Vanity Fair

Directed by Chester M. Franklin, Vanity Fair follows Myrna Loy’s Becky Sharp as she strives to achieve wealth and status by any means necessary. Filmmaker Franklin, armed with F. Hugh Herbert’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually tiresome and tedious endeavor that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie, which runs a short-yet-not-nearly-short-enough 78 minutes, lumbers through a spare narrative with little thought towards forward momentum or a sense of escalation – with the almost total absence of interesting or meaningful sequences only exacerbating the arms-length feel. And while Loy offers up a strong performance that attempts to transform Becky into a three-dimensional figure, Vanity Fair suffers from a proliferation of hopelessly bland and woefully underdeveloped periphery characters that slowly-but-surely drain the proceedings of anything resembling life or vitality – which, when coupled with a second half that just crawls along, confirms the picture’s place as a misguided adaptation that couldn’t be less compelling.

* out of ****