I’ve seen it. I was thinking of it yesterday when I was thinking of how compressed this new film version is. The 1935 Becky Sharp is even shorter–only about 90 minutes!
My favorite Becky remains Eve Matheson from the 1980s VF miniseries, but I do enjoy Miriam Hopkins in the role. I’m used to seeing her later on in her career, when she always seems to play ditzy matrons, and it’s fun to see her as a young woman and a scheming vixen. Nigel Bruce plays Jos–just the sort of role he always did so well in.
I have never read Vanity Fair, somehow missed hearing much, if anything about the book, and saw the movie a week or so ago, before reading this thread. In other words, I saw the movie without any expectations.
I didn’t see Becky as a sympathetic character. From reading this thread, it sounds like she is presented far more sympathetically than in the book (for example, I thought she really loved her son and husband, it was just that she loved money and society more), but even so, she wasn’t someone I liked. I thought she was clever and I had to admire her persistence, but she wasn’t likeable. I can understand how those of you who read the book would see her as sympathetic, though, since she sounds as if she is much nicer than in the book.
Miss Mapp, to answer your question, there were bits where it was hard to catch up with the plot, especially when there were huge gaps in time, but on the whole, I could follow what was happening. I wasn’t sure exactly how she ended up in a casino in Germany, but I assumed she landed there somehow following her fall from grace. My husband (who also hadn’t read the book) was a bit more confused, but he also said he didn’t like the parts he was awake during, so he might not be a good judge of the plot.
I am glad to hear the Indian dancing scene was an add-on, because while it was visually interesting, it was also weird as hell in the context of the movie.
I keep hoping that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (George Osborne) will finally break through to the A-list, but judging from this thread Vanity Fair still ain’t gonna be the movie that does it for him. Ah well. At least he’s continuing to carve out a niche for himself as “good-looking jerk in period pieces”.
Indeed. I’ve been aware of him since Gormenghast, and was wondering how he would do here.
I know George Osborne is supposed to be self-centered and snobbish, but he also had his charming side and his good moments now and then; we saw little of them here. Part of that lack of subtlety I was writing of earlier. Here, he’s such an unlikeable little creep that I had a hard time believing that Amelia or Dobbin would have the depth of affection they do for him.
On the other hand, oddly, I found Pitt the younger rather likeable. Some of the other characters say that he’s priggish and pompous, but I thought he came off more as well-meaning but socially awkward.
There was a backstory to that scene in the book, which the movie completely omitted: Lady Steyne, nee Pendragon, came from a very ancient noble family which had stubbornly clung to the “Old Religion,” i.e., Catholicism. Becky, whose mother was French, moved Her Ladyship to tears by singing Catholic hymns they both knew from childhood.
In the book, however, he was occasionally clever and devious – as on the occasion of his cousin Bute’s visit, when both of them are vying to impress Lady Southdown for the sake of getting remembered in her will.
Oh, yes, she’s much worse in the book. If you’ve checked some of the spoilers above, you can get an idea how awful Becky can be.
While I think she has a physical attraction for her husband when she marries him (it really isn’t her most prudent move, from a cold-blooded, ambitious perspective), and they get alone pretty well as like-minded adventurers, I don’t believe she ever has any real love for him. By the time Lord Steyne shows up, she has no problem with getting her husband out of the way. She also has no difficulty lying to get more money out of Steyne. And she has no interest at all in her little boy, dislikes him in fact.
One example, as a scene in the movie markedly changed from the book to make Becky more sympathetic: In the movie, she is singing at a soiree in her own home. There are a lot of people around, and little Rawdon comes to peek in at the door. Becky never sees him, but Lord Steyne does and shoves the boy, not too roughly, back out. In the book, Becky and Steyne are alone when she’s singing; when they find that the little boy has come out of his nursery to sit on the stairs and listen, Becky boxes his ears.
Thank you for answering. I did wonder.
The years after Becky’s downfall are glossed off in one chapter, but what basically happens is that she’s sent out of England (by Lord Steyne primarily) and travels from place to place on the Continent, the story of the scandal following her. She sinks out of “respectable” society entirely after awhile and starts hanging out with disreputable characters–gamblers, swindlers, etc.
