MADAME BOVARY (1949) B/W 114m. dir: Vincente Minnelli
w/Jennifer Jones, James Mason, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan, Alf Kjellin, Gene Lockhart, Frank Allenby, Gladys Cooper, John Abbott, Harry Morgan, George Zucco, Ellen Corby, Christopher Kent, Eduard Franz, Henri Letondal, Esther Somers, Frederic Tozere, Paul Cavanagh, Larry Sims, Dawn Kinney, Vernon Steele
Minnelli's dramatic retelling of Gustave Flaubert's novel of a woman, bored with her marriage, whose life unravels as she has affairs with other men is one of the cinematic jewels in the director's crown. Mason plays the author in the framing device through which the story of Emma Bovary is told, that of Flaubert himself being on trial for writing the realistic novel. Jones is fine as Emma, but the film belongs to Minnelli: witness the breathtaking ballroom scene for yourself!
From Directed by Vincente Minnelli by Stephen Harvey: "The conflict between the urge for self-expression and the pressure to conform is a central one for Minnelli; with his pronounced understanding for the opposite sex, he expresses it with a special intensity when his protagonist is female. 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi!' famously declared Gustave Flaubert, a sentiment Minnelli manifestly shares. Yet throughout, he inflects this empathy with an undertone of dispassionate irony. It's there in the detached authorial voice of James Mason, narrating Emma's wayward history; even more so in the way Minnelli defines her visually as an alien figure constantly ill-matched with her surroundings.
"The interplay between these two perspectives is what makes this film so intriguing. Like all movie versions of classic fiction, Minnelli's Bovary subjects its source to a certain amount of compression. For dramatic emphasis, Rodolphe enters the plot at an earlier stage, initiating Emma to the intoxication of a waltz at the gala ball which seals her restlessness with her lot. Certain characters --- Bovary's mother and his first wife --- were eliminated entirely, while the faces of expressive character actors like Gene Lockhart and George Zucco served as shorthand for the collection of small-time poseurs and hypocrites Flaubert had sketched with more amplitude.
"Virtually every episode in which the heroine does not figure directly has been omitted, but the momentum of Emma's fate remains as inexorable as before. Minnelli's intuition and craft preserve Flaubert's spirit by translating it into a filmic language the mass public of his own time can well understand. 'There are thousands of Emma Bovarys. ... There are hundreds and thousands of women who wish they were Emma Bovary and who have been saved from her fate not by virtue but simply by lack of determination,' proclaims Mason/Flaubert in the prologue's courtroom scene. Yet in the person of Jennifer Jones, one thing distinguishes Emma from the common run of women in the world of this movie, and that's star quality. Her beauty, poise, and energy mark her as a creature apart, but also prompt the heroine's fatal delusions. With an actress's born egotism, she imagines herself as the center of a hundred glamorous fantasies; the hitch is that stars don't shape the scenarios assigned to them --- their role is to act them out as vividly as possible. Posing in her incongruously sumptuous wardrobe, Minnelli's Emma muses on 'Love in a Scotch cottage, love in a Swiss chalet,' but she's a leading lady pathetically trapped in the wrong vehicle."
From Emanuel Levy's website (www.emanuellevy.com), this 2007 review of the film:
"Gustav Flaubert’s scandalous novel Madame Bovary was one of director Vincente Minnelli’s favorite books, which he first read as adolescent, and then kept going to it in later years. He kept his volume (with red velvet cover) on a cherished place in his large bookcase. As a mature man, he felt emotional affinity with both Emma Bovary (her dreams and fantasies) and her dejected husband (his feelings of discomfort, rejection and ineptitude).
"Madame Bovary tells the story of a woman whose private phantoms made daily life unendurable for herself, her spouse, and their infant daughter. Minnelli was living a similarly hellish scenario, albeit in modern costume, at a Beverly Hills home. Minnelli later acknowledged that Judy’s periodic retreats into fantasy helped him shape his view of Flaubert’s self-destructive and capricious Emma.
"Like Minnelli’s best work, Madame Bovary simultaneously exalted the style of Hollywood moviemaking embodied by MGM, the most prestigious studio, while slyly debunking the moral assumptions that it also made the most traditional company.
"It could have been an Illustrated Literary Classic, a genre MGM excelled in before WWII, with its opulent tributes to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Dumas fils. Those pictures aimed to please provincial romantics with pretensions to refinement, whose vicarious movie thrills made their lives even more wanting in excitement.
"Minnelli is attracted to the subversive elements of the central character and story, specifically to Emma's doomed infatuation with the idea of love, and her vanity, which was a form of narcissism. A faithless wife and negligent mother, Emma defies all the feminine ideals MGM movies were promoting in the Greer Garson vehicles after Mrs. Miniver. Minnelli argued that if Emma earns the sympathy of the readers, it’s due to her human lapses.
"Screenwriter Robert Ardrey opts for a dramatic reduction of the novel. But due to censorship, producer Pandro Berman feared that even Emma’s suicide might be deemed insufficient punishment for her adultery. On screen, Ardrey suggests Emma’s promiscuity, but very little is actually shown. The chosen distancing device is voice-over narration. The story is bracketed with a reenactment of Flaubert’s trial for obscenity.
