Rad black and white films

Kara schlegl counts down some of the silver screen’s best black-and-white flicks.

If you think black-and-white films are pretentious…

CLERKS (1994) A day in the lives of two employees at a convenience store, and a case study into why Gen X-ers are the way they are, Clerks has all the pretension of a servo meat pie. Shot in black and white because a 23-year-old Kevin Smith couldn’t afford proper lighting, it’s the filmmaking equivalent of a garage band come good. This is Smith’s first film, and he goes in hard on the black (and white) comedy, including a long sequence about necrophilia that has haunted me since I convinced my dad to rent it from the video store at far too young an age. Expect bare-boned, static shots of 20-somethings talking fast about tits, arse and Star Wars.

If you’re looking for the OG When Harry Met Sally…

THE APARTMENT (1960) An ambitious insurance clerk lends his apartment to his employers for secret rendezvous with their own employees – a circumstance that couldn’t possibly go awry. In an age where gawky women concussing themselves on gym equipment has become a genre staple, it might be difficult to imagine a romantic comedy winning Best Picture at the Oscars, but this film about the corrosion of love in corporate America is worthy of its accolades. It poses questions about power dynamics in a workforce designed to limit the ambitions of women – ones that remain compelling in the #Metoo era. There’s gravity to its message, and not the kind that makes Rebel Wilson fall down.

If contemporary US politics isn’t absurd enough for you… DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING

AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) While experiencing a breakdown, a US brigadier orders a nuclear strike on Russia – no one is certain why an attack has been ordered, but surely “something doggone important’s goin’ on”. Experience has evolved my natural reluctance to see any movie a film studies 101 grad might recommend, but I’m grateful to the stoned waif who sat me on a Bacardi-soaked recliner and stretched my eyes open with toothpicks to watch this anti-war satire. Starring comedy legend Peter Sellers at his most manic, this is a romp through the increasingly uncomfortable subject of American exceptionalism. Its monochrome cinematography was a stylistic choice by director Stanley Kubrick – one that adds to an archival feel, heightening the pants-shitting prospect that this satire isn’t so far from the truth.

If you thought Meryl Streep was the best dame to grace the silver screen…

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) In All About Eve, an ageing film star hires an obsessive fan, Eve Harrington, as her assistant, and the resulting tension will make you want to claw at your own face. Eve isn’t who we think she is, and it has nothing to do with the fact the actress playing her bears a striking resemblance to Dawson’s Creek star Michelle Williams. A first-act sequence of Bette Davis getting wasted at a party is in itself a masterpiece – her declaration “I hate men” is now a legendary gif – but it’s the meta-commentary on the diminishing roles for women over 40 that resonates. This is a movie that “terrified” my mum as a little girl, and terrifies me as a grown woman, leaving little solace at its conclusion.

If you want to see something super-new…

ROMA (2018) Roma is an intimate portrait of Cleo, an Indigenous maid living in Mexico City, pregnant and abandoned by her partner. It’s also the story of a community whose impact is too often overlooked or ignored. Alfonso Cuarón – the director behind my personal favourite Harry Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban – invented a new kind of monochrome cinematography especially

for Roma, filming in colour then digitally painting each scene black and white. The process was, in his words, “a way to embrace digital” and distance the film from the typically hazy nostalgia that comes with on-screen stories of the past. (Apparently, colour was totally forbidden on set to get the cast and crew in the ‘black-and-white’ mindset.) This is a personal story for Cuarón, and each crisp shot clarifies a memory that shouldn’t be forgotten.

If you think cinema peaked with The Dark Knight…

THE THIRD MAN (1949) A pulp-fiction novelist travels to Vienna for work, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend. Shot entirely at a Dutch angle (which, in this case, means tilted to make you feel like you’ve had five too many gins), this post-war film noir is a wild ride. Like dipping your eyeballs into warm ink, the film is dark, fluid and surprising, and will probably make you fall for both Orson Welles’ wily Harry Lime and the cobblestoned Austrian city it takes place in. With harsh lighting, long shadows and a broody atmosphere, director Carol Reed invented a genre style that would be replicated ad nauseam but never matched, inspiring cinematic greats, and also every Batman film ever made (that didn’t involve Ben Affleck).

If you want to be romanced…

FRANCES HA (2012) A tale as old as time, Frances Halladay is a 20-something thrown from her comfortable Brooklyn apartment after her rent goes up. There’s a legacy in black-and-white filmmaking of putting women’s coming-of-age stories front and centre, but often with the sheen of an Audrey Hepburn up-do. Greta Gerwig’s performance as the infuriating, but somehow endearing Frances is Hepburn if she were burdened with millennial class anxieties. Director Noah Baumbach builds her expectation of grandiosity with style, then subverts it with the mundanity of contemporary life, managing to make even a spontaneous trip to Paris dull. In this monochrome flick, romance isn’t found in indulging expectations, but in accepting realities for what, and who, they are.

If you’re looking for a gateway film…

ED WOOD (1994) Ed Davis Wood Jr. was a purveyor of Hollywood schlock in the 1950s, most famous for directing B-grade horror and sci-fi like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Orgy of the Dead. Who better to direct a biopic of his life, then, than Tim Burton, who made Batman a leather goth and inspired thousands of teenage girls to regret Jack Skellington tattoos? Johnny Depp leads an impressive cast, but it’s Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning performance as washed-up Dracula star Bela Lugosi that resurrects this story from the dead. With a set made of papier-mâché and strung up with fishing wire, Ed Wood transports you to a time when transgressive filmmaking was a contest in who could piss off the studios the most, and it might just hook you into watching Wood’s far more devious catalogue of work.

If you think all greyscale movies are old-fashioned…

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959) In this romantic farce starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, two musicians on the run from the mob disguise themselves as women, then proceed to school us all in contemporary gender politics. A film with this plot could have been a Wayans brothers’ wet dream, with gags a-plenty about straight cis-gendered men pinching the arses of other straight cis men in skirts. But instead, it’s a hilarious and sensitive thesis on how transgressing gender expectations can set us free. High five for that! Reviewers in the ’50s admonished this Billy Wilder masterpiece for its subversive ideas, but thankfully, it’s an aspect of the flick that’s been applauded ever since.