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64 North W~st Mount~d Polic~ A Paramount Picture. A Cecil B. DeMille Production. Produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Original screenplay by Alan LeMay, Jesse Lasky Jr., and C. Gardner Sullivan, derived in part from The Royal Mounted (1908), a play by Cecil B. DeMille and William C. deMille (additional, uncredited writing by Jeanie Macpherson, Frank Wead, Clements Ripley, and Bartlett Cormack). Associate producer: William H. Pine. Second-unit director: Arthur Rosson. Assistant directors: Eric Stacey and Eddie Salven. Rehearsal director: Cullen B. "Hezie" Tate. Art direction: Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson. Music: Victor Young. Photography: Victor Milner and W. Howard Greene. Film editor: Anne Bauchens Picture started: March 7, 1940. Picture closed: May 13, 1940. Picture reopened and closed: May 24, 1940. Second-unit schedule: March 25-26, April 5-19, April 24-28, and April 30-May 9, 1940. Length: I 1,30 I feet (thirteen reels). Released: October 21, 1940 (Regina, Canada, premiere) Cast: Gary Cooper (Dusty Rivers), Madeleine Carroll (April Logan), Paulette Goddard (Louvette Corbeau), Preston Foster (Sgt. Jim Brett), Robert Preston (Ronnie Logan), George Bancroft Gacques Corbeau), Lynne Overman (Tod McDuff), Akim Tamiroff (Dan Duroc), Walter Hampden (Big Bear), Lon Chaney Jr. (Shorty), Montagu Love (Inspector Cabot), Robert Ryan, Regis Toomey, Wallace Reid Jr., Rod Cameron, and Richard Denning Although DeMille had long been interested in color effects and had included two-color Technicolor sequences in The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King ofKings (1927), North West Mounted Police was DeMille's first picture to be shot entirely in color. It set the photographic style for all of his future productions. Brightly lit, with rich, saturated hues, the film has a story-book quality that is vivid and pleasing to the eye, but also rather stylized and theatrical. The decision to shoot in color was no casual option in 1940. The only viable full-spectrum color process was Technicolor's three-strip system, first demonstrated in 1932, which exposed three rolls ofblack-and-white film simultaneously through color filters to create red, green, and blue color records. From these records, printing matrices were generated and soaked in complementary dyes, which for various technical reasons were 312 North West Mounted Police / 313 actually magenta, yellow, and cyan. These dyes were transferred to a blank print-film in a procedure that owed more to lithography than photography . In addition to requiring three times the footage in principal photography, the release prints were much more expensive. Going into production the estimated cost of release prints for North West Mounted Police was $200,000, compared with only $56,000 ifthe picture was shot in black and white.I Producers were locked into using Technicolor's proprietary threestrip camera and the Technicolor laboratory. Technicolor also required that producers hire a color consultant, and preferably use one of its own cinematographers either as first cameraman or as a "lighting expert." Seeking advice from Arthur Rosson, who had experience with Technicolor as a second unit director on Gone with the Wind (Selznick InternationaI/M-G-M, 1939), DeMille received a quick lesson in the process. Rosson recommended shooting in three-quarter light to get modeling in the actors faces, and also advised that lights should be on hand at all times-even outdoors. "Particular attention must be taken of the sky," Rosson informed DeMille. Where sky is shown ... all scenes for that incident showing sky should be taken against the same sky.... To illustrate, if you photograph two people straight on, (south we say) and show sky-the chances are if you made individuals of each [actor in close-up] you would normally show the eastern sky behind one and the western sky behind the other-chances are all three skys would be a different tone of blue. The difference on the screen is intensified and should be avoided. Move the people [in relation to the camera so that the same southern sky will be seen in the closeups as in the two shot]. But if the sky presented problems, the Technicolor process did offer certain advantages. In shooting night scenes in daylight ("day for night" as it is known in the industry), Rosson stated, "It is not essential to eliminate the sky. The sky can be made almost a jet black [in printing] if desired." With regard to Technicolor' s cameramen, Rosson told DeMille that Ray Rennahan, who had shot the two-color Technicolor sequences for The Ten Commandments in 1923, was the most experienced Technicolor cameraman and...

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