Color (or colour 
) photography in the day was a tricky and precice thing.
You had to hit developer temperatures to the nearest degreen (e.g. ±0.5ºF) and the immersion and pause times had t obe accurate to almost the second.
The colors were very tightly bound to the filmstock (often nitrocellulose, aka celluloid) and the film stock was fixed and processed to a known spectral standard as well.
Which was very important for color printing in the day, as you wanted very prcise color rendition to pull four-color masking used in offset printing.
The archive of Life (magazine) photos is pretty snazzy, too. Some of the source material is direct scanned from preserved archival material which has been kept light-safe and in an acid-free environment for the last 70+ years. Some are direct prints of old neagatives (which are usually compared to the magazine cut sheets).
Modern color film is a blurry, sloppy thing by comparison (unless you pay extra for the good stuff and pay for it to be professionally processed). We are only begging to see 14mP CCD imagery get close to the old Ektachrome standards.
That being said, some images are changed by the stock used. Ektachrome produces brilliant blues with crisp definition (it's still the preferred slide stock, not that anyone shoots lides anymore). But, take a picture at sea, and everything is hue of blue. Kodachrome is warmer and richer, and really renderd indoor themes, and green or tan scenes superbly.
If those photos are reproduced without a proper color correction, the images can really be off.
Life magazine really committed to making their images as "true to life" as possible, and the archives show it.