We begin with Becky Sharp, the first feature film in Three-Strip Technicolor. An adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), Becky Sharp starred Miriam Hopkins as the titular adventuress and was directed by Rouben Mamoulian. It was released June 13, 1935.
Color Use in (Historical) Context
Upon its release, the use of color in Becky Sharp received mixed, though largely positive and intrigued reviews. On the positive side, reviewers noted it was "endowed with a great deal of pictorial beauty," "a truly beautiful film," and "probably the most significant event of the 1935 cinema." [1] Writing in the New York Times on June 14, 1935, Andre Sennwald wrote: "one thing is certain about Becky Sharp. Its best is so good that it becomes a prophecy of the future of color on the screen. It forced this column to the conclusion that color will become an integral motion picture element in the next few years." [2]
The film—and its color—also received quite a bit of criticism, particularly for its occasionally luridly over-colorful palette. Earlier in his same review, Sennwald commented, "some of the color combinations make excessive demands upon the eye." [3] Even in 2023, when we take colored movies and TV for granted, we might concur with this assessment, but in 1935 getting used to seeing a film in full color at all was an adjustment. Sennwald continued:
The major problem from the spectator's point of view is the necessity for accustoming the eye to this new screen element in much the same way we were obliged to accustom the ear to the first talkies. The psychological problem is to reduce this new and spectacular element to a position, in relation to the film as a whole, where color will impinge no more violently upon the basic photographic image than sound does today. This is chiefly a question of time and usage. At the moment it is impossible to view "Becky Sharp" without crowding the imagination so completely with color that the photoplay as a whole is almost meaningless. That is partly the fault of the production and partly the inevitable consequence of a phenomenon. We will know more about the future of color when its sponsors employ it in a better screenplay than "Becky Sharp." [4]
Preview audiences also criticized the film for its assertive use of color and it unnatural skin tones, a problem which would plague Technicolor for two more years until Elizabeth Arden's Stage and Screen and Max Factor's Pan-Cake make up ranges changed the game for white skin in Technicolor. Indeed, as Kirsty Sinclair Dootson explains, quoting directly from preview feedback postcards, "preview audiences confirmed that 'extensive color research, especially in backgrounds and personal makeup,' was 'imperative.'" [5]
In the filmmakers' (and Technicolor's) eagerness to advertise the considerably fuller gamut of colors available in Three-Strip Technicolor, characters and sets were decorated with more or less every possible highly saturated color, and some sequences plummet headlong into color confusion, particularly in crowd scenes. Perhaps inadvertently, these sequences prove true Technicolor's Color Director, Natalie Kalmus's assertion that "a super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well." [6]
In the sequences of Becky Sharp where color is used for more expressive purposes, it is used exceedingly well. For the first feature to be made using full-color Technicolor, the color storytelling is remarkably potent, with wonderful moody patches of pure black splashed with illumination that completely changes the character of the sets and costumes during the dramatic scenes that lead up to the Battle of Waterloo. Considering the slow adoption of color photography into darker genres like film noir or tragic melodrama, it is notable that the designers of Becky Sharp were able to convey menace so effectively so comparatively early.
It is notable that these more expressive color effects feel rare and fresh even in 2023. When Becky douses us in emotional color, it feels as innovative in its use of expressive color as sequences from Powell & Pressburger or Vincente Minelli - rarefied company. But part of Technicolor's vision for the adoption of its product was the idea that color was the final step on the path to the motion picture achieving "complete realism", so it is natural that they were particularly attuned to reviews which called out Becky Sharp's unnatural coloration.[7] I do wonder if part of the reason the kind of expressive color use in Becky never became as innate to film language as any number of other artifices which regularly go unnoticed is because in (perhaps rightly) wishing to curtail the frenzied "super-abundance" of colors in Becky, Technicolor also supressed the expressive use of color that is the film's most exciting feature. Natalie Kalmus's negative reputation as someone who directors viewed as an anti-creative authoritarian would seem to support this notion to some extent.
Some Close-Readings of Color Use
As I noted above, Becky Sharp particularly features the use of colors that were specifically available in the gamut of Three-Strip Technicolor which had not been previously available in Two-Strip variants. Yellow is perhaps the most prominently used, but primary red, green, and blue all make appearances. I don't know enough about the casting process for the film to say specifically why Miriam Hopkins was cast as Becky Sharp (she clearly relishes the darker sides of her character), but I would imagine her light eyes and white-blonde hair were a selling point as far as Technicolor was concerned.
Since so many of the colors in the movie are richly saturated, the primary mode of color contrast is in terms of hue, and the designers make extensive use of both complimentary and cold-warm contrast. The red of the British officers's jackets, and its symbolism within a story touched directly by the Napoleonic wars, makes it a key color within this cold-warm relationship. In the scenes where harsher and more expressive lighting prevails, this naturally also creates bright-dark contrast, which is probably part of the reason these scenes seem so much more dynamic than the flatter (and chromatically more confused) interior scenes.
