Revolution in Color?

REVOLUTION IN THE CINEMA--screamed the Paris-Presse. Le Parisien Libere went one better: MOVIES IN BLACK AND WHITE ARE DEAD.

The subject of such superheated ban-nerlines last week was a new colored movie process called Rouxcolor. Though hardly as colossal as the excitable French puffs made out, the first Rouxcolor films made moviemen sit up & take notice. To many they seemed sharper and more nearly faithful to natural color values than Technicolor itself. Furthermore, Rouxcolor is an impressive cost-cutter: it can be made with an ordinary black& -white camera equipped with a special lens--at about the same cost as black-&-white film.

Four in One. Two brothers, Armand and Lucien Roux, both opticians, have spent 17 years at the process, working in their fifth-floor laboratory in a drab building on the Left Bank. Fortnight ago they invited famed Writer-Producer Marcel Pagnol to see some test shots. Greatly excited by what he saw, Pagnol (The Baker's Wife, The Welldigger's Daughter) asked to take some color shots of his own. They turned out so well that he decided to shelve the black-&-white film on Franz Schubert (La Belle Meuniere) which he had just finished, and shoot it over again in Rouxcolor. When he releases the color film next September, he expects to make "screen history."

The secret of Rouxcolor is a lens which is divided into four parts, each with a filter for a different color (red, yellow, green, blue). The four-in-one lens "decomposes" light, making four different images on the film. (A gadget prevents distortion of the images in relation to each other.) When projected through a similar lens, the four-color images are "recomposed" into one color picture. The color of the projected image on the screen is given, not by the film as in other processes, but by the four-in-one lens through which the black-&-white film is projected.

'No Sale. Rouxcolor, the inventors say, can be filmed simply by attaching their four-in-one photo lens (a matter of two minutes) to a black-&-white camera, and shooting with black-&-white film. Projection is just as easy. Laboratories can process the film as if it were black-&-white, thus bypass the costly printing of color film.

The Roux brothers do not plan to sell equipment. They expect to rent lenses to producers and moviehouses, hope to have all France supplied in two years. Except for a few first-run moviehouses in major cities, the U.S. will have to wait its turn.

To Hollywood, which has spent millions in its quest for a simple, inexpensive color process, the invention of the Roux brothers seemed too good to be true. Moviemakers had seen too many processes come & go to get excited. But research cameramen have long worked to perfect a process in which the lens and not the film would be the principal color agent. Up to now, experiments with such lenses have not worked out commercially. Hollywood wanted to hear more.

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