Ted Newsom wrote:
I agree with Rick on the costume designer thought, and it's a pretty valid one. It's not something audiences would consciously notice, but it works, the light-to-dark business. ...
Though Hitchcock did do something similar with Marion's changing bra color in Psycho. Of course, that was Hitchcock. (And you were paying attention to the color symbolism during those scenes, right?)

Ted Newsom wrote:
... I'd read the "Saneman" concept years ago-- surely not Professor Dillard? Where would I have read it? Was it published anywhere accessible?-- and now, of course, see it every time I watch the movie. It IS an "odd" name, and why, indeed, was it chosen over Smith or Jones or Llanwallaghouafnyx unless to underscore some point?

The theory and the movie would work better, I think, if the movie didn't have a visible werewolf until the very end... or even the on-screen gravedigger's death or Larry's footsie transformation. ...
Perhaps it was a leftover from the original idea where Larry didn't change into a real werewolf but only imagined he did? (In fact, since we've gone this far, maybe that's why we have the glimpse of Larry fighting with a man rather than a wolf during the scene where he kills Bela? Larry sees a wolf, but in reality ... well, it's a thought.)

captainmarvel1957 wrote:
The costuming point is something I'd never thought of until you mentioned it, Andy. And I should have because it is a fairly common practice. There have been a lot of productions of Hamlet that begin with him dressed in white and ending with him in black from head to toe.
Why the heck would a director do that? Yeah, Hamlet turns a bit nutty and ends up directly or indirectly responsible for a half-dozen or so deaths, but he's not introduced as the epitome of purity, and since when we first see him he's deep into mourning his father's death then unless Denmark of the time (or Shakespearean England) had some weird opposite-color custom to today, then it would only make sense that he'd be in black or at least some very dark colors then. Heck, the first words spoken to him were Claudius commenting "How is it that the clouds still hang on you" and then, after Ham's pithy "Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun," Gertrude implores "Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off..." to which Hamlet then refers to his "inky cloak." I mean, I can see such white-to-black color shift symbolism working for Macbeth or a few others, but to apply it to Hamlet would seem to be a case of a director thinking him/herself clever in injecting his/her own symbolism into a Shakespeare play and ignoring not only the context but the very dialog. (Great, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to the Richard III scenes in The Goodbye Girl.)

Gadfly