Helen of Troy (1956)
Warnercolor - NOT Technicolor
29 April 2003
Come on, IMDb'ers! Get your stuff right. Warner Brothers was the studio and they usually forced their producer/directors around this period to use their own proprietary single-strip color process, rather than Technicolor, which by 1956 had already abandoned its own more expensive to use and cumbersome to handle three-strip process. Somehow Robert Wise and his technicians managed to get more variety and warmer tones while using Warnercolor in this film than what was usually achieved stateside on W.B.'s Burbank sound stages and on various U.S. locations. Maybe it was, as Franco Zeffirelli is fond of calling it, "the golden-ah light" of Italy. Anyway this film is quite an eye-filling visual achievement. And Max Steiner's score is one of his better ones, pumping up the spectacle aspect quite effectively.

A couple of trivia notes: The Walls of Troy set accidentally caught fire before the company was finished with it, but Wise and his technicians were on the spot and managed to get some usable footage out of that disaster. (I don't know if they had to reconstruct it or rewrite some scenes that were originally supposed to have taken place on its ramparts.) And TIME magazine in its review complained that Signorina Podesta's vaccination scar (and I think that of Monsieur Sernas as well) is clearly visible in a love scene. Without computers to fix such gaffes back then, and probably not noticing that little "oops!" until examining footage in a U.S. screening room when the company returned home for editing, the studio probably figured they'd just let it pass. But forty-foot wide CinemaScope screens were quite merciless when it came to audiences' perceptions of the obvious.
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