It turns out that not every black & white movie was a great work of art. I was against colorization like all right-thinking people. Once the controversy passed, I was able to admit that the colorization of the first season of Gilligan's Island was an improvement.
Now I've stumbled upon several 1930's B westerns on TUBI. They star a young John Wayne. They colorized them, adjusted the sound which made them easier to understand but also made them sound dubbed, and they added non-diegetic music which those old low budget movies never had.
I forced myself to sit through one of them in its original form on another streaming channel. Colorization was a vast improvement. The foreground didn't blend in with the background. They colorized the blood and made shooting a gun out of someone's hand seem less innocuous.
One, Randy Rides Alone (1934) starts with John Wayne walking into a bar that was littered with dead bodies. The player piano is still going. There's no one left alive. You don't see that every day. Wayne is arrested for killing them. He escapes from jail and, while fleeing the posse, he stumbled upon the gang of killers who accept him as a new member.
I'm not sure if the movies were really more watchable or if I was just distracted by the colorization and my doubts about their music choices.
I still don't know what to make of the French New Wave's admiration for American B movies.
Other titles include Stolen Goods (1934), An Innocent Man (1933), and Cold Vengeance (1935) and West of the Divide (1934).
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