When I think of the amazing legacy of Columbia Pictures film noir I am reminded of the classic stylistic elements of the genre: the dark foreboding cityscape of The Big Heat, or the equally forbidding hot island nights of The Lady from Shanghai, or the dangerous allure of Gilda as she flips her hair in that very seductive way.  The elements common to all noir – the shiny wet streets where it has always just rained, the (usually blonde) femme fatale, the high contrast black and white cinematography – are the most pleasurable things that come to mind.  Then there are other aspects of restoring these films that I think about.

There is the damage. Many of these films were so popular that they were released over and over for years.  The sheer mechanical contact of making prints would inevitably take its toll: torn sprockets, broken splices poorly repaired, bad duplicate negatives made to replace damaged original negative, scratches running through entire reels, or worse yet, entire reels missing in action. Films mere shadows of their former life.

In the purely photo-chemical era of film restoration, many of these problems could not be fixed. Working with great film laboratories specializing in this work, for both picture and sound, had its share of great successes mixed with heartbreaking compromises in quality.  In the current era of high resolution digital tools and techniques that some of these same laboratories have morphed to, many of these issues can be resolved and satisfyingly exhibited digitally, or with new prints theatrically, or in a variety of ways in the home theater. 

And yet it is the haunting image – the moody dark shadows, the dramatic low-key/high-contrast lighting of the cinematography – that is one of the most challenging aspects of restoration.  The goal is to have the film looking as it did at its best when originally released. Not modern, not ultra clean or grain-free, but right for its time.  Over many years, we were fortunate to have worked with great cinematographers on their own films – Neo-Noirs such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (Michael Chapman), Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (Conrad L. Hall), Brian De Palma’s Obsession (Vilmos Zsigmond) and Body Double (Stephen H. Burum).

But it was the work of the late, great cinematographer Burnett Guffey that demands attention, having shot such classics as In a Lonely Place, The Harder They Fall, So Dark the Night, The Reckless Moment, Knock on Any Door, The Sniper, Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, among almost two dozen noir films. His visual style, with its dramatic use of the stark and shadowy contrast between darkness and light, literally defined the look of Columbia noir.  Replicating the original achievement of artists like this is the thing that drives our restoration imperative, keeping alive and well Columbia Pictures film noir.