Siskel & Ebert: Hail, Hail, Black and White (1989)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- Film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert praise black-and-white films in this 1989 black-and-white special episode of their legendary TV series "At the Movies." Films mentioned include Raging Bull, Swing Time, A Hard Day's Night, Cat People, and many others. Original commercials from the broadcast are retained here. Some music is muted due to copyright.
According to Opposable Thumbs, Matt Singer's book about Siskel & Ebert, this episode's lighting was done by the (retired) gaffer who lit the 1960 presidential debate between JFK and Nixon in the same studio.
I love black & white films even 2024. Thanks S&E.
I cant lie B&W movies are amazing sometimes look at The Most Dangerous Game, or The Bad Seed even uf you remake you cant get that passion and fear in those films with color
I would like to see A Hard Day's Night in color.
My Top 8 Best Black and White Movies are
Rashomon (1950) Akira Kurosawa
Citizen Kane (1941) Orson Welles
Raging Bull (1980) Martin Scorsese
The 400 Blows (1959) Francois Truffaut
Some Like it Hot (1959) Billy Wilder
Dr. Strangelove (1964) Stanley Kubrick
Pather Panchali (1955) Satyajit Ray
Seven Samurai (1954) Akira Kurosawa
Have you seen Stray Dog by Kurosawa?
There's so many great Black and White films that work so well without colour.
The Kid 1921, Red River 1948, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1945, Shadow of a Doubt 1943, Bicycle Thieves 1948, The Lost Weekend 1945, all look great in black and white because of the added grittiness it can give, colour can sort of soften a film.
How about Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Third Man, Citizen Kane, Paper Moon, Dr. Strangelove, Casablanca, etc., etc., etc.....? The list is very long! LOL
Here's a great one we can all watch for free on YT: Ingmar Bergman's delicious black comedy _The Seventh Seal_ (1957)
th-cam.com/video/GT8VqgagrJw/w-d-xo.html
- There's no doubt that this movie would be massively weakened if it were shot in colour, it feels so mythic!
It’s a Wonderful Life, Schindler’s List, King Kong, Nosferatu, 8 and a half, Double Indemnity, Seven Samurai, Duck Soup, not one of these movies would have been better in color. No matter how more advanced the technology gets, Colorization is nothing more then an attempt to rob our great black-and-white movies of their magic, to re-process them into a more prosaic and usually pasty and phony looking color. It’s like graffiti on works of art. During the colorization frenzy of the 80s one film maker mounted a hard fighting campaign to put an end to the process before it was too late. George Lucas. That’s right, the man who CGed his Star Wars movies, was the man leading the charge against colorizing motion pictures.
But one thing that I have been noticing is that as these young people are getting older, they are starting to look at these old films and give them a chance. More often than not, the results have been very cathartic. Great art is timeless and the longer these films hold up, the more their messages can be conveyed to, and interpreted by, future generations…just so they can grow up to see these film being dismissed and overlooked by the next horrendous generation.
4 years before Schindler’s List
I recorded this episode back in 1989 and I watched it multiple times. I was 19. It was the reason I sought out a number of films (red river, cat people). I remember every moment of this episode.
A delicious recent B/W movie is the hauntingly strange _November_ (from 2017)
- We were glued to that the whole way through, so many beautiful images!
I think films really need to be left alone because the director would have made specific choices about how the film was shot and and presented based on black and white v colour.
I can't imagine watching the adventures of Robin Hood or Gone with the Wind not in colour because in Gone with the Wind they thought so closely about the light, the warmth to empthaise the south, the spectacular reds and Blacks almost like blood when Atlanta is under siege.
But equally a film like The Third Man or The Spy who Came in From the Cold looks so dazzling in black and white and sort of hard and shadowy which fits the theme so well.
A half way point could be the way Some war movies now are filmed in that fadded washed out look where there is colour but it's been toned down a lot.
I totally remember this episode
I'm disappointed that the advertisements aren't in black and white.
Other great Black and White films, Good Night, And Goodluck!
Stagecoach
It's a Wonderful Life
The Great Dictator
Belfast
To Kill a Mockingbird
Dracula
Schindelers list
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
My Darling Clementine
Brief Encounter
Totally agree! Thank goodness for the black and white era of movies.
Thanks for posting this. I saw an interview with S&E a few weeks ago and they were asked what show they were most proud of, and they both answered this one. I don’t remember seeing it when it aired (I was about 17-18 at the time and watched them whenever possible) so I looked on TH-cam for it. Nothing. Then I tried the archive site. Nada. So again, thanks for posting. I love S&E and B&W films. I once watched nothing but TCM for 6 months straight.
I believe it was on Bob Costas' show where they said that. I might have taped that show and could upload it if TH-cam would permit.
@@classicvideogoodies Andyfilm has a Costas episode from 1992 posted. Not sure if it's the same one. He said he also had them on 3 years prior at the start: th-cam.com/video/gczRoEjnql8/w-d-xo.html
@@jedijones I looked at the 1992 episode and the 1989 episode ( th-cam.com/video/lQaYA1X0ZPo/w-d-xo.html ) of the Bob Costas interviews but couldn't find the mention. Later I remembered it was on a 1995 C-SPAN2 interview ( th-cam.com/video/Kp1potfWU8M/w-d-xo.html ) where they mentioned it. Go to the 13-minute mark of that video where Gene and Roger gave a long answer on their favorite episode being the one on b/w. They celebrated their 20th year in 1995, an occasion that prompted someone to ask them what their favorite show was.
