Vanity Fair

[Wellesnet]

On 7 January 1940, Orson Welles's production of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel "Vanity Fair" was broadcast on "The Campbell Playhouse," CBS-Radio. With Helen Hayes guesting as Becky Sharp, one of her eight Campbell Playhouse guest appearances. Hermann Mankewicz wrote the script for the program.

Vanity Fair recounts the tale of a lower-class English girl who survives in the years following Napoleon's defeat and insinuates herself into an upper-class family, only to see her life and the lives of those around her destroyed. Portrays roughly the same time period as "Les Miserables".

Thackeray's novel had already been turned into a film three years earlier by David Selznick, called "Becky Sharp", which was one of the first uses of Technicolor in Hollywood. In 1998 it was filmed again by Mira Nair, with Reese Witherspoon as Becky. Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film, "Barry Lyndon", was based on one of Thackeray's other novels, "The Luck of Barry Lyndon".

[Wellesnet]

This show, in good sound, is available at the new Lilly website, along with the original script:
https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/s ... 458%2C3082

[Le Chiffre]

The problem I have with Vanity Fair is the same problem I have with several other Campbells based on long, classic novels: There's too much story to fit into an hour radio program and still make sense. The book is huge and too convoluted for radio and there are far too many characters to keep track of, much less care about, and when you eliminate most of the book's subplots, you eliminate the epic quality that gave the main story it's resonance to begin with. It was one Helen Hayes's last Campbell appearances and she might as well have been running the show at that point. Right at the beginning Welles says the program was her choice, as if washing his hands of it. His involvement seems minimal, which is understandable since at this time he was desperately brainstorming film ideas with Mank and Houseman that would start to turn into the Kane script about a month later.

This is one of the few (if not the only) Campbell Shows where Bernard Hermann does not do the music,