Since DR td and I have been talking THE PIRATE, I took it down and watched it tonight (with the Fricke commentary turned on since I've watched the movie so many times.)
Sorry, DR td, I guess we will never agree about this. It's sharp and deeply saturated. However, bk would call it brown; I tend to think of it as dark. The color is saturated more than I remembered from the last time I saw it, but in the clips used in the documentary, the picture is a lot brighter and the color sparkles in the previews where in the feature, the color is deep but drab. As I called it yesterday, lackluster.
As I said, that Todd-AO OKLAHOMA! with its blurry soft focus and muddy color and dull picture is INFINITELY more what I would term a disaster.