"Pandro Berman initially planned to cast Lana Turner, the studio’s glamour-plastic woman, still described as 'The Sweater Girl.' But Minnelli rejected the idea as both implausible and impractical. The Production Code censors had already warned that Madame Bovary was trouble enough, even without Lana Turner’s incendiary screen image. Minnelli refused to consider Metro’s other stars, British imports Greer Garson, who was established but boring, and Deborah Kerr, who was still new in Hollywood, because both were too refined ladies for the part.
"David O. Selznick agreed to release Jennifer Jones, his wife-actress, for the film so long as MGM used some of his idle leading men. Hence Emma’s noble seducer, Rodolphe, was assigned to Louis Jordan, and James Mason was cast as Flaubert, affording the estimable Brit the opportunity to flaunt his impeccably musical and cultured voice. Only one actor, Van Heflin, as Charles Bovary, was chosen from the MGM stable.
"Though Flaubert devoted only a few pages to the ball at the chateau, Minnelli turned it into the picture’s dramatic highlight, the occasion for Emma’s illusions and Charles’ forebodings to converge in music and movement. One of the last sequences to be shot, and the most complicated to orchestrate, Minnelli planned it as if it were a production number in a big glossy musical.
"For Minnelli, the picture’s standout scene is the Waltz dance. In that sequence, he conveys the giddiness that enveloped Emma at the ball. In dramatic films, music is usually added to the edited footage. Minnelli, however, shapes the ball scene to the pre-recorded strains of the neurotic Waltz he had commissioned from the noted Miklos Rozsa, known for his evocative scores for many films noir.
"In the ball, Emma is a Cinderella-like figure, outshining everybody else, only briefly remorseful over her neglect of husband and child. The neurotic Waltz is done with an accelerated tempo, to accentuate the idea being that as Emma was swirling around, the baroque mirrors and chandeliers were swinging around with her.
"Devoid of words, the camera movement suggests Emma's dizzying breathlessness as well as explaining with no dialogue why the host ordered to break the windows. This is shown while Emma's husband is in the billiard room, getting drunk. The Waltz was among the most difficult sequences Minnelli had ever staged or shot. Minnelli devised a series of 360-degree pans to convey Emma’s perilous exhilaration. The scene represents one of the more audacious and spectacular epiphanies in a Minnelli movie.
"Madame Bovary's tragedy is the prototype for many of Minnelli’s subsequent dramas. At the center, there’s usually a hero/heroine-misfit who's maddened by life’s routines, norms, and rituals. Identifying with his protagonists, male or female, Minnelli experienced similar emotional struggles in his own private life.
"Like Manuela, played by Judy Garland in Minnelli’s musical The Pirate, Emma Bovary is a woman stifled by the mores of her environment. For each woman, the main allure of her impending marriage is materialistic. Both heroines are prey to erotic longings, born and shaped by literature and popular magazines. The difference between the two women is that, as befits a hopeful genre like the musical, Manuela is liberated by her imagination, while the gravity of daily life brings Emma’s fantasies to tragedy.
"The film’s detached mode is also reflected in the way that Minnelli defines Emma visually, as an alien figure, ill matched with her surroundings. The interplay between the insider-outsider perspectives is what makes the film so intriguing.
"The script of Madame Bovary compresses the richly dense source material. Thus, every episode in which the heroine doesn’t figure directly was omitted. For dramatic emphasis, Rodolphe enters the plot at an earlier phase, before initiating Emma to the intoxicating waltz at the gala ball. Certain characters, such as Bovary’s mother and his first wife, are eliminated completely from the film. Minnelli’s intuition and craft preserve Flaubert’s spirit, while at the same time translating it into a language and look that were understood by the mass public of the era.
“'There are hundreds and thousands of women who wish they were Emma Bovary and who have been saved from her fate not by virtue but simply by lack of determination,' proclaims Flaubert (James Mason) in the prologue’s courtroom scene. Minnelli related to it viscerally.
"Though her interpretation lacks depth, Jennifer Jones’s star quality, her frail beauty, and elegant poise, are important, accentuating Madame Bovary's fatal delusions. Madame Bovary’s life is sustained entirely on illusion and fantasy, and she imagines herself the center of glamorous fantasies. Minnelli’s Emma muses on 'love in a Scotch cottage, love in a Swiss chalet.'
"Minnelli draws a number of striking contrasts, such Emma's grand entree in the first reel. Graciously preparing breakfast for the young doctor who’s called to see her farmer father, she beams in her kitchen over her omelet pan, while wearing a long white gown! Viewers have been tipped off that this elegant domestic is not the 'real' Emma, but a cameo turn to titillate her own vanity and dazzle Charles. Unseen by Dr. Bovary during his midnight vigil, in the previous scene Minnelli showed the girl in her usual guise, bustling in farmhouse kitchen, in a smock and with a kerchief under her chin.
