The Good Fairy (1935) and Becky Sharp (1935)

Toronto Film Society presented The Good Fairy (1935) on Sunday, March 30, 2025 in a double bill with Becky Sharp (1935) as part of the Season 77 Series, Programme 5.

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Toronto Film Society presented The Good Fairy (1935) on Sunday, December 7, 1986 in a double bill with The Bishop’s Wife (1947) as part of the Season 39 Sunday Afternoon Film Buffs Series “A”, Programme 5.

Production Company: Universal.  Director: William Wyler. Assistant Director: Archie Buchanan. Associate Producer: Henry Henigson. Screenplay: Preston Sturges, based upon the play by Ferenc Molnar. Cinematography: Norbert Bodine.  Editor: Daniel Mandell.  Art Director: Charles D. Hall. Sound: Joe Lapin.  Gowns: Vera West. Make-up: Jack P. Pierce. Release Date: February 1, 1935. Running time: 98 minutes.

Cast: Margaret Sullavan (Luise Ginglebusher), Herbert Marshall (Dr. Max Sporum), Frank Morgan (Konrad), Reginald Owen (Detlaff), Alan Hale (Schlapkohl), Beulah Bondi (Dr. Schultz), Eric Blore (Dr. Motz), Hugh O’Connell (Telephone Man), Cesar Romero (Joe), Luis Alberni (The Barber), Torben Meyer (Head Waiter), Al Bridge (Doorman), Frank Moran (Moving Man), Matt McHugh (Moving Man).

In 1914, Universal Studios bought the rights to Ferenc Molnar’s play The Good Fairy, which Max Reinhardt had directed in Berlin and Vienna and Gilbert Miller had brought to Broadway in 1931 with Helen Hayes as the heroine.  Full of the bubbly romanticism and witty character sketches that had made the Hungarian playwright famous, The Good Fairy also contained too much banter about marital infidelity to please the Hays Office.

Preston Sturges, then five years away from directing his first film and a struggling screenwriter with only one really bit hit to his credit, was hired to sanitize the play.  He chose to dispense with most of the original dialogue and remodeled the characters to fit his own conceptions. The play’s heroine, a goodhearted but extremely knowing gold digger, was refashioned by Sturges into a naive, unworldly orphan who becomes an usher in a movie theatre–she is so helplessly innocent that three men come to her aid, turning their own lives upside down in the process. It is doubtful if one line of Molnar dialogue survives in the finished film, but Sturges’ adaptation lightened the tone and broadened the emotional range of Molnar’s flimsy, mock-cynical play.

The changes were also undertaken to make the role of the heroine more suited to Margaret Sullavan, then one of Hollywood’s hottest stars with two films and two hits to her credit–Only Yesterday (1933) and Little Man, What Now? (1934).  Although only 24, Sullavan had already married and divorced Henry Fonda and was noted in Hollywood for having a quick temper and a mind of her own.  She and the film’s director, William Wyler, were soon at odds.  Wyler was then relatively unknown, The Good Fairy being one of his first prestige productions.

As he later recalled: “We were constantly fighting, over the interpretation of her part, over everything….She had a mind of her own and so did I.”  Noting one day how tired and worn Sullavan looked in the rushes, Wyler asked her out to dinner to try to make peace.

He was so successful that they married two weeks before the picture was finished. The marriage proved to be a brief one, however. Wyler, as a struggling director, found it difficult to cope with his wife’s greater wealth and fame. As he told Axel Madsen: “One time at Claridge’s where we stayed, a crowd wanting to see her and get autographs got us separated. I stood and waited for her to get through. One girl felt sorry for me and finally came over and stuck out her scrapbook and pencil.  ‘Here, you, too,’ she said.  I said, ‘Thank you very much’ and signed ‘Mr. Sullavan.’”

When The Good Fairy was released, the New York Times critic noted that it was “so priceless that it arouses in one the impertinent regret that it is not the perfect fantastic comedy which it might have been.”  He felt the film should have been directed by Rene Clair or “a director less earth-bound than William Wyler.”  The critic was to some extent right–Wyler’s interest in the psychological delineation of character was to drive him away from comedy until Roman Holiday nearly two decades later.

Notes by Laurie McNeice

BECKY SHARP (1935)

Production Company: Pioneer Pictures. Produced by: Kenneth Macgowan, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Edmond Jones. Directed by: Rouben Mamoulian. Screenplay: Francis Edward Faragoh. Story by: William Makepeace Thackeray

Langdon Mitchell. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Roy Webb, William Faversham. Running time: 84 minutes.

