Russell Merritt is a film studies professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of Walt in Wonderland and the forthcoming Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies.

Color in Hollywood film came of age in the 1950s, the fractious decade when Eastman Kodak finally broke the near-monopoly of 3-strip Technicolor and studios were free to work out color codes and designs of their own. Melodrama all but displaced the musical, the spectacle, and the outdoor picture as the center of a whole new system of color aesthetics. Old masters-notably Sirk, Minnelli, Huston, and Hitchcock-quickly created signature color styles with distinctive new palettes, while the young Turks (Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray in particular) collaborated with their cinematographers to cook up innovative ideas of their own. In tonight's illustrated lecture we look at the developments, and in our three-film series, we examine the color styles of three kinds of fifties melodrama.