"Emma’s apprenticeship in her craft is shown in a flashback of her convent years. In her bedroom, we see the teenager musing --- the camera spans to her reveries, a shrine as an eclectic collection of framed landscapes of enchanted woods, engravings of rapt lovers ripped from novels, copies of fashion magazines. They are described by Mason’s mournful voice-over as 'images of beauty that never existed.' These fetishes accompany Emma for the rest of her life, placed in the attic to which she retreats from her bleak domesticity.
"Significantly, in Minnelli’s melodrama, Bovary’s villain is an amoral interior decorator, shopkeeper/moneylender Lhereux, who furnishes Emma’s new home and adorns her. Minnelli indicts Lhereux’s malign influence on his heroine’s gullible whims with a vignette that’s absent in Flaubert’s novel. Of all his new merchandise, Emma gets excited over a plaster cherub of negligible merit, prompting Lhereux to remark, 'you have unfailing taste.'
"Madame Bovary is a tale of the misguided nineteenth-century housewife, who is rushed down the primrose path to ruin. Metro had actually put it in the form of an open defense. James Mason plays the author on trial, for writing this infamous novel, as indeed Flaubert actually was. Though it was not his choice, Minnelli abided by the restriction of having James Mason speak a preface to the work and offer occasional commentaries in an off-screen voice as the story unfolds.
"By using this device, Minnelli suggests that Emma Bovarys tragic life is not the result of willful sinning by a selfish, licentious woman, but the consequence of her environment, her upbringing and her childish dreams. We had taught her to believe in Cinderella, Mason tenderly remarks.
"In Minnelli's version, Emma is the victim of hopeless illusions, a sheer product of the romantic age and its ideals. She doesn't find the man of her dreams in her poor loving husband, or in her dazzling lover, or in the pitiful law clerk. In the end, it is ruin and despair, shame, desolation, and death.
"Minnelli keeps the story moving with smooth directorial touches. As noted, the high point of his work is a ballroom scene, which spins in a whirl of rapture and crashes in a shatter of shame. In this sequence, Minnelli the stylist fully visualizes his theme in a way in which he is not successful in other sequences. A better performance of Emma could be wished for than the beaming and breathless one Jennifer Jones gives. Minnelli thought that Jones was too light for playing the anguish of this tormented soul. Given the choice, he would have preferred an actress like Vivien Leigh in the part, and that was before he saw A Streetcar Named Desire.
"None of the men in the cast is distinguished, either. Louis Jordan is not quite electric as Bovary's phony and elegant lover Rodolphe. Van Heflin is moderately appealing as her trusting small-town spouse, but the script neglected to give him long scenes, mostly allowing him reaction shots; it was a passive role. A better portrait of the weakling lover is given by Christopher Kent. The only actor to approximate Minnelli's vision of the film is Frank Allenby, as the shrewd and manipulative merchant Lhereux.
"Madame Bovary draws on Minnelli's rare sensitivity to its source material and his vivid sense for melodrama. The movie was too gloomy and fatalistic for the broad public, though it performed respectably at the box-office. It’s Minnelli’s first dramatic film since The Clock in 1944 (with Judy Garland in the lead) to fulfill his expectations and meet his high standards. The movie demonstrates Minnelli's breadth of talent, proving that his stylistic flair could enliven the most demanding and bleakest of subjects."
MADAME BOVARY was nominated for an Oscar for Best B/W Art Direction (Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith).
Notes collected for a lecture on the film:
Gustave Flaubert &
Woman as Victim:
by 1949: year MADAME BOVARY
was released: people's general view of society included psychoanalytic /
Freudian ideas:
this
was reflected in films of time: from directors who started in silent era &
also from younger directors like Minnelli:
Minnelli:
generation removed from silent directors D.W. Griffith / King Vidor
in late 1940s: dozens of
psychological thrillers: film noirs represent psychoanalytic vision at its most
paranoid
but:
in all genres: psychology & keener awareness of sexuality & of how
human beings are shaped by ideology:
by
class, gender, childhood, family, the media
in melodrama: morally simple
stories disappeared: no more tales where it's easy to distinguish between right
& wrong:
instead:
more shadings to many factors that shape people & more shadowy aspects of
fate emerge
Minnelli's MADAME BOVARY:
shares theme with STELLA DALLAS: heroine struggles vs. pressures of social
prejudice & class:
but:
biggest obstacle to Emma's happiness: her blindness to fact that life &
romantic fictions re: life are different
Emma: desires life that's
lived vividly: not unreasonable: but those around her make her desire:
seem
frenzied & extreme in proportion: as that desire is thwarted
but:
her desire is doomed to be thwarted: because she does not temper it with any
compromise
Leo Bersani: Emma is: "finally
crushed by the weight of an insubstantial imagination which has been unable to discharge
itself
of
its fables, which has never found a world"
Emma: even as young girl:
harbors: "ridiculous dreams of high romance & impossible love":
but:
like Flaubert: Minnelli: does not blame Emma for her actions:
whole point of Madame Bovary: melodramatic one:
to
measure validity of her desire