DVD Chronicle

In 1914 a small group of Bostonians led by the physicist Herbert Kalmus founded a company to bring scientific expertise to the fledgling film industry, especially expertise in devising color film processes. The new enterprise was called the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, the “Tech” in the title paying homage to the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So, for exactly a century Technicolor has been part of the cinema scene, developing color filters and special emulsions and multiplied layers of film to reproduce the hues of the natural world, to convince or dazzle filmgoers. It’s a sign of the company’s importance that “Technicolor” has slipped into the lexicon, signifying something we all recognize but might have trouble defining. A certain brightly lit garishness? A celebration rather than a mere employment of color? The red of sports cars or of lipsticked mouths popping right out of the screen, reality colored in a way that inevitably announces “Hollywood”?

It was the artifice of Technicolor that struck Graham Greene when in 1935 he reviewed Becky Sharp, Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, and the first feature made with the company’s new three-strip process. A “triumph for colour,” Greene’s Spectator article begins, “for the scarlet cloaks of the officers galloping off under the lamps from the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, for the black Napoleonic shadows passing across the white-washed farm . . . the winking out of the yellow candle flames . . . the windy encroachment of nocturnal colour.” So far, so good, but Greene the doctrinaire realist, always on the alert when reviewing American films, worried how the newly available hues would function when transferred from the fancy-dress ball to the ordinary world—“the cheap striped tie, the battered Buick and the shabby bar”—or to the yet seedier world Greene created for his own fictions. “Can Technicolor reproduce with the necessary accuracy the suit that has been worn too long, the oily hat?”

Its neglect of oily hats notwithstanding, Becky Sharp is absolutely worth watching, partly for the pleasure of seeing Miriam Hopkins take on the title role. Greene thought her “indecisive,” but I like her forthright energy, her outrageousness in flirting and cupidity, and her bright, hard-edged beauty. Mamoulian brought out the best in this actress, here and in the black-and-white Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where she plays a prostitute caught up first in Jekyll’s tepid chivalry, then in Hyde’s nasty violence. As an adaptation, Becky Sharp lacks key aspects of Vanity Fair, above all Thackeray’s ironical, man-of-the-world narrative voice, his stance as carnival showman putting the puppets through their weary paces. But the film offers a reasonably complete outline of the novel’s events, and they are in fact events best viewed in color. At that ball on the eve of Waterloo, the red coats of the British officers do show to splendid advantage, especially when matched with the red-hued gowns of their partners. At least, they should show to splendid advantage. If the colors on the Alpha Video DVD (or on Amazon Instant Play) appear muted, that’s because they have been bleached out by time. In assessing color in older films, it’s important to...