Vanity Fair

Plot synopsis:
This film adaptation's storyline begins around 1920 and concludes in 1933. In its opening scene a limousine is traveling down a road outside London. In the car are two passengers, Amelia Sedley (Barbara Kent) and her friend Becky Sharp (Myrna Loy), young ladies who agewise are in their twenties. Amelia is from a rich, well-connected family, while Becky is from very modest means and has no family at all. Given Becky's circumstances, Amelia has invited her to her home for the Christmas holidays.
At the Sedley estate Amelia's family welcomes their guest, but the mother is soon wary of her. Those suspicions are warranted, for Becky aims to use her beauty and guile to gain wealth and privilege by climbing England's social ladder. Her first target for achieving those goals is Joseph, Amelia's much-older brother (Billy Bevan). After Becky tries unsuccessfully to trap him into marriage, Mrs. Sedley sees her cuddling in the home's drawing room with her daughter's fiancé, George Osborne. Disgusted, the mother calls "Miss Sharp" into the adjoining room, where she advises Becky to leave immediately so she can begin the job she had accepted before the holidays, that of governess for the family of Sir Pitt Crawley. Becky heeds the thinly veiled advice and departs.
Upon her arrival at the residence of Lord Crawley, Becky quickly stirs the passions of both the elderly Sir Pitt and his son Rawdon (Conway Tearle). The new governess entices them with her suggestive comments and by allowing each man into her bedroom at night while she glides about in her satin pajamas. Soon she and Rawdon begin a secretive affair, but Sir Pitt finally catches them together in Becky's bedroom. There they inform him they had married the previous day. That news enrages the old man, who orders his son and his "shameless little hussy" out of his house.
Relocating to a townhouse in London's Mayfair district, Becky and Rawdon feel the financial strains of being cut off from Lord Crawley and his wealth. The couple at first brings in money by betting and cheating their friends playing bridge. That income, however, is insufficient for their mounting bills, so Becky schemes to find other ways to get money. She does so through blackmail and by obtaining gifts from a string of lovers, including George Osborne, now the husband of her friend Amelia. Eventually, even Rawdon cannot tolerate his wife's wanton, criminal behavior. On the evening he is released from police custody for writing bad checks, Rawdon finds Becky at their home with another lover. He declares their marriage is over and gives her only ten minutes to vacate the premises. As she leaves, he informs Becky that his father had just died, and he is now the new Lord Crawley. He then warns her that if she ever dares to refer to herself as "Lady Crawley," he will track her down and kill her.
Several years pass and Becky lives in a far less affluent, largely French-speaking area of London. There she prowls the area's bars and casinos, getting money from the assorted men she meets. One evening in a casino, she sees Amelia's brother Joseph, who updates her about his sister's situation. While Becky already knows that Amelia's husband George had died five years earlier in a horse-riding accident, she learns from Joseph that Amelia still refuses to remarry. Subsequently she also learns that her friend's devotion to George's memory and her mistaken belief in his fidelity have led Amelia to refuse repeated marriage proposals from Dobbin, a gentleman who has adored her for years. Sometime later, Becky invites Amelia to her apartment and confesses her affair with George. She then calls Amelia a fool for revering a dead "cad" and urges her to wed Dobbin, who is waiting outside in a car. When Amelia rejoins him after Becky's disclosures, she rests her head on Dobbin's shoulder, implying that his next proposal will be accepted.
The film sequence that follows shows the passage of more years and the ongoing disintegration of Becky's life, which has become a daily struggle marked by petty crimes, prostitution, and meager funds. In the final scene Becky enters her shabby one-room apartment. Lying on the bed is Joseph, stirring from his latest binge. She addresses him as "my love" and informs him that his sister had just given her another check. He is infuriated and tells her never to accept money again from Amelia. Becky turns, sits at a dresser, and stares into its mirror. In the reflection she watches her face transform from the reality of its present haggard appearance to its former beauty. She then notices that Joseph has quietly departed. She also notices on a small bedside bureau that he has torn up his sister's check, and in the dust that coats the bureau's surface he has written Finis ("The End"). The film concludes with Becky lowering her face into her hands and weeping.

Tags: romantic, satire

Review:
This is a marvellous retelling of William Thackeray's 19th century novel, successful in almost every possible way.
But what makes this so good, particularly for those familiar with the novel, are two things: its total commitment to the spirit of 'Vanity Fair', and joyously perfect casting and acting.As readers of VF will know, the narrator plays a very important part in the book.
His sly comments on the 'puppets' (as he often refers to the characters) that perform in his 'play' are frequently funny, exciting and always engaging.
For the story is literally a Fair: characters come and go as the narrator sees fit while we the audience look on with amusement.
