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Topic: Legong - Dance of the Virgins (DVD)

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-16-2005 04:33 PM

This film is going to be of interest to Film-Techers mainly because Legong was the last feature to be shot in the two-colour (red and green) Technicolor process, and is also claimed to be the last silent feature released by a Hollywood distributor.

The film is a travel 'documentary'. In terms of content, it sort of sits half way between the deadly serious ethnographic approach of Robert Flaherty and Nanook of the North and the trashy, sensationalist style of Martin & Osa Johnson. This quote from the DVD sleeve sums it up, I think:

quote:
In the 1930s, Bali became the place to be. Extolled as a paradise on Earth with beautiful (mainly topless) natives and an exotic culture, the small island was soon swarming with the rich and famous. When the Marquis Henry de la Falaise de la Coudray (or 'Hank' to his ex-wife Gloria Swanson and current wife Constance Bennett) arrived with a Technicolor crew in 1933, there had already been a slew of 'documentaries' that reaped box-office success in the United States. Directed by the dilettante husband of two famous movie stars, how good could the film be? Slashed apart by censors throughout the world, it quickly disappeared and was forgotten.

The film was recently restored from a combination of original, intermediate and release print elements from US, Canadian and British archives by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which is the version on this DVD. To be honest, it's a bit cliched and trashy: the 'story' is basically an excuse for filming Balian natives without much in the way of clothes on. But if you want to see what two-colour Technicolor could achieve at its very best, this is very much worth a look; and the restoration and transfer is amazing (the bitrate hardly ever drops below 8). As with all Milestone DVDs, the extras are very generous, including a transfer from a 16mm print of another Falaise documentary, previously thought lost, and a 1960s b/w travelogue about Bali.

Link to ordering information

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 04-17-2005 04:53 PM

quote: Leo Enticknap
the 'story' is basically an excuse for filming Balian natives without much in the way of clothes on.

Well, two colour processes did render flesh tones quite well, so maybe it was a good choice of subject.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-19-2005 08:59 AM

Interesting - one of the things which struck me about this film was that it was obviously shot with the limitations of the red/green system in mind. The only other two-colour Technicolor feature I've seen is The Toll of the Sea. Quite apart from being an utterly shite film in terms of script, acting and direction (it's almost not believable that the lead actress is the same Anna May Wong as in Picadilly), the sets and locations keep reminding you that there's no blue in the picture. In the last scene, any tears that may have been jerked by the sight of a heartbroken Wong throwing herself into the ocean are totally undermined by the yellowish-green sky above the cliff she jumps off, making you wonder if the film was shot on Mars!

They seem to have taken this into account with Legong - you hardly ever see any sky in the shot composition, trees and woodland are used as backdrops most of the time and most of the costumes are in vivid shades of red and green. It was very effective, and throughout much of the film I barely noticed that only two thirds of the visible colour spectrum was in use.

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