10 great Technicolor melodramas

Neither Technicolor nor melodramas present reality exactly as it is seen and felt. Both the dye-transfer film colour system and the genre of heightened dramas filter reality through a system of exaggerations that capture movement and emotion and makes it feel exhilaratingly cinematic. 

In many ways, ‘Glorious Technicolor’ (referring to the colour system’s fourth iteration, popular in the industry from the 1930s onwards) and melodramas are a perfect pair. The saturated colours and textures appeal in the same way that stories of scandals, trysts or harboured desires do. Not as an exact representation of the world, but as a vibrant revision inspired by its raw materials.

At the time of the old Hollywood studio system, melodramas were often considered lower grade entertainment or ‘women’s pictures’. Many were literary adaptations populated by stock characters and familiar story arcs about the patrician classes and social transgressions. But their dismissive reputation at the time undermines the strength of countless powerful performances and impressive craft, strengths that are harder to ignore when paired with a vivid Technicolor palette. 

Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) has been reclaimed from its initial ‘woman’s weepie’ reception as one of the finest Hollywood melodramas – a deft, moving exploration of constrictive social mores, neglected female sexuality, and the need to hide love from prying, judgmental eyes. It’s also the pinnacle of the melodrama as it is expressed in Technicolor, where transgressive social reflections are painted in luscious colours. 

As Sirk’s film returns to the big screen as part of our Too Much: Melodrama on Film season, here are 10 more films that marry heightened drama with the heightened hues of classic Hollywood’s most eye-popping colour process.

Director: William A. Wellman

There have been four big-screen versions of A Star Is Born, and two of them – the ones starring Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland respectively – have been shot in Technicolor. Borrowing liberally from the 1932 drama What Price Hollywood?, the 1937 version stars a smiley Gaynor as Vicki Lester, the movie star who arrived in Hollywood as nobody Esther Blodgett until washed-up alcoholic actor Norman Maine (Fredric March) launched her as a bonafide celebrity. 

At 111 minutes, this is the shortest A Star Is Born, recounting its parallel rise and fall narratives with an impressive clip. The film industry is pastiched as savvy, petty and manipulative, a self-interested structure that triggers vivid internal conflict for the celebrity husband and wife. As the scuttlebutt and scandal surrounding Norman and Vicki’s relationship deepens, her career soars while his falters, leading to a tragic resolution – set against a dazzling Technicolor sunset – that damns contemporary Hollywood far more severely than is hinted at by the bright-eyed, declarative title.

Director: Clarence Brown

This family-friendly melodrama stars a fresh-faced Elizabeth Taylor (only 12 years old) as Velvet Brown, a pre-teen horse enthusiast in 1920s England whose friendship with young drifter ‘Mi’ Taylor (Mickey Rooney) leads to her competing in the Grand National on her racehorse ‘The Pie’. Director Clarence Brown’s use of Technicolor enhances the cosy, pastoral feel of the film, but aside from the rich exteriors (California doubling for Sussex) and finely painted backdrops, the young actors are aided by the sharp colour cinematography – in her breakout role, Taylor’s rosy red cheeks and sharp blue eyes constantly register on screen, and these colourful details add to her animated performance. 

Taking place mostly at the Brown farm, National Velvet weaves affecting and amusing arcs out of the eccentric Brown siblings, their stern but good-natured parents, and the ways Mi’s weathered self-reliance interrupts their rural calm. It’s a sports story concerned chiefly with smoothing out the tensions of a family.

Director: John M. Stahl

John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven blurs the borders between the melodrama and film noir, intensifying the major emotions that protagonists of both genres are driven by – including guilt, jealousy, anxiety and inadequacy. Gene Tierney plays Ellen, a dazzling socialite who falls helplessly for novelist Richard (Cornel Wilde) and tries to create a picture perfect marriage. But Richard’s love for her is jeopardised by her inordinate jealousy – directed first towards Richard’s disabled kid brother, then her own cousin Ruth (Jeanne Crain). 

Stahl’s Technicolor images are picturesque but also bristling with uneasy mood and emotions, exposing every flicker of resentment and anguish on Tierney’s perfectly-lit face. It’s not clear if Ellen is a textbook example of a femme fatale, as her growing obsession and paranoia feels more indebted to how melodramas trigger self-destructive behaviour via the instability of their characters’ worlds and relationships, but the film’s noir DNA definitely complicates the lush pleasures of the summertime Technicolor photography.

Director: King Vidor

A massive and hectic production interrupted by weather, strikes and sickness – not to mention director King Vidor walking off the set in protest at the interefence of super-producer David O. Selznick – this hot-blooded, borderline demented western melodrama follows in the footsteps of Selznick’s previous mega-hit Gone with the Wind (1939). 

No expense was spared for this lavish spectacle wherein Jennifer Jones plays Pearl Chavez, a Mestiza woman orphaned when her father is hanged for murdering his adulterous wife. She moves in with distant Texas relatives, including their two handsome sons, the rakish Lewt (Gregory Peck) and the upstanding Jesse (Joseph Cotton). Lewt ignites a battle between the brothers for Pearl’s heart that soon becomes a fight for her soul, with Jones’s performance somewhere between hysteria and righteous fury for the film’s back half. The Technicolor images try their damndest to sell the impressive scale of the melodrama, convincing us of the chaos and high emotions that defined the settling of the West. 