@@classicvideogoodies Might've been when they were doing the National Press Club in 1995. That is on here.
Best Black & White
Casablanca
Manhattan
The Hustler
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Attack of the Puppet People
The Heiress
Stormy Weather
Young Man with The Horn
Psycho
Raging Bull
Citizen Kane
Some Like It Hot
The Grand Hotel
Schindler's List
Swing Time
Roman Holiday
It Happened One Night
The Best Years of Ours Lives
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Hard Day's Night
Notorious
Red River
Out of the Past
The Bad & The Beautiful
La Dolce Vita
The Third Man
The Lady from Shanghai
One of the great things about black-and-white is that restorations of B&W films, especially films that were shot purposely in black-and-white, look incredible and, ironically, more contemporary. Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf, Manhattan, Lenny, Ed Wood, Raging Bull, they all feel like they could have been shot yesterday.
What I’ve wondered is whether Bogdanovich’s output been way better and been one of masters if he had stuck with mostly black and white. The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon are classics and easily his best films
Calling that dating hotline.
brb.
I’m a millennial, I’m lazy, withdrawn and cynical. I’m a progressive, I love new technology, I don’t have a problem seeing Godzilla in CGI. Yet at the same time I also love black and white movies. Film noir without black and white? Might as well have a driving movie without any cars.
The Bad and The Beautiful was a great movie
Roger looks "great" in B&W
Siskel: "Halfway decent"
All the more important to watch/post/like in our present age, when a new generation of colorists has posted colorized footage on TH-cam. Bafflingly regressive.
@@ianmillerdevilsfan1223 They get something that’s easy, that doesn’t challenge them. Isn’t that what most Americans want?
They forgot Young Frankenstein.
There’s something about black and white which creates this more other worldly feel. I don’t know what it is, but monochrome is so intimate and yet not. It’s weird. My personal view on how films are done is that they should either be technicolour or monochrome. If you’re going to shoot something in colour, actually have colour (cough, Zack Snyder, cough). I’m a big fan of the older Universal Frankenstein films. The black and white actually enhances those films, especially when the colour would actually make the makeup look fake.
Frankenstein looks stupid with the green face
Here's a perfect example of what you're saying
that we can all watch for free on YT: Ingmar Bergman's delicious black comedy _The Seventh Seal (1957)_ 👍
th-cam.com/video/GT8VqgagrJw/w-d-xo.html
- There's no doubt that this movie would be massively weakened if it were shot in colour, it feels so perfectly mythic!
What about the Disney films? What about the glorious color of, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
I like black and white films. But to claim that director's today would prefer to shoot in black and white is an overstatement. Imagine Pulp Fiction in black and white, or 2001 a space Odyssey: no way
Kubrick directed Dr. Strangelove in black-and-white right before that.
To be fair they said that directors would love the chance to shoot a picture in B/W - Not ALL their films!
What happened to the sound during A Hard Day's Night?
©️ music that’s muted
Beatles' army of lawyers ruining fair use.
TH-cam copyright bots - it has to be censored to not get taken down.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 they did it in b/w, very funny,
@7:05 got em'
The Hustler. One of the best movies ever. It gave that atmosphere about a pool hustlers life. As a kid A Hard Day's Night was my favorite movie. I still love it, but at the time I wish it was filmed in color. Was I wrong?
Robert Blake! 😂😂😂
Sucks muted audio
It's music copyright that did that. Either that, or you don't see the video. This is commonplace in all of TH-cam. E.g. all the videos on the Oscars official channel had all the copyrighted music and video taken out.
Spiker!😅😅
I'm kind of on the fence about Gilda....
The quintessential redhead in black and white⁉️💃 I'm not sure about that and the scene with the airplane crash in the Ocean looks horrible..
It needs some beefing up
Siskel was lying his ass off about dreaming in black and white, but I understand why he said it.
Let's just say the first time photography was invented, it was in color. Would anyone have invented black-and-white photography later just for artistic reasons? I can understand it existing by accident but would there really be a valid artistic argument to create it if it didn't?
Whatever photography that could've been used, it would've been made an art form just the same because we humans see a lot of things as art, especially visual matters. I also want to add that although B&W looks good in films, it does not look good on videotape as shown in this show because the VHS format (and also LD, for that matter) can't present brightness and contrast as optimally as celluloid film can. In fact, we had to wait till the advent of digital video (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.) in order to actually see the most optimal picture quality on home TV, thus finally seeing the beauty of B/W on home video.
Well I guess you can use Schindler's List as a sort of experiment. Would it have been just as good or better if it was in color? Spielberg made a conscious decision to put it in black and white. I don't know if it would have been better but there are some examples of directors using black and white in the age of color.
If it expressed something that color couldn’t, of course. Why wouldn’t they?!?
I think so, just like if we only had 3D movies to start with I think 2D would still have come along.
@@emersonlee5146 They use black-and-white for older period stories sometimes simply because we all know black-and-white film is what existed during that period. If film had started in color, they wouldn't have likely chosen black-and-white for Schindler's.