to a heatstroke, although others were
hospitalized from burns for unrelated yet typically insane 1939-filmmaking reasons.
A rushed explosion stunt had left the Wicked Witch of the West (and her stunt double) with severe burns to which the actress Margaret Hamilton describes "as though someone had taken off the top of her hand and peeled it back like an orange."
Harmetz, Aljean - The Making of the Wizard of Oz : Movie Magic and Studio Power in the Prime of MGM and the Miracle of Production #1060, 1977
In this scene from Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), notice how sharp the casted shadows on the walls are. Shadows this clear requires strong direct light, akin to a spotlight, which is still dim enough on-camera to create a night scene, although there are many ways to make a scene bright but still feel like a night shot

We Need To See The Money

In its earlier years, Technicolor operated as a full-suite service rather than a rentable product, comprised of 25 operations (eg. color-directing, printing, processing) and dedicated crews to operate one of their
unweildy 25 specialty cameras
. The knowledge was so guarded, even Technicolor technicians were prevented from learning the entire process. This trades knowledge lent Technicolor aggressive control over its pricing
TIME Magazine. "New Picture" March 15, 1950
(The cost of Technicolor for
Goldwyn Follies (1938)
was an estimated $600,000,
Higgins, Scott. “Technology and Aesthetics: Technicolor Cinematography and Design in the Late 1930s.” Film History 11, no. 1 (1999): 55–76
more than a quarter of its total
$2 million budget
Converted for inflation for 2024, that is $13.5 million out of a $45 million budget
). With costs that high, production needs to make every penny spent on colour could be seen as justification. Sets and costumes are the most notable in these efforts, through
matte painted backgrounds
Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939)
, or vibrant (and sometimes sparkling) costume designs that bordered on cartoonish. Even in Dorothy's Slippers, which were
silver in the source material
"Dorothy looked, and gave a little cry of fright. There, indeed, just under the corner of the great beam the house rested on, two feet were sticking out, shod in silver shoes with pointed toes." - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
, were swapped last minute for sparkling Ruby sequins that flexed its reds against the Yellow Brick Road (although in real life, the slippers are a
deeper maroon
The Smithsonian, where the shoes are displayed
since they were to be blasted with aformentioned powerful set lights).
The iconic red slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939) really were just to make the most of this highly commercial film.

Technicolor Color Doesn't Fade

Despite our archival and restoration developments getting better over the years, the 3-strip Technicolor dyeing process happens to be fade-resistant (as of 2025). This let us experience Technicolor restorations as clear as its original intention, compared to other colored films in the era (i.e. Eastman's) which would would exhibit severe fading after 10 years.
In70mm.com - "Fabulous Technicolor! A History of Low Fade Color Print Stocks"
Although "Brilliant Technicolor" was still praised on release, with time, the distance against its competitors only widen.
Suspiria (1977) has gone through multiple remasters over time, getting crisper with each remaster.

Bonus Material: The Glamour Shot

This is a shot common in Hollywood Golden Age (1930s-60s) to spotlight leading actors in a dreamy wash. Although not absolutely related to Technicolor (this technique existed years before Technicolor), the construction of this shot highlights the types of techniques used to construct scenes of this era.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is interjected with these glamorous portrait shots of Judy Garland, exhibiting all the techniques mentioned. This shot has a strong key-light from the left which is picked up by her eyes and casts a strong shadow on her neck.
This shot is generally a three-quarter-view close-up with a
shallow depth-of-field
A "shallow DoF" creates a blurry background. Think of this as allowing a small or "shallow" degree of what's on screen to be in focus, versus a "deep DoF" which allows for a larger amount to be in focus.
. The subject is lit with a standard three-point-light composed of a 'fill' light that brightens the entire scene (more on this fill later), a 'key' light to show where the main light is coming from (often catching the glint of the eyes and creating the only harsh shadow on the head), and a 'rim' light shone above and behind the subject, carving a white perimeter of the silhouette. The rim light serves the purpose of isolation when, combined with the shallow depth of field, separates the subject from its background in an almost pasted green screen-like manner. This rim creates a halo-like glow (especially against fluffier hair) that is excentuated by techniques of diffusion. Diffusion is a method that softens lights by filtering it through some sort of substance. The fill light in these shots are often so diffused it eliminates any shadows that imply roughness or texture. Combined with soft make-up and sometimes even an intentional slight defocus, this can create an air-brushed look. However, diffusion isn't exclusive for lights, but can also be applied to lenses to alter the images passing through the camera. The most primitive techniques ranged from coating the lens with a thin layer of vaseline or even a stretched pantyhose. Today, there's no need for questionable accessories on set when you can buy many diffusion lens filters or the flexibility of post-processing.

Further Learning & Sources