We start with both Becky Sharp (the main character but not the traditional heroine as Thackeray's contemporary audience would have expected) and Amelia Sedley, and we follow their fortunes and interaction with other characters over some twenty or thirty years.
And though he is notable by his absence in the book's most powerful scenes, he will return shortly to talk about something else that another character is getting up to.
This is where this adaptation nails the spirit of VF so precisely; it never forgets that these characters are puppets in a play, performing for our entertainment.
And the sly comments of the narrator are subtly retained in bizarre camera shots: the fat pig snuffling outside Queen's Crawley, or the beggar  playing 'Rule Britannia' with his little bells as the soldiers march off to fight the Battle of Waterloo.But this would have been for nought if the casting had not been spot on.
Natasha Little IS Becky Sharp.
Beautiful, alluring, charming, witty, cunning, deceptive and manipulative, she is every man's dream on the outside (I fell in love with her, and I can see all she is getting up to!).
Frances Grey is also perfect as Amelia; not as beautiful as Becky, but still pleasant, sweet and kind-hearted, and forever doting on George Osborne.
Tom Ward as Osborne was not what I was expecting, yet he got it right: a dashing English officer, strikingly handsome, and not totally devoid of morals, but very easily succumbs to his vanity and pride.
Philip Glenister as the only genuinely heroic character in the book (though still not without faults), Dobbin, again is not how I pictured the character, but again nails it perfectly: slightly clumsy, socially awkward, but clear thinking, level-headed and always ready to do the right thing.
The rest of the cast play their respective grotesques with equal perfection and relish - to single out each and every one is impossible, though all deserve it.As a lover of this book, I congratulate all on a job well done.
I cannot comment on how someone who has not read VF will like this series, but I can understand that they may be a little bewildered by it all: the occasional dizzy camerawork and loud brass band music.
So long as you understand that we are the audience of a colourful, vibrant fair populated by a rich assortment of people, all with faults, all with redeeming features (however materialistic they might be), then I think you should derive great pleasure from it, because more than anything, this is great fun..
The story of Becky Sharp, a girl who is never any better than she needs to be, and her friend Amelia who is much too good for her own good.Natasha Little is simply perfect as Becky.
Little is the kind of woman that women find hard to like: delicately beautiful, exceptionally talented  making her perfect to play Becky.
It is the subtle nuances in her moments that give her performance great depth and complexity  needed for accessibility for a selfish character who is the smartest person in any room she is in.
All she has to do is stand still and look stupid." Little's Beky is not as likable or vulnerable as Reese Witherspoon  who played Becky in a major motion picture film version made right around the same time  but with a miniseries we have time to understand her more.
Besides, not many actresses are as likable as Witherspoon.As the story begins, this production does not look lavish, but the casting is so wonderful, the script so strong, the costumes simple but just right, that we are given the ability to focus on getting to know the people we will be following through 6 episodes.It is this initial simplicity that is the brilliance of the production design by Malcolm Thornton.
As we progress through the story, wealth becomes more complex, overstuffed and overdecorated, echoing the complexity of the lives of Becky and Rawdon.
Rawdon played by the handsome and overwhelmingly talented Nathaniel Parker (INSPECTOR LINLEY, BLEAK HOUSE).Breathtaking Andrew Davies, possibly the most brilliant adapter of the classics of all time, gifts us with a screenplay of grace and subtlety, weaving the ease of modern speech perfectly into the period action in a way that feels classic, but is totally accessible.It all bounces along to the ohm-pa-pa of a brass band.
While it passes as a military band, it also has a the raw, slightly under-rehearsed sound of a New Orleans jazz band, and sometimes a 1940s dance hall meanwhile Becky's musical choices are straight from the pub to the delight of the men around her.
The band is really the only downfall of the production, in the moments of great serious importance, the band hits us over the head with a blaringly repetitive theme that gets very annoying after 6 episodes.
One of the nice subtle touches is that even Becky's singing, which at first seems flawless and delightful, begins to sound a bit flat in the episodes where we see dark results of her behavior on those around her.The music for Amelia and William is completely different.
Plaintive melodies played as quietly as loyalty and love that things only of the good of the beloved.
Wonderful movie, and very faithful to the book!.
I saw this version of "Vanity Fair" when A&E premiered it in 1998, and I was totally captivated.
I had not, at that time, read the book, so I was happily tugged along by every twist and turn of this delightful tale.
The acting is outstanding on all accounts, the writing is solid, and Thackeray's story is timeless.Now I am finally getting 'round to reading the book, and I am amazed by how faithful this mini-series is to the original work.
