Kodachrome – 1922

The Kodak company has posted this clip of an early Kodachrome test. I can only imagine what the ASA was on the film. I would guess it was fairly slow and took lots of light.

Comments

[Sam Flowers]

Thanks for finding that clip. I always have wondered what the true 20's women and clothing looked like. Looking at B/W or colorized photos it is hard to imagine what they were really like. I wonder if any city scenes exist?

[fibber mcgee]

Your Kodachrome test is very interesting. I would suspect the film speed was around 10 or so -- very slow. You will notice ther's no attempt to show a deep depth of field in the test segments. The film was a world beater in its day. I have some photos I took on Kodachrome of Joshua Tree National Monument (it became a park later) after a rainstorm and there's brilliant shafts of light coming from holes in the clouds shining down the 500-foot-tall rocks and Joshua trees and the pix are just fabulous.

[Mary Mallory]

It's a great test featuring many film performers, like Mae Murray above. Jules Brulatour also shot many of these types of fashion shoots with his wife Hope Hampton.

[Arye (Leslie) Michael Bender]

Hazarding guesses: That fabulous clip looks to be a 16 mm reduction print. Am assuming that Eastman would have shot it on the standard 35 mm in order to compare it to the standard resolution of the day. The 16 mm reduction would have lost much of the color fidelity and changed the contrast of the original.

If those guesses are accurate, the color and image quality would have been striking in 35 mm.

Could very well be wrong now...

[Vincent]

For more about Hope Hampton -- one of several women who may have been as much an inspiration for Susan Alexander Kane as Marion Davies -- go to http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/334194.html.

[v]

It looks like 2 reel technicolor. I know my grandmother had a couple of photographs taken in color when she was modeling for camel cigarettes in '34. They sort of have this quality to them.

[Wade Collins]

The first woman is Hope Hampton in two different costumes. The second woman is Mary Eaton, and the third is Mae Murray.
I find this film haunting,it's a window to another time which we have never seen before. The women are lovely, Mary Eaton a Zeigfield Follies girl, and an early star in several 1929 films including the Marx Brother's Coconuts.

Her younger sister Doris was the oldest Zeigfield girl, until her recent passing. Mary was an engima, beautiful, a talented singer and dancer who seemingly disappeared in the 30's, she turned to alcohol, and tragically died at age 48.

Mae Murray was rumored to be the inspiration for the Norma Desmond character in Sunset Boulevard. Hope Hampton married and was considered a socialite.

[fibber mcgee]

In New York City in 1970 or '71 I got an invitation to the closing of the El Morocco nightclub (it became a private club the next day) and Hope Hampton was there, dripping in diamonds and accompanied by a gaggle of shall we say sweet young fellows. She had "married well" and was a socialite but still every inch the movie star.