Director: Bernard Knowles

The Gainsborough melodramas were a series of domestic costume dramas from Gainsborough Pictures based in Islington Studios. Of all the films on this list, Jassy most stringently obeys the conventions of the historical melodrama – Jassy (Margaret Lockwood) is a gifted, shrewd head maid in a country estate owned by a vile, drunken scoundrel (Basil Sydney). Compared with the melodramas of auteurs such as Sirk or Powell and Pressburger, Jassy feels unrefined, revelling in the broad, cross-class caricatures, scandalous plotting, with every possible excess of desire and feeling. (One character unsuccessfully instructs his weeping lover, “Don’t be melodramatic!”) 

But the assured camerawork and strong pacing sell the pleasures of the story, alongside the diffused, attractive Technicolor textures. Jassy proved to be a swansong of sorts: the Gainsborough melodrama had waned in popularity by the late 1940s, and their first Technicolor effort was one of the last films they produced, as the studio shuttered two years later.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Famed creative duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are no stranger to Technicolor mastery, but this romantic melodrama set in the West Midlands has a far more rugged and windswept feel than the Archers’ previous colour classics, such as Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). 

Hazel (Jennifer Jones) is the half-gypsy daughter of a simple coffinmaker. She loves her pet fox and roams the countryside with abandon, until she attracts the attention of a braggart squire (David Farrar) and a mannered local parson (Cyril Cusack). The Technicolor cinematography heightens the natural countryside colours – reds, greens and browns – but also of clothes and fabrics worn by the feuding symbols of freedom and control that drive the film. In the opening act, Hazel is ecstatic in a bright green dress that first attracts male attention, while in the intense and ultimately tragic conclusion the red uniforms of the squire’s hunting party are an invading force trying to flush out her wild spirit.

Director: John Ford

The Quiet Man is the rare Republic Pictures film with a big budget – the western and B-movie studio spent a significant $1.75 million in 1952 for an Irish pastoral melodrama that showed director John Ford at his most moving and sentimental. 

Sean Thornton (a sensitive John Wayne) is a Pittsburgher who travels to Inisfree, his Irish birthplace, to start a new life in his ancestral home. The village folk are lively and welcoming (despite some glaring culture clashes), with the exception of the beautiful, nervous Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) and her boorish brother Will (Victor McLaglen), who will do anything in his power to keep the two prospective lovers apart. Shot across County Galway and Mayo, Ford’s use of Technicolor deepens the beauty of the locations with rich, overwhelming sensation and colour, underlining the tensions between rigid rural tradition and affecting, good-humoured romance.

Director: George Stevens

The melancholic gunfighter is a well-worn, time-honoured archetype, and this rich tale of homestead peril is firmly situated in both the western and melodrama tradition. The small, fragile Starrett family – Joe (Van Heflin), Marian (Jean Arthur) and young Joey (Brandon deWilde) – are being intimidated by a cattle baron in their picturesque Wyoming valley in the tail end of the 19th century. Enter Shane (Alan Ladd), who slinks into the Starrett’s homestead and becomes an object of admiration for young Joey. 

Director George Stevens shot largely on location, and the Technicolor images capture both how impressive and lonely the frontier must have felt. Although it was originally shot in the Academy ratio, Paramount cropped the film to make Shane their widescreen debut. The results feel like a cinematic counterpoint to the contemporary popularity of western TV shows: an aching, romantic story of family tensions and social change surging through America the Beautiful.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti’s first colour film was a milestone in his career, a tempestuous melodrama set against a nationalistic historical backdrop. The plot sees Livia (Alida Valli), a Venetian countess, in a loveless marriage and quietly supporting her Italian Nationalist cousin, but defying all reason by starting a dangerous affair with a caddish Austrian soldier (Falrey Granger). 

Senso feels like an epic novel condensed to a digestible scale, and the Technicolor visuals (the collected efforts of three cinematographers: G.R. Aldo, Giuseppe Rotunno and Robert Krasker) capture the pastel opulence of aristocratic interiors, the murky, purple colours of cities at night, and the open plains of a country at war. Senso is tied so closely to Livia’s perspective that the clandestine, shadowy alleys and waterways feel protective, while the bright reds and yellows of countryside horizons feel relentless and exposing as Livia wrestles with her traitorous secrets.

Director: Douglas Sirk

A terrific introduction to melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows explores with poise the fraught social structures that ruled middle-class society in mid-century America. Neglected by her adult children and WASP community after the death of her husband, Cary (Jane Wyman) falls for her frank gardener Ron (Rock Hudson), despite their significant difference in age. 

Sirk paints Cary’s country club enclave and Ron’s simple, natural lifestyle with exaggerated lighting and sets, leaning into an unreal intensity that expresses the increasingly passionate but also confused emotions gripping Cary as she debates her love for Ron. All That Heaven Allows is a story of anxiety and desire rooted in a specific American historical moment, where the distress caused by the gendered, classist traditions could be critiqued freely within the melodrama form. Sirk animates the archetypes with an achingly attractive style.

All That Heaven Allows is back in cinemas from 24 October.

Too Much: Melodrama on Film is a celebration of melodrama at BFI Southbank, in cinemas UK wide and on BFI Player from October to December.