The French Connection, director William Friedkin's Academy Award winning New York City crime drama from 1971, has made its way to Blu-ray.
And it makes a very interesting case study.
I'm not going to discuss the film. Everyone knows that Mr. Friedkin created a superlative, taught, heart-pounding drama. If you've not seen it, don't waste any more time. Grab a copy!
What I want to discuss is the color, and how it has been adapted to the filmmaker's desire to see it in a certain new (and different) way.
Let's get a couple of fine points out of the way first.
Personally, I like what Mr. Friedkin has done with the film, and as the director, has the right to update and change the film. The original negative still survives, unchanged. His new color concept, which is actually an old color concept, is quite different from the way the film looked 27 years ago when it had very natural color by deluxe.
The other point that needs to be noted is that what one is seeing in this Blu-ray incarnation, is no longer the Best Picture of 1971. It is a re-vision. Like many of the Disney animated classics, it has been visually "re-imagined."
Might it still have won awards at the time of its release if it looked as it does now?
Probably.
Could this look have been achieved in 1971?
Absolutely.
What Mr. Friedkin, and his colorist have done is to cross-pollinate 1930s and '40s dye transfer technology with the modern digital world, and the fact that they carried out this experiment, which IMHO works, shows just how talented Mr. Friedkin remains as a filmmaker and technician.
But let's go back to the not so lusty, color drenched years of early Technicolor.
To many, dye transfer Technicolor was an extremely problematic system, that needed not only a great deal of hand holding, but also needed to be tamed.
Producer David O. Selznick, one of the format's earliest proponents, along with Walt Disney, felt that the potentially heavy Technicolor look was too much for the modern audience to appreciate. Fox used it undiminished for many of their "40s musicals.
So he toned it down.
The earliest prints of Gone with the Wind, along with other productions as disparate as his own Nothing Sacred (1937) and Fox's The Little Princess (1937), had extremely low color saturation with overall sepia cast.
One of the problems of early Technicolor was an apparent lack of depth in the dyes and their ability to render a image heavy enough and sharp enough to properly project. A way around this, which was standard into the mid-1940s was the use of a fourth record, black & white, derived from the green information.
Thus, when printed, the final result had (as a single exposure) a black & white soundtrack, a black & white exposure at a lower than normal density to both add sharpness as well hold back contrast, and frame lines -- and over this, the yellow, cyan and magenta dyes.
Mr. Friedkin references John Huston's Moby Dick as the precursor to his work on The French Connection, and while true, the reality goes directly back to the mid-1930s and the period up to WWII.
There is also a bit of information that comes across incorrectly in the Color Timing piece, which is that Moby Dick was not a Technicolor production. It was photographed on standard Eastman Kodak 5248 color negative, and then printed by Technicolor in dye transfer, but with the extra black & white record. I'm sure that he knows that.
What is interesting here, is that Mr. Friedkin and his colorist take it a step further. Not simply wishing to add the extra record, they also extracted the color, de-focussed it, reduced it, and laid it back on top of the black & white, to yield a higher contrast with lower chroma.
Not your father's French Connection, but a very interesting and beautiful one.
If I were able to make a single change, it would have been a simple one.
I would add a third disc -- the film is certainly worth it -- with the original Academy Award winning version of the film, as seen in 1971, the new version of French Connection "redux," and the third disc of extras.
From his appearance on the Blu-ray special feature, Mr. Friedkin appears to be a very young 73, and is certainly in tune with modern processes. I'd very much like to see him behind the camera again ASAP. Just imagine what he could turn out going full digital with a Dalsa or Red, and taking it to a digital intermediate.
