RESTORED ‘BECKY’ DUE

There will be a rare opportunity to see Rouben Mamoulian’s superbly restored “Becky Sharp,” the first three-strip Technicolor feature, when it screens at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in Melnitz Theater, UCLA, as part of the “Technicolor: The Glory Years” series.

As timeless as its source, Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” it has at its center Miriam Hopkins’ boldly mocking Becky, an impoverished young woman making her way in Regency England on her wits and looks. “Becky Sharp” is a lavish period piece but Mamoulian uses color intuitively, for psychological rather than naturalistic effect. Also screening is Henry Hathaway’s “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (1936), the first Technicolor outdoor epic--here the colors are very natural. Starring Sylvia Sidney, Fred MacMurray and Henry Fonda, it is Americana at its most unself-conscious best, yet also a complex work involving a Hatfield-McCoy-like feud compounded by the incursion of the modern world into the lives of mountain people. It’s further evidence that Hathaway was too often underrated. Phone: (213) 825-2345.

Even in truncated form, Erich Von Stroheim’s “Greed” (1923) remains dazzling. In adapting Frank Norris’ “McTeague” in a justly celebrated documentary-like style, Stroheim forsook his usual Ruritania to tell the working-class story of a big, beefy, unlicensed--and therefore vulnerable--San Francisco dentist (Gibson Gowland) and the deceptively fragile-looking woman (ZaSu Pitts) he marries.

This tragic consideration of the interlocking of fate and character, is paired at the Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd. today and Thursday with another classic silent, King Vidor’s “The Crowd” (1928).