Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Written by Robert Ardrey from the novel by Gustave Flaubert
1949/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Emma Bovary: Is it a crime to want things to be beautiful?[/box]

How could MGM destroy a masterpiece of world literature?  Let me count the ways.

The story of the novel is bookended by scenes of the trial of Gustave Flaubert (James Mason).  He defends the morality of his work in a possible concession to the Hayes Code. So right off the bat we change a study of provincial manners and human frailty into an object lesson on the dire consequences of adultery.

Farmer’s daughter Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones) was raised in a convent where a Swiss housemother provided the girls with romantic novels and fed them all the love stories of legend.  Emma imagined herself as the heroine of all these tales.  She returns to the farm where the first educated man she meets is Charles Bovary (Van Heflin), a simple country doctor who has come to set her father’s broken leg.  She marries him but the reality of marriage is a cruel disappointment.  She decides to devote herself to making a beautiful home for him and secretly begins taking loans for furnishings, etc.  She starts a flirtation with Leon Depuis, a presentable young villager who assists her, but before this can become anything more his mother sends him off to Paris to study law.

Emma decides that what she needs is a son who will not face the obstacles she is suffering as a woman.  But again, her hopes are dashed when the child turns out to be a girl. Next, a local pharmacist convinces her that Charles could win the Legion of Honor if he is the first to perform a surgery to cure club foot.  (The filmmakers give the botched surgery – one of the most memorable parts of the novel – a pass.)

A count invites the Bovary’s to a ball where Emma is swept off her feet by the handsome aristocrat Rudolphe (Louis Jourdan).  They begin a love affair but Rudolphe gets cold feet when it comes to running away with Emma.  The ever-trusting Charles rescues Emma from a suicide attempt and later unwittingly enables her to start a liaison with Leon, now a law clerk in Rouen.  Emma’s dreams are finally dashed permanently when her debts catch up with her, but not before the money lender gives her a lecture on the wickedness of her ways.

This is a handsome production and Minnelli’s staging of the ball scene, in particular, is marvelous and worth seeing.

The film’s problems begin with the characterization of Emma, who comes off as more like Scarlett O’Hara than the pathetic none-too-bright heroine of Flaubert’s novel.  The other characters and their dialogue ring one false note after another.  Maybe I would have loved it if I had not read the book but not as more than as a costume melodrama.

Madame Bovary was nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.

Trailer