Cast:  Miriam Hopkins (Becky Sharp), Frances Dee (Amelia Sedley), Cedrick Hardwicke (Marquis of Steyne), Billie Burke (Lady Bareacres), Alison Skipworth (Miss Crawley), Nigel Bruce (Joseph Sedley), Alan Mowbray (Rawdon Crawley).

The Word of the Day is: Picaresque. The picaresque novel (Spanish: picaresca, from pícaro, for ‘rogue’ or ‘rascal’) is a genre that depicts the adventures of a roguish, appealing hero, usually of low social class, who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Becky Sharp is based on the novel Vanity Fair: a Novel without a Hero, written by William Makepeace Thackeray and published as a 19-month serial (1847-1848) in London’s Punch magazine. The novel’s title is a reference to John Bunyan’s 1678 story, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The fictional town of Vanity had a never-ending fair of man’s sinfulness, pre-occupation with idle pleasures and ostentatious displays. Thackeray, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, had a dim view of the excesses of upper-class British society and its hypocrisy. As in both the novel and the movie, Becky Sharp is described as an anti-heroine; a complex, morally ambiguous, and self-serving character. Often rejected for her lowly social status, Becky cleverly manipulates her ‘betters’ to her own ends. Note the use of the word “sharp” for Becky’s surname, as well as the decidedly creepy surname of Crawley; and the Marquis of Steyne (pronounced ‘stain’), a most unpleasant individual.

Another picaresque novel by Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), recounts the rise and fall of an Irish nouveau riche who connives his way into 18th-century English aristocracy. It was adapted to film in the 1975 movie, Barry Lyndon – written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. It won four Academy Awards including Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. Barry Lyndon is a ‘must-see’ for its innovative superfast lenses to film scenes by natural candlelight; the interior sequences have a rich, moody feel – well-deserving of an Oscar.

A uniquely Canadian Picaresque story is Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Duddy’s grandfather said, “a man without land is nothing,” inspiring a young Duddy to pursue lakefront property and his vision of success, but at what price? Due to its financial and critical success, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is considered the ‘coming of age’ for Canadian cinema; TIFF had twice listed it in the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time. Love him or hate him, the Duddy Kravitz character is a uniquely Montreal-Canadian Picaro, in pursuit of financial and social success – no matter the cost (and there’s your Canadian connection!)

In the news: New York elites had a real-life ‘Picara’ in their midst. Anna ‘Delvey’ Sorokin convinced New York’s high society that she was a German heiress and socialite, when, in fact, she was a penniless grifter. Originally from Russia, Anna was supported by her father, a former truck driver from Russia who ran an HVAC business in Germany. Over the better part of her 20s, this lovely young woman managed to alleviate wealthy individuals and even some financial institutions of several hundreds of thousands of dollars; poor Anna ended up with a stretch in jail. The extraordinary story of this Picara is now a Netflix limited series, ‘Inventing Anna’.

Now, back to our movie… Becky Sharp was the first film made in the three-strip Technicolor process; the beautiful settings and costumes make the best of the rich and vibrant colours.  Though the men’s uniforms were mostly accurate, much of the Regency dresses, hairstyles and makeup had influences from modern 1930s fashion – pin-curls and cloche hats. Historically, women’s Regency fashion was heavily influenced by ancient Greece with flowing robes as worn by Grecian ladies – sheer material, and lots of it. Many of the evening gowns in Becky Sharp were 1930s-style fitted affairs with simply a seam under the bustline, but…oh boy, Miriam Hopkins looked stunning! She received an Oscar nomination for her clever and engaging performance in this film. Though Becky Sharp didn’t get an Oscar that year, it won at the Venice Film Festival for Best Colour Film (1935).

The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian (say that 3-times fast!) was known for his innovations in working with lighting and staging; just one example is the use of lighting and effects in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). His reputation as a filmmaker was solidified with The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941), another Technicolor film in which it is said that Mamoulian was inspired to mimic colour palettes used by Spanish artists, Diego Velázquez and El Greco. In Summer Holiday (1948), he again took inspiration from art, wanting colours to be like Currier and Ives prints. In Summer Holiday, a prickly movie censor made Mamoulian remove ‘certain words’ in a father-and-son/birds and the bees scene, making Mamoulian write the best awkward explanation ever filmed between a dad (played by Walter Houston) and his son (played by Mickey Rooney). One of the founders of the Directors Guild of America, Mamoulian’s headstrong, independent nature had him run afoul of studio leadership; this would end his career and force him into retirement. Married to his artist wife, Azadia Newman Mamoulian, since 1945, Rouben Mamoulian passed away of natural causes on December 4, 1987 in his 90th year.

Notes by Carol Whittaker