Madame Bovary

Three versions stand out as far as Flaubert's classic is concerned:the Jean Renoir one,with Valentine Tessier,which has not worn well,the acting has become unconvincing and almost lurid when you see it today,Minelli's version and Claude Chabrol's starring Isabelle Huppert ,which doesn't avoid totally academism,despite Jean-François Balmer's portrayal of Charles that steals the show . Now for Minelli 's attempt:some have been hard on his rendition,and however,it features the best Emma ever:Jennifer Jones,the romantic heroine par excellence.Her savage beauty,looking tense,triumphs here. The supporting acts are well-chosen:Van Heflin is oafish,meek.The French Louis Jourdan is well-cast as Rodolphe Boulanger,Emma's lover who betrays her and leaves her to despair.Their final confrontation,in Boulanger's luxury mansion oozes hatred and contempt. The main drawback is the rural background:Minelli did not realize how this country life disgusted Emma:the wedding,a very very peasant one ,which Flaubert describes in lavish detail,is too short on the screen.The farms are too clean-Emma dreamed her childhood away because she could not stand the mediocrity of her milieu.She jumped out of the frying pan into the fire:a two-bit doctor,a would-be sawbones who 's totally incompetent.Van Heflin's rendering makes up for Minelli's weaknesses.The movie is sandwiched between two brief scenes of Flaubert 's trial (He was accused of immorality in his book),that's redundant.It would have been better to tell the audience about Emma's daughter's terrible fate:after the doctor's death,an orphan,she becomes a worker in a spinning mill.Supreme decay for a mother who was longing to be a socialite.

Although it is several years since I saw it I can remember the beautiful photography and period setting of this not very happy story of a tormented woman.Particularly Jennifer Jones,a vastly underrated actress giving a sensitive performance which one imagined could have done with a bit more directoral guidance. Minnelli was one of those directors who seemed to give all or nothing to his projects.By his own admission he had very little interest in "Kismet" as he wanted to get it out of the way in order to start "Lust for Life" with Kirk Douglas.The lumbering manner of "Kismet" shows this to be true !! (he owed MGM one picture under his contract before starting "Lust for Life" and unfortunately for the project "Kismet" was it)Additionally Minelli did not want Jones in the lead role and one wonders how influencial David Selznick was in pushing for Jennifer once Lana Turner was unavailable for the lead.At any rate Lana had not yet developed her dramatic abilities which would lie some years ahead.Jennifer showed that she was adaptable to many moods including a few years later her scene stealing turn in "Beat the Devil" few actresses can take credit for stealing a picture away from Bogie,Peter Lorre,Robert Morley and LaLolla. Back to Madame Bovary,although the subject is a heavy one,it is well handled by Minnelli,and most reference books today regard it as a sadly neglected piece,which deserves a wider recognition.Interestingly if my memory serves me correctly Vincente barely mentions it in his autobiography.Maybe his private life at the time and his more financially successful works figure more prominantly in his memory.If I had directed Madame Bovary I would be immensly proud of it.Maybe he was.

This MGM film sure sports a terrific cast--Jennifer Jones, James Mason, Van Heflin and Louis Jordan! However, no matter how good the cast and production values are, this is a film that was very, very difficult to produce in 1940s Hollywood due to the restrictions of the Production Code. This code precluded the film from fully realizing Flaubert's novel, as frank discussions of sexuality were not possible--the film never would have been cleared for public exhibition. So, the studio softened it here and there--and reduced the impact any film about this book could have had. I am sure a more modern version of the book would be quite a bit different--ad Madame Bovary's infidelities been a lot less vague.

The film begins with Dr. Bovary coming to Emma's home to treat her father. The Doctor is quite taken by her and eventually marries her--making her Madame Bovary. While quite pretty, there are some serious warning signs that went unnoticed. First, Emma was a bit childish and lived in a fantasy-sort of world where she expected real life to be like a romance novel! As a result, she's ill-equipped to deal with the boredom that comes with everyday life--as she expects constant passion, excitement and variety--not knowing even the rich and powerful live that way! Second, there is a huge disparity between the head in the clouds Emma and her rather nice but bland husband. He cannot possibly live up to her ridiculously high expectations of a man--and soon she goes searching for excitement on her own. Not surprisingly, she gravitates towards affairs, though in time, these, too, are unsatisfying--even lovers cannot always create excitement and distractions. Eventually, this leads to disaster and the story ends.

Not surprisingly, many story elements have been omitted--some due to the code and some due to the confines of a full-length film. For example, the Doctor's first marriage and significant periods in Emma's life are absent--though the spirit of the book is mostly intact.

While not exactly intended, the film seems to be an interesting portrait of what we might now consider to be a Borderline Personality or at least a person with strong Borderline traits. The inability to cope with boredom, interpersonal shallowness, the tendency to self-sabotage and craving for excitement and addiction (in this case, sexual and spending addiction) are all important hallmarks of this disorder. Such classifications were unknown in Flaubert's time, though he clearly seems to be describing such a person in Emma Bovary.