Though I usually am frustrated by the liberties that are taken with great literature, and I believe that one should always "read the book" before taking in someone else's interpretation of it, this is a case where having "seen the movie" makes it even more fun to read the book.Becky Sharp, Emmy Sedley, and especially Captain Dobbins (Philip Glenister really shines) are vividly portrayed -- as are all of the characters.
In either order, read the book and watch the movie.
Generally I think that the great Victorian door-stoppers are better suited to the mini series format than that of feature films because even with a running time pushed to three hours there just isn't the room for the typical panorama of characters, supporting characters, plots and subplots.
I admit at first I was a bit disappointed by the choice of Natasha Little to play Rebecca because I thought the actress was too tall and elegant to play a character who was described as petite and vivacious.
But no matter; Little's cool headedness, verbal wit, and carefully disguised ruthlessness were all pure Becky (unlike Mira Nair, the screenwriters of this production realized that to soften this character's harder edges wouldn't modernize her; rather, it would flatten her).
Frances Grey does fine in in the thankless role of Amelia Sedley.
Although this was somewhat out of keeping with the novel, I did like the scene of Amelia still in bed after her wedding night, her hair spread out on the pillow, blissfully talking to her new husband.
It makes her seem a bit more than stupidly devoted child-woman she is for most of the novel and makes those later scenes in which Becky and George (just weeks after George's marriage) brazenly flirt in front of Amelia all the more painful.
The other characters are well cast too, with the terrifying Lord Steyne being the most memorable of all--in his final scene, without having to say a word he looks as if he really will have Becky murdered without a second thought if she ever approaches him again.All in all, highly recommended..
The best production of Vanity Fair for all time?.
Thackeray prefaced his book with a short piece apparently explaining that the characters were just "puppets" who lived, ate and made love in a (fictional?) world that was neither moral nor immoral.
However the book is generally seen as a savage satire and even today the appearance of Knight of the Realm, Sir Pitt Crawley, is rather shocking in that the reader just as much as the characters in the book, mistake him for a footman or even watchman such are his appearance and manners - breaking a convention that other Victorian writers such as Dickens and Trollope strictly observed.
In the opening chapter the exceedingly disrespectful young Becky Sharp is again a character set against the Victorian archetype.
Neither virtuous nor fallen woman (generally the literary alternatives at the time), Becky Sharp fights her way through life using her sharpness of perception and her bodily attractions - sometimes winning, sometimes losing badly.Thackeray portrays a world where people can and do behave badly and act grossly.
The real Becky Sharp, on the make and none too scrupulous, existed then, she exists today, as do all the other characters but it requires the removal of the rose-tinted spectacles to see them - and perhaps some courage to write about them too.This production plays the story entirely straight - an excellent cast portraying their characters realistically and without exaggeration, living according to their respective values and the hand Life deals them.
It is left to the titles - the visuals and the music - to sound a ripe raspberry at their antics - and to remind us that this is not a puppet show but a sharp satire on how some people lived in England 200 years ago.A pretty fine cast, not all though got an opportunity to shine, but memorable were Jeremy Swift as a perspiring great dumpling Jos Sedley; an unsmiling, uncharming and unsightly Lord Steyne, removing the noble from the nobility; Philip Glennister as the ever reliable Dobbin; Nathaniel Parker as the dashing officer/adventurer snared by adventuress, Becky Sharp.
The problem however I had with Natasha Little was that she was no seductress, there was no sweetness (however false) that surely would have been an essential weapon in her fight to get what she wanted?
Perhaps the book does not make clear the nature of her appeal to men, only her will, her lack of scruples and the mixed success she had.
Perhaps for all his sharp observation, Thackeray did not have intimate knowledge of such aggressively ambitious women?
Vanity Fair 1998 BBC version.
I had never read the book (I will now!) but have grown to have a lot of trust in any adaptation that BBC does.
Especially impressive was the ability of Natasha Little (Becky Sharp) to express Becky's manipulativeness through her subtle facial expressions and subtle use of her eyes and her voice.
Not hard to believe that so many of the characters were completely sucked in by Becky's wiles.
There has been a ridiculous number of movies about psychopathic killers - Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, Copycat, The Cell, etc, etc - and yet for a realistic depiction of a psychopath, this mini-series leaves them all far behind.
If you want to see what the average psychopath is like (or perhaps I should say above average, because there is nothing average about Becky Sharp), this is far more true to life than all the others.
The reality is that for every Hannibal Lecter in the world, there are a thousand Becky Sharps, and together they do far more damage than all the serial killers.
