Was the 1938 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy movie The Girl of the Golden West at least started in Technicolor? With color possibly abandoned due to the problems with the two stars, and thus the movie was released with a “sepia” tint instead?
The main “problem” was that Jeanette MacDonald had just wed Gene Raymond in June 1937. Jilted Nelson Eddy was upset, drinking, and had been ready to go on suspension rather than have to work with Jeanette again. MGM teamed them together again because of international movie-going audience outrage following her marriage to Gene Raymond. Details about the filming can be read at this link, including the fact that Jeanette and Nelson are in the same scene together in only 22 minutes of the entire film!
At that same link, I noted the following: “In the mid 1970s I met an elderly man who had worked at Technicolor in the 1930s. Long retired, he had an amazing collection of color clips, films, scrapbooks and written records from Technicolor. He pulled out a somewhat faded 35mm film strip of several frames from the scene pictured above. He kindly cut off one frame and gave it to me along with another frame from Jeanette singing “Ave Maria” in the church choir scene as well as color portraits (now also faded) and glass slides of Jeanette and Nelson together from Girl plus a candid shot of her on the set with her makeup kit, also in color.”
While unpacking boxes that were kept in storage when still living in New York City, I just located the color photo mentioned above of Jeanette singing in the church choir scene. This was taken from another film strip frame, and the photograph is stamped on the back the date of August 1976. This is when I met the gentleman and these photographs were made. He did not know why the color was abandoned, but below is the transferred, un-retouched photo. What a find!
Here’s one of the series of color portraits I was given; this one we used on the cover of our magazine #58.
This gentleman had a log book of Technicolor films. I do remember him commenting that he didn’t see in the log book that Rose Marie was supposed to be in color, even though Fred Phillips, one of the young makeup men along with William Tuttle, both working under Jack Dawn, insisted he did use Technicolor makeup for a time on Nelson both in Rose Marie at Lake Tahoe, and for Girl. Phillips defended the fact that while it looked awful on Nelson, orders to overdo the makeup came from the top, and if both films had indeed been filmed or released in color, Nelson wouldn’t have looked so overdone. As comparison, Nelson’s The Desert Song was aired in color when first released on TV in 1955. The surviving master film print is, however, in black-and-white, and Nelson looks similarly harshly made up in some of those scenes.