One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley announced another technical innovation in a film that was in production:
It looks as though natural color photography were coming into its own at last, at any rate so far as the Lasky Studio is concerned. Following the success and the loud acclaim of the color scenes in Cecil B. De Mille’s production of The Ten Commandments, the beauty of which seems to open a new world of loveliness to the cinema, and which scenes were made according to a new color process, the Lasky people announced yesterday the production of a whole new feature to be made in colors.
For the first time the brilliant colorings of the desert will be filmed, for the picture is to be the visualization of Zane Grey’s Wanderer of the Wasteland, and is to be made in Death Valley, with Irvin Willat directing.
In late February Kingsley mentioned that the Wanderer company came back to Los Angeles after five weeks of camping out in the desert. It didn’t take terribly long for the movie to be ready for a critic’s preview in New York City on May 26th. It was a big success. Herbert K. Cruikshank in Exhibitors’ Herald wrote:
In the history of motion-picture production Wanderer of the Wasteland stands alone. Another great forward stride has been made toward perfection. One of the most critical, difficult and hard-boiled audiences ever was assembled at midnight to view this film. As the first few feet were projected, there was an audible intake of breath, then a spontaneous burst of applause that continued at brief intervals throughout the showing and culminated in a demonstration of enthusiasm at the final fade-out.
Why? The Wanderer would have been a fine picture if it had been projected in the usual black, white and gray, but when desert mountain and stream are portrayed in all the splendid grandeur of their natural colors the resulting beaty is actually overwhelming. That’s the answer. The picture is ‘Technicolored’…This masterpiece is a magnificent work of sheer artistry.
Robert E. Welsh in Moving Picture World was similarly effusive, both about the color process and the film overall:
We have for once an example of a story big enough and human enough to rise above the color, and at the same time, a story that gave the color every opportunity to be seen at its best….Able direction has given us the atmosphere of the overpowering desert, the sufferings of its victims, in an admirable manner natural color completes the task with convincing realism. A midnight audience at the Rialto last week spent an hour and a half in successive “oh’s” and “ah’s”!
He concluded that every foot of the photography was “a gem of pictorial beauty.”
Photoplay magazine was less impressed by the story, calling it “more or less indifferent.” However, “the Technicolor process catches the remarkable natural colorings of the arid American desert in a way that is, at times, breath taking in its beauty.” So while what we can see of it now suffers in comparison to three-strip Technicolor, to people in 1924 it looked terrific.
Wanderer opened in Los Angeles on June 14th at the 3,600-seat Grauman’s Metropolitan and only played for one week. It had another one-week run at the 878-seat Alhambra in July. The L.A. Times didn’t review it. However, on the day of its premier, the paper ran Grace Kingsley’s interview with director Irvin Willat about the problems color brought to filmmaking. He said:
Locations had to be picked for their color values. There could not be too many brilliant reds, nor too many brilliant greens. The soft tones of the desert itself were admirably fitted to the Technicolor process, but in smaller things great care had to be exercised. In one scene a red apple was needed. In black and white photography any apple would have sufficed, but for our picture the company had to send all the way to Yuma for a bright red apple.
There’s so much material about the history of Technicolor online that I don’t need to repeat it here. A good place to start is on the well-illustrated Wide Screen Museum site.
Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor:The Movies’ Magic Rainbow. South Brunswick: Barnes, 1980, pp. 29–36.
Herbert K. Cruikshank, “Box Office Reviews,” Exhibitors’ Herald, May 31, 1924, p. 19.
Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.
Grace Kingsley, “Color Brings Difficulties,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1924.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1924.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1924.
“Technicolor Building Here,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1924.
“Wanderer of the Wasteland,” Photoplay, August 1924, p. 49.
“Wanderer of the Wasteland Takes N.Y. by Storm,” Moving Picture World, July 19, 1924, p. 204.
Robert E. Welsh, “Wanderer of the Wasteland,” Moving Picture World, May 31, 1924, p. 492.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 