Millers Crossing
A Slam Dunk Choice For Black & White Conversion
First Step in making a beautiful black & white adaptation is starting with a beautiful color film. Millers crossing is a top contender. The film is already a masterpiece for it's rich dialogue, fantastic characters and cast, and spot-on screenplay, but it's the lighting choices and Berry Sonnenfield's camera work that makes this film work so well in both color and black & white.
The Process
There's no one right way to create a stunning black and white film from a color version. The real question is not how you go about it, but how far you go with it. It's easy enough to drop the saturation and nudge the contrast up or down and apply that across the whole film. But just as there's no one level setting for every black and white photo, there's no one setting for an entire film. Each shot is different, and what works for color is not what works for black & white. Even though the finished color version was painstakingly color graded for artistic choices and scene matching continuity, all bets are off when you throw that color out and start from scratch with luminosity only.
A scene with lots of red and blacks creates plenty of contrast in the hue difference between the two. But the the gray value of red and black are close to the same, yielding a dark, flat scene when the color saturation is pitched. A stunning yellow dress agains a bright blue sky disappears completely in black and white. There's no way around it if your goal is to create a black & white version worthy of it's color counterpart — make a few universal settings to the overall look you are shooting for, then go shot-by-shot to raise each image to it's highest potential.
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Step 1: Pick a key frame
though Millers Crossing has a wide range of interiors, outdoor, daylight and night shots, I chose this frame to set the tone for the entire film. A dark interior, with the main character high lit , but critical detail in shadow, including the man behind the man, standing in the shaddows. In this scene, Leo (Albert Finney) stands out as the
