Becky Sharp

The Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of Waterloo empties as the officers go to their regiments, and the screen fills with scarlet cloaks going out the door. That sequence is the film's justification, and the reason Rouben Mamoulian built the first three-strip Technicolor feature around colour as a dramatic tool after Lowell Sherman began directing and died. Thackeray's Vanity Fair cut to Becky, Miriam Hopkins, who climbs from governess to London society and back down, using every man on the way. Robert Edmond Jones designed it; Frances Dee is Amelia, Cedric Hardwicke the Marquess. Pioneer Pictures for RKO, 1935.