Mamoulian himself drew attention to the use of color in the movie's most dramatic moments:
The artist should take advantage of the mental and emotional implications of color and use them on the screen to increase the power and effectiveness of a scene, situation or character. I have tried to do as much of this in "Becky Sharp" as the story allowed. To quote an example of this, I would refer to the sequence of the panic which occurs at the Duchess of Richmond's ball when the first shots of Napoleon's cannons are heard. You will see how inconspicuously, but with telling effect, this sequence builds to a climax through a series of intercut shots which progress from the coolness and sobriety of colors like grey, blue, green and pale yellow, to the exciting danger and threat of deep orange and flaming red. The effect is achieved by the selection of dresses and uniforms worn by the characters and the color of backgrounds and lights. [8]
To this day, Becky Sharp retains a reputation as garishly designed, but this reputation obscures some of the touchingly muted compositions occurring later in the film. Part of the shift in saturation and stridency comes from time passing within the story, as both interiors and fashions change from Empire to Neoclassical, but the shift also serves to introduce greater gravitas as Becky's lies and machinations come home to roost.
In these later scenes, the contrast is more one of saturation. In the shot at right, red is the only highly-saturated color within a frame that is mostly off-whites, greys, and pastels. Indeed, white itself becomes—extraordinarily—almost a saturated color in this shot, balanced as it is against red and Hopkins's flushed complexion. The intractability of the officers's red jackets also makes for an interesting counterpoint to Becky's changing interiors and costumes, as if to emphasize how much and how quickly her character is changing.
Some concluding remarks
Starting this project by attempting to write about Becky Sharp is tremendously hard. The film, and its use of color, is weighed down by a lot of baggage surrounding its mixed reception, and I am not sure I have been able to free my analysis of it from the assumptions that I had about its place within the story of color cinema before watching it. Becky is a film that it is easy to do a glib analysis of, and this little essay absolutely does not adhere to my intention to create a termite critique of the use of color in Technicolor IV films. It may be worth revisiting Becky later in this process, once I have developed better frameworks for seeing, analyzing, and writing about color in this way.
Versions & Availability
One final aspect of color confusion comes from the film's production and release history. In 1943, it was shortened by 18 minutes and re-released in two-color Cinecolor. Until the film's first restoration in 1984 by UCLA Film and Television Archive, Becky Sharp was only available in this format or, on video, in a 59-minute black-and white public domain version.
At left: a shot in two-color Cinecolor; at right: a shot from the same location in full Technicolor.
Becky Sharp has been restored several times by UCLA Film and Television Archive and Paramount Archive, and was given a beautiful Blu-Ray release by Kino Lorber KL Studio Classics in 2019. In a couple of instances (as in the shot above), where three-color Technicolor materials were unavailable, this restoration substitutes sequences from the Cinecolor version.
Reasons
Reasons to watch: historical signifiance; extraordinary use of emotional and expressive color in key scenes; wild, implausible, and ludicrous outfits and color combinations; Miriam Hopkins' performance, though at times stilted and marred by her attempted British accent, is nevertheless compelling.
Reasons to avoid: the film includes (fairly brief) episodes of racist and orientalist stereotyping against people of color involving a servant boy, played by Jimmy Robinson; the film is of greater historical value than entertainment value; the colors and makeup are garish sometimes in a way that is distracting; lousy or halfhearted attempts at British accents abound.
Credits
All images above from the 2019 Blu-Ray release of Becky Sharp by Kino Lorber KL Studio Classics. I do not own any rights to any of the images or video.
For more valuable information on Becky Sharp, including contemporary reviews and some excellent secondary sources, see its listing on Timeline of Historical Film Colors.
[1] "NY Press Comment on 'Becky Sharp', First All-Color Feature Film", International Projectionist, June 1935, 16. Accessed 03.01.2023 from Archive.org
[2] Andre Sennwald, "The Screen: The Radio City Music Hall Presents 'Becky Sharp,' the First Full-Length Three-Color Photoplay," The New York Times, June 14, 1935. Accessed 03.01.2023 from TimesMachine.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, "'The Hollywood Powder Puff War': Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s", Film History , Vol. 28, No. 1 (2016), pp. 107-131, published by Indiana University Press, p. 108. Accessed 02.26.2023 from JSTOR.
[6] Natalie M. Kalmus, Color Consciousness, pamphlet reprinted from Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, August, 1935, pp. 139-147, based on a talk given by Kalmus at the Technicians Branch of the Society of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, CA, May 21 1935, p. 142. Accessed 02.26.2023 from Eastman Museum.
[7] Kalmus writes: "In the early days, pictures were a mere mechanical process of imprinting light upon film and projecting that result upon a screen. Then came the perfection of detail—more accurate sets and costumes—more perfect photography. The advent of sound brought increased realism through the auditory sense. The last step—color, with the addition of the chromatic sensations, completed the process." Ibid, 139-140.
[8] Rouben Mamoulian "Some Problems in the Direction of Color Pictures" in The Three Color Process, 1935 Volume of Technical Bulletin, May 31, 1935, published by Technicians Branch of the Society of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, CA, p. 20. Accessed 02.26.2023 from Eastman Museum.
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