Ask Parky: Was Harold Lloyd a pornographer?

This week our film history expert answers your questions on amateur snappers, Laurel and Hardy in colour and a rival to Ginger Rogers
Harold Lloyd
Harold Lloyd in, ahem, Girl Shy. Photo: Kobal

Did Harold Lloyd become a pornographer?

Tom Saunders, Ilfracombe

Pornography is a rather extreme word for the self-consciously arty nude studies that Harold Lloyd produced after his screen fortunes dwindled. Between the late 1940s and early 60s, Lloyd amassed a collection of some 100,000 photographs of naked women, but they were all processed by Eastman labs that had very strict rules about acceptable content. Besides some chaste cheesecake snaps of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Lloyd's most celebrated pictures were taken with a Stereo Realist camera and images of Bettie Page and such starlets as Shirley Kilpatrick, Arlene Hunter and Joy Harmon (who later got Paul Newman in a lather washing a car in Cool Hand Luke) are included in the book Hollywood Nudes in 3-D.

Harold Lloyd
Officially not a pornographer ... Harold Lloyd. Photo: Kobal

However, Lloyd also photographed landmarks and landscapes around the world and was the first president of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society, whose members included Ronald Colman, Dick Powell, Robert Cummings and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

I have a couple of colorised Laurel and Hardy films. Why did they stop making them?

Ally Bradford, London

Laurel and Hardy
A colourised Oliver and Stanley. Photo: Kobal

There are some genies that refuse to go back in the bottle and colorisation ranks among the peskiest. The process was first used in 1970 by Canadians Wilson Markle and Brian Hunt to add colour to monochrome footage of the Apollo moon missions. But controversy arose when Markle formed Colorization Inc. as a subsidiary of Hal Roach Studios and colorised Norman Z. McLeod's spectral comedy, Topper (1937). The purists cried bowdlerisation and argued that such tinkering would distort film history. But the movie's star, Cary Grant, liked the transformation and persuaded Frank Capra to consider colorising It's a Wonderful Life (1946). However, Capra joined the chorus of disapproval when he discovered that the picture was in the public domain and he was powerless to block the gaudily altered print.

The debate grew more heated in the mid-1980s, when Ted Turner announced a deal with Color Systems Technology to colorise 150 MGM and Warner Bros features. Turner insisted these reissues would entice younger audiences to watch films they had resisted in black and white. But opponents accused him of disregarding artistic integrity in the name of profit and dismissed arguments that artificial colouring had a legitimacy rooted in the aniline dyes used in the 1890s and in such stencil formats as Pathechrome (1905) and the Handschiegl Color Process (1916). Such was Hollywood's renitence that legends like James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas testified to a Congressional panel in 1987, while the carelessness of the enterprise was exposed when Frank Sinatra, Ol' Blue Eyes himself, was given brown eyes in a colorisation of Lewis Allen's assassination thriller, Suddenly (1954).

Ultimately, poor video sales did more to condemn colorisation than righteous indignation. But enthusiasm has revived in the digital era, with Timebrush and Legend Films generating subtler and more natural hues. Colour versions of Laurel and Hardy and Three Stooges comedies are now offered alongside the monochrome originals, while the likes of Ray Harryhausen, Jane Russell and Shirley Temple have actively collaborated in the colorisation of their work. So, Billy Wilder seems to have answered his own question: "Do they hope to palm off some of the old stinkers by dipping them in 31 flavors? Is there no end to their greed?"

Is it true that Fred Astaire considered partnering Jessie Matthews after splitting from Ginger Rogers?

Helena Ranwick, Dumfries

Jesse Matthews
Jesse Matthews in post-dancing days. Photo: Rex

Adele Astaire always hoped that Jessie Matthews would become her brother's stage partner when she retired and Fred once told Picturegoer magazine, "There is nothing I would like better than to appear in a film with Jessie Matthews." However, caprice kept the pair apart. In November 1933, RKO suits were so excited by Astaire's showing with Ginger Rogers in the yet-to-be-released Flying Down to Rio that it refused to loan him for Rodgers and Hart's Evergreen and Gaumont-British exacted its revenge in 1935 by turning down a $50,000 offer for an unspecified Astaire project and then by blocking a deal for A Damsel in Distress two years later. A mooted project at Columbia similarly failed to materialise in 1940.