Vanity Fair ** (1932, Myrna Loy, Conway Tearle, Barbara Kent, Montagu Love, Anthony Bushell) – Classic Movie Review 11,268

Myrna Loy appears in her first starring role in director Chester M Franklin’s 1932 black and white romantic drama Vanity Fair, an early sound ‘modern version’ adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s famous 1848 classic novel.

Thackeray’s Napoleonic wartime-set Regency-era novel is updated to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s in this dull, cheap, creaky production redeemed by Loy, who is admirable as the heroine Becky Sharp. It was shot in just ten days.

This forgotten movie is fair to uninteresting, with excellent performances battling a flabby script, flaccid direction and a weakly realised production with desperately poor early-talkie sound quality and bitty technical credits. Billy Bevan is also notable as much-older Joseph Sedley, one of Becky’s many suitors, with Conway Tearle as her loving, good-hearted but wastrel gambler husband Rawdon Crawley, Barbara Kent as Becky’s friend Amelia Sedley and Montagu Love as the Marquis of Steyne.

The cast are Myrna Loy as Becky Sharp, Conway Tearle as Rawdon Crawley, Barbara Kent as Amelia Sedley, Walter Byron as George Osborne, Anthony Bushell as Dobbin, Billy Bevan as Joseph Sedley, Montagu Love as Marquis of Steyne, Herbert Bunston as Mr Sedley, Mary Forbes as Mrs Sedley, Lionel Belmore as Sir Pitt Crawley, Arthur Hoyt, Raymond Hatton, Lilyan Irene, Elspeth Dudgeon, and Tom Ricketts as Parker.

The title on the DVD is Indecent, The Private Life of Becky Sharp.

Remakes for cinema: Becky Sharp (1935) and Vanity Fair (2004).

Remakes for television: Vanity Fair (1956), Vanity Fair (1967), Vanity Fair (1987), Vanity Fair (1998) and Vanity Fair (2018).

Previous versions: Vanity Fair (1911) with Helen Gardner; Vanity Fair (1915) with renowned Broadway stage actress Mrs Fiske (the film is preserved in the Library of Congress collection); a British feature Vanity Fair in 1922; and Goldwyn Pictures’ Vanity Fair (1923), with Mabel Ballin as Becky, which now considered to be a lost film.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,268

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