FLASHBACK: Vanity Fair, 1935

Miriam Hopkins in Becky Shu n

"Something new and strange and exciting is happening in Hollywood," wrote Robert Edmond Jones in a 1935 Vanity Fair. And he didn't mean Marlene Dietrich doing the hootchy-kootchy in a gorilla suit. He meant the advent of Technicolor. The first feature-length film to use the revolutionary process was Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp, based on Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and starring Miriam Hopkins, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Billie Burke. Last year, half a century later, it was the surprise hit of the New York Film Festival. For three years the U.C.L.A. Film Archives has been restoring it to its original, multicolored splendor. And the San Francisco Film Festival plans to show it this month, before it's released later this year.