There is only one problem with such a portrait, however. Emma Bovary is in no way sympathetic--she is selfish, vain and pretty stupid. And, to make things worse, her husband is an utter fool as well, as he willfully ignores his wife's 'excesses'. As a result, it's a lovely movie to watch (it is a very glossy MGM production) but its also detached and hard to love...much like Madame Bovary herself!

Though I'm sure that the various French dramatizations of Madame Bovary are probably superior to this film, this English language version that MGM did in 1949 is as good as any we would have gotten from Hollywood. of that era. Jennifer Jones, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan, and James Mason were unfortunately hampered by the Code in this version.

MGM's version incorporates the author right into his story. James Mason plays Gustave Flaubert and the film opens with him on trial for authoring indecent material as the French censors of the day saw Madame Bovary. While on the witness stand defending his work, he tells the story of his creation Emma Bovary, a girl with silly romantic notions who brings tragedy all around because of them.

Jennifer Jones is Emma and imagine Bernadette Soubirous who instead of having a divine experience has the misfortune to have other things peak her interest as an adolescent. She reads a whole lot of romantic novels who give her exaggerated notions about the nature of love.

She lives in a pretty dull town in Normandy which was also where Flaubert himself hailed from and which he satirizes in acid in this work. She marries solid, dependable Van Heflin who's a doctor and who she hopes will give her a better life.

It's in Heflin's character that the Code watered down what Flaubert was trying to say. Here he's an upright guy, a lot on the dull side, but dependable. In the novel he's as much desiring of social climbing as Jones is. In fact in the film he refuses to perform an operation that might gain him fame and success because he knows he's not qualified to do it. In the novel he does the operation and it ends in disaster all around.

Jones takes lovers Louis Jourdan and Alf Kjellin and runs up bills that put Heflin into financial disaster. All the while refusing to face the truth about life and herself.

Given the Code restrictions director Vincente Minnelli does as best as he can with his cast. James Mason makes a brilliant and erudite Flaubert on the stand. But considering he was on trial for indecency by not showing the alleged indecency to the fullest the Code defeated what could have been a classic.

Films of great novels are usually light years away in terms of quality from their originals. There are of course a few exceptions, the David Lean Dickens adaptations for instance and recently a Neil Jordan version of Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" that I much admired. Generally it is second rate literature, "Gone WIth the Wind" a prime example, that fares so much better. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" has continued through the history and development of cinema and TV to exert its fascination on would-be translators, although it has to be admitted that it has generally proved elusive. One would have thought that it would have fared particularly well in the hands of outstanding French directors such as Renoir and Chabrol but their efforts to come to grips with Flaubert's masterpiece have ultimately to be judged as among their lesser works. There is quite a lot going for Jean Renoir's early 1933 version, not least the authentic Normandy exteriors shot with great affection, but technically the film shows its age. It is rather like a series of tableaux, some in themselves quite well done, but ultimately lacking a strong narrative thrust and sense of cohesion. Nevertheless I remember being more impressed with it than with Claude Chabrol's 1991 version which I found surprisingly cold and passionless. I admit I have only seen this once and my memory of it is far from clear, perhaps because it grabbed me so little at the time. It may seem rather preposterous to award the accolade for the best "Bovary" to Vincente Minnelli's Americanised 1949 MGM version with its studio mock-up of a French village that seems more of a Flanders lookalike and some location work clearly done in Californian woodland, but, in the absence of so little competition, I would have to plump for it as being certainly the most enjoyable. After all it has that quite exquisite beauty, Jennifer Jones, as the eponymous heroine, suffering and eventually dying as tenderly as only she can. My favourite memory from the film is her first appearance on the farm where Doctor Bovary is calling to tend to her sick father. There she is in a setting of all too believable rural squalor decked out in the most unbelievably opulent dress imaginable. If nothing else it makes Bovary's initial besottedness with her absolutely credible. Minnelli's is a rather sanitised adaptation. Okay to have the heroine die beautifully once the initial agony of taking poison has been established, but the inevitable outcome of a botched operation on a villager's clubfoot - amputation - is, unlike in the novel and other versions, evaded by the doctor's refusal to take on the medical challenge. It makes for rather more comfortable box-office. There are some beautifully done scenes including the almost obligatory inclusion in a Hollywood period piece of a ballroom sequence. The one here has the hedonistic movement that is everything we had come to expect from "The Great Waltz" onwards. There is also the heroine's wait, her bags fully packed in a windswept street after dark for the lover that never comes. Wyler did it rather better in "The Heiress" but Minnelli's has plenty of atmosphere. His version may be even further than its competitors from Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" but he invests it with enough passion and commitment to ensure it a small place in Hollywood history.