“Physical attraction”? I didn’t get that at all – in fact I got the impression that Rawdon Crawley was ugly. Becky regularly calls him mon cher monstre. That’s why the choice of James Purefoy to play him in the movie rather bothered me – Purefoy isn’t ugly.
It may be more my impression than anything Thackeray says outright. Remember that Becky decides to dream about Rawdon from a picture she sees of him as boy, even before they meet.
In one of her letters to Amelia from Queen’s Crawley, Becky describes him as “a very large young dandy. He is six feet high, and speaks with a great voice and swears a great deal.” I also seem to recall something about him having a florid purplish or reddish complexion; I’ll look through the book some more tonight and see if I can find any other descriptions of him. My interpretation is that she calls him a ‘monstre’ for his physical size and uncouth, blustering manner rather than his appearance. I never pictured him as a pretty boy like George (or Mr. Purefoy), but as a big, thick, lunk of a guy, perhaps attractive in a ruggedly masculine way. He does have a reputation with the ladies, after all.
There’s also a part in the book where Becky’s feelings for her son change for the worse.
It seems originally, she merely was indifferent-she didn’t outright resent him, but she didn’t really seem to care one way or another. He, however, worshipped her from afar. He’s a sweet, sensitive little boy, who looks at his mother like an angel-someone beautiful, but only to be loved from far away.
One evening, when Becky and Rawdon are at the home of Pitt Jr. and Jane, little Rawdy comes into the drawing room, where Becky and Jane are sitting with some others. Jane, who is very fond of her little nephew, draws him to her and kisses him. Becky, feeling put out-NOT because of jealousy, but because people will start to talk that Jane loves her son so much, does the same. Rawdy looks at her in astonishment and says, “But Mama, you never kiss me at home!” She laughs it off, but when no one else is looking, gives him a look of pure malice, according to the book.
You know, come to think of it, a lot of movies based on novels make the protagonist significantly nicer than in the book. Barry Lyndon, for instance – in Kubrick’s movie he was an unprincipled opportunist, but in Thackeray’s novel he was a total bastard.
My theory is, the reader of a novel invests a lot more time getting inside the protagonist’s head, so it’s possible to learn to sympathize with him/her even when he/she is not really very sympathetic. It’s much harder to do that when viewing a two-hour film.
Thank you. I think it must be that that I was remembering, perhaps mixed up with the color of General Tufto’s whiskers.
BTW, the book is online and searchable at http://www.classicreader.com/booktoc.php/sid.1/bookid.91/ I did a search for the word “purple” this morning to see if I’d missed anything in my skimming last night, and am surprised to find how often people turn that color in Thackeray’s world.
I would agree with this. As another example, look at how many versions of Wuthering Heights cut down or entirely omit the second half of the story. It’s easy to sympathize with Heathcliff as a mistreated young boy, but not so easy to see him as the romantic figure the movies usually like to portray him as once he’s grown up and starts to take his revenge on the three children.
The 1987 mini-series of VF, which I so often speak highly of, does keep Becky’s character closer to the book. She commits all the unpleasant acts, even to the ending with Jos (and as I said awhile ago above, this is the only version I know of that does keep the book’s ending in this respect). But this is also the longest version I know of, so there’s plenty of time to develop her character and allow much of the story to unfold (although there are things omitted, even here).
I would like to recommend this mini-series as the best adaptation of VF, but unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to find. I’d love to get it on DVD, or even videotape, but it never seems to have been released. I have the tapes I recorded when it first aired on A&E 15 years ago, and they’re getting very old and grainy.
I just found a copy of Vanity Fair in the bookcase last night (The Fine Editions Press classics series that my parents bought forty years ago and no one has read!) and started reading. Can’t wait for my day off tomorrow to really get into it.
I don’t know, but sometimes the picture on the TV screen looks like it was filmed in needlepoint. The tapes weren’t that bad when I first recorded them, so obviously they’ve decayed in some way or other.
