Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

like a giant toy garage. For The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis,
1961), the set design of Ross Bellah and Hal Pereira,
decorated by Sam Comer and James Payne, and shot in
Technicolor by W. Wallace Kelley, features a giant
boardinghouse in which nubile girls dressed by Edith
Head in pastel pajamas wake up in variously colored
rooms.
The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) has a
number of startling color sequences, in particular Fred
Astaire’s ‘‘Put a Smile on Your Face’’ dance routine. On a
set designed by Preston Ames, Harry Jackson’s
Technicolor camera shoots a kaleidoscopic arcade with
Astaire, in a light gray suit with royal blue socks, dancing
his troubles away with a shoeshine man in a green
Hawaiian shirt and hot fuchsia socks. In the celebrated
‘‘Dancing in the Dark’’ duet, Astaire and Cyd Charisse,
both in elegant white against a vivid green-and-blue
background of Central Park at twilight, move to Arthur
Schwartz’s music as the color of the set—not quite real,
not quite fake—suspends and lulls us into a trance of
engagement. In a stunning moment we see the horse that
has pulled their carriage to this location pausing to drink
from a fountain in which the water is sapphire blue—the
blue of dreams, of pure wonder.
SEE ALSO Cinematography; Lighting; Technology
Color
FURTHER READING
Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as Modern Business
Enterprise, 1930–1939. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Buscombe, Edward. ‘‘Sound and Color.’’ In Movies and Methods:
An Anthology, Vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols, 83–91. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985.
Fielding, Raymond. The Technique of Special Effects
Cinematography. New York: Hastings House, 1968.
Gunning, Tom. ‘‘Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative
Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator.’’ In
American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions,
Practices, edited by Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, 15–50.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Haines, Richard W. Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye
Transfer Printing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen
to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Winston, Brian. ‘‘A Whole Technology of Dyeing.’’ Daedalus
114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 105–123.
Murray Pomerance
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