This movie featured beautiful scenic backdrops, with snow-capped mountains, winding rivers and dense woods. You may have noticed it bore little resemblance to Oklahoma, and that's because it was filmed in Colorado. As majestic as it is, the scenery seems quite incongruous with all the references to place names in Oklahoma and western Arkansas.
14 comments:
The scenery was beautiful. I think the Technicolor really heightened it. But does Technicolor go with grit?
Found this interesting tidbit on Wikipedia. from the dates mentioned, it sounds like there were other ways to shoot this movie. Was Technicolor chosen in 1969 to give the movie a throw-back feel? Erin mentioned the music functioning as a send-up. Was the use of hyper-saturated Technicolor part of that?
Technicolor was the second major color film process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color motion picture process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952. Technicolor became known and celebrated for its hyper-realistic, saturated levels of color, and was used commonly for filming musicals (such as The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain), costume pictures (such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Joan of Arc), and animated films (such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia).
That is an interesting idea. The movie does seem have several elements intended to give it a retro feel.
I agree. The movie doesn't feel like 1969 at all.
Another Technicolor western from 1969 is Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”. It is quite clearly about the end of the old Wild West, and is as bloody as the spaghetti westerns.
"The Wild Bunch" is Technicolor? I didn't remember that. I remember the "blood ballet," though.
"The Wild Bunch" and "True Grit" had the same cinematographer, Lucien Ballard.
Was it supposed to be set in Oklahoma? It seemed pretty mountainous.
I loved one of the last scenes, of Rooster on one side of the golden trees, the four hoodlums on the other, and then the camera pulls back so you can see them start to approach each other.
Yeah, that's a fantastic scene.
Besides taking liberties with the geography, they played a little loose on the seasons too. At the start of the man hunt, they go past some pretty mountains covered with late spring snows. Then by the time of that gun battle, many of the scenes had lush fall colors.
Or did the manhunt last five months?
Oh, good point, DW.
They look remarkably fresh for a five-month trek.
Yeah, definitely way too mountainous for Oklahoma. McAlister is a real place, though. It has a state prison. But since the rest of the country only thinks of dust when they think of this state, you can get away with it.
Yeah, Ben has family in McAlister. Yell County, Arkansas, is a real place, too. Do you think filmgoers thought "Indian country" really looked like that?
Post a Comment