I can only think that Thackeray must have known someone like her, because you can't get this close to reality by sheer imagination, and I don't know of any literary examples he could have copied from.Of course, the novel, and the series, are about far more than one character - they are in fact about Vanity Fair, the world that Thackerary knew and didn't particularly love, the society which was so warped and hypocritical (rather like ours today, in fact) that it allowed characters like Becky Sharp to prosper.This is not nearly as pleasant as the usual BBC mini-series, but it is compulsively watchable; the depiction is almost flawless and Natasha Little does a brilliant job portraying the woman we love to hate.
The rest of the cast is also excellent, including Nathaniel Parker as Rawdon, the principal victim of his wife's intrigues, Philip Glenister as the lovable but awfully clumsy Dobbin and David Bradley as the appalling baronet Sir Pitt Crawley..
I had never read the novel (though I recall the name William Makepeace Thackeray from school), so I have no idea how accurate to the book this version is.
I love this mini-series so much.
The somewhat dark humour and the love/hate for Becky is delicious.
I love Natasha Little - first experiencing her acting abilities and beauty on 'This Life'.
Strangely, the wonderfully grotesque nature of most of the characters reminds me of films like 'Strictly Ballroom' and 'Muriel's Wedding'.
Odd I know, though they are also somewhat dark humoured films.
A six hour miniseries by the BBC and A&E, "Vanity Fair" (1998) has sufficient time to present the classic tale of the socially adroit, cunning, and beguiling Becky Sharp's rise from lowly governess to lofty aristocrat with depth, detail, and attention to the many characters and side stories swirling around her.
Natasha Little makes a superb centerpiece though her fellow actors are equally well cast and competent in their roles.
The downside to the series is a somewhat uneven screenplay which spends time while women sing parlor songs only to rush through some of the moments in which we would most like to linger.
"Vanity Fair" (1998) should be time well spent for anyone into Victorian period fare, especially comedy/dramas, the works of W.M. Thackeray, or fans of the players.
I haven't seen the new version (it's not out in the theaters yet here), but the fuss led me to re-watch the DVD of the mini-series.
I agree with the comments that this is not the top-of-the-drawer BBC miniseries, although there are some very dramatic scenes, particularly as the venue of the film shifts to Brussels in the lead-up to Waterloo.
Natasha Little is indeed bewitching as Becky Sharp, a slippery character if ever there was one, and it will be interesting to see how Reese Witherspoon will cope with this role.
Perhaps since Ms. Little is much less well-known than Ms. Witherspoon, she has more scope for creating a unique image of the ambitious Becky Sharp.
My favourite novel, but not my favourite mini-series.
I have usually enjoyed tremendously British mini-series based on classic novels, but...I read that wonderful novel some 15 years ago when I was still teenager and I fell in love with it instantly.
'That's life' he shows us, and let the readers do their own convictions.But then I saw this tv-series, and if I hadn't read the book first, maybe I wouldn't have bothered to do so after it either.
You can't spoil a novel that good completely, but still that tv-series left much to hope for.
Like in other mini-series, Tom Jones, made at the same time, there should have been a commentator in it (novelist's alter ego).
One of Vanity Fair's strong points are those wonderful comments which Thackeray made throughout the book.
Without them half the fun is missing.I should also complain about annoyingly boisterous music, lack of colour and the casting, which wasn't that impressive in my opinion.
Well, of course I had great expectations, but if you haven't read the original novel, or think it's something unique, this adaption might not be that bad.
Excellent music, fantastic performance by Natasha Little and her 'Linley'.
a splendid mini series.
I much prefer this version to the film, which naturally has its limitation of time to be considered.
The cast I believe to be perfect, so much is said without words and the story plays along beautifully.
It's been some years since I read the book, it's always on my list but gets pushed back because I have read it before, but perhaps this year?
Becky is a delicious minx and Amelia is gullible and sweet.
I loved Josh Sedley, adored Dobbin and Rawdon.
I enjoyed Vanity Fair.
However, it probably won't be on my top ten list of mini-series to watch.
I love Andrew Davies work, but the character of Becky Sharp was dialogued rather sparsely.
How many times can Ms. Sharp "look sultry and seductive" instead of speaking?
The stand-outs in the cast are the man who played William Dobbins (Phillip Glenister) and Joss Sedley (Jeremy Swift)..
William Makepeace Thackray has written an unbelievable piece of literature and this film does justice to the great story of human imperfections.
Story doesn't finish until the last scene is over.
There are certain flaws like actors don't age even after 10-12 years but the story is so good that you see them as grown up men and women psychologically.
Story was really supported by very good actors.
Natasha Little was a delight to watch as a lady with grey shades.
I haven't read the novel or knew anything about it.
I had to chose between Mira Nair's 'Vanity Fair' and this one.
The film is really good but novel has to be a masterpiece.