kekseksa I have seen all but one of the cinema films of Flaubert's novel (the missing one is the German version with Pola Negri)although it is a very long time since I saw the 1933 Renoir version.Pleasure though it always is, to watch Jennifer Jones in anything, this is not really her part.The major problems with the 1949 version are 1) the complete lack of any atmosphere of a French town, although this is rather crucial to the plot since it is precisely that rather stifling, hypocritical atmosphere that drives the entire tragedy. 2) the poor and very abbreviated screenplay which is in fact largely based on the 1947 Spanish version. This is. for instance, where he idea of framing it with Flaubert's trial comes from - not in my view a happy idea because it detracts from the necessary illusion in a way that occasional narration - as in the Chabrol version - does not. Another serious departures from the novel is the ballroom scene (wonderfully filmed but it is NOT - and importantly NOT - the occasion of her becoming involved with Boulanger but - and importantly BUT - an earlier stage in her downfall. This change also comes from the earlier Spanish film. Then again, the most painful episode in the book - absolutely central again to the fall of Emma and something that necessarily lingers throughout the rest of the novel since the boy lives on as an amputee - is the failed operation on the boy with the club-foot which never takes place in this version and is rather glided over in the 1947 version (which also omits Emma's child altogether. I cannot recall this episode in the Renoir but it very painfully brought home in the Chabrol version. Here Van Heflin's Bovary does what the character should have done - entirely changing the profile of the character - not what he actually did, which was to carry out the operation and make a hash of it. Whatever else he is, Bovary should not be simply a noble long-suffering character....or we end up effectively with Lust in the Dust (sorry, Duel in the Sun) with Van Heflin for Joseph Cotten and minus Gregory Peck.The 1933 and 1991 versions both excel in different ways in providing the French atmosphere in the latter in part at least due to the superb performance of Jean Yanne as the mayor-pharmacist, which also prevents the film from being over-dependent on the actress playing Emma on whom almost the entire onus of the film falls in Minelli's version, the other players being no more than adequate. Huppert's Emma and Jean-François Balmer's Bovary (another superb performance) are unmistakeably French,as one might expect while Jones and Van Heflin both come over altogether too much like something out of a western.One aspect caught beautifully in Chabrol's version but inevitably difficulty for any black-and-white version to manage is the gradual transformation of Emma as a result of her extravagant purchases. This too, however, is rather crucial to the plot.In truth, I do not think that this is a work that Hollywood has been or will ever be capable of adapting for the screen because it is simply, in cultural terms, far too distant from it. I should like to re-see the Renoir version, my impression being that it the one that best shows Emma's suffocation at the life she leads (the 1991 version has to move so briskly along to get everything in that her life appears altogether too dashing. An ideal version, I suspect, should be in two parts, quite common in French films of a certain period (Les Misérables for instance) but not, alas, when either of the versions of Madame Bovary were made. A two-part version could include the early parts of the novel (the childhood and early manhood of Bovary) which none of the existing versions attempt but which provide another perspective in the novel itself.

zofo57 I had first seen the 1991 version of this classic and then the 1949 version with Jennifer Jones. I did like both. One large difference that stood out to me was the fact that Dr Bovary does not perform the surgery on the deformed worker in the 1949 version yet he does in the 1991 version? I have not read the book to know how this truly played out with the author Flaubert? Does anyone know why this was done? Of course the surgery to me recollection was a disaster. So I will leave this out there in hopes someone will answer this question as to why the script was changed. And is it actually accepted to do such a thing? Certainly the outcome was fairly much the same as the poor doctor was perceived by his wife as a failure, and isn't it strange to see a doctor referred to as a peasant?

Steffi_P "What you try and create," the director Vincente Minnelli once said, "is a little magic". Like Madame Bovary, Minnelli's crime, if he had one, was wanting things to be beautiful. Producer Pandro S. Berman knew what he was doing when he hired Minnelli to shoot this adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's classic novel. Classic-era Hollywood was saturated with stories of apparently selfish women who ruin the men in their life, but Madame Bovary differs in that it gets us to understand and sympathise with its tragic heroine, even drawing parallels to our own desire for escapism through literature or cinema. And in the 1940s few pictures were as escapist as those of Minnelli.When you look at a Minnelli picture, his visual style is all about framing and defining beauty, be it Judy Garland singing at her window, a spectacular Ziegfeld stage set or recreations of fin-de-siecle artworks. For him, exquisite imagery was not simply a gloss – it was an aesthetic ideal that was at the heart of cinema. Yet for this picture, he frames beauty within the dreariness of reality, for example showing Jennifer Jones gazing out of the window of her dingy attic room on a glorious summer's day. But what is significant is that no matter how desperate the circumstances get, no matter how dark or cramped the interiors become, Jones is always magnificently dressed, and there is always somewhere a window onto a better world. In other words, he doesn't allow us to lose respect for the character or her romantic idealism. The real world may let us down, Minnelli seems to be saying, but he won't allow the concept of beauty itself to be dragged through the mud.The trouble with this version of Madame Bovary – and this is something common to many book-to-film adaptations – is that it is extremely bitty and repetitive. Novels are after all intended to be picked up and put down, whereas motion pictures must be swallowed in a sitting. Minnelli's flowing style may be designed to keep the audience constantly engaged on a visual level, but story-wise it is less likely to hold our interest. The acting performances are not exceptional – at least not by the standards of Jones and Heflin, and in any case we are not really able to focus on them within Minnelli's technical sweep.What we have here then is an adaptation that fails to assemble coherently the bones of the plot, but captures the essence of Flaubert's work and exhorts us to sympathise with the protagonist. The picture opens with a historical scene in which the author, played by James Mason, defends his creation by defending its heroine. This introduction as much as states that it is not enough to read what Emma did; we must understand why she did it. In this respect, Minnelli's Madame Bovary is a success on its own terms.

funkyfry This was something of a personal film for director Vincente Minnelli, one of my favorite directors from the 40s/50s Hollywood scene. But I can't say it's a personal favorite of mine, basically because it was too much undermined by Hollywood sensibilities. Still, it is an interesting link in the chain of Minnelli's films and reveals a lot about him as an artist. It bears interesting comparison with some of his other films, which provides my main interest in the film as opposed to what it is in and of itself.This version of "Bovary" starts with a rather intrusive framing device wherein the author Flaubert (played by Englishman James Mason) takes the stand in defense of his novel's decency. What he ultimately provides by way of defense is rather insulting to one's intelligence -- simply the idea that art depicts "realism" of some kind and that therefore the morality of the art itself cannot be drawn into question. All of this just might have some kind of impact, if it weren't for the fact that the film itself avoids a lot of the nastier aspects of Flaubert's work and replaces them with a relatively standard misogynistic "fallen woman" tale, whitewashing the character of Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) and cleaning up the ending. So while we have James Mason eloquently defending artistic freedom, we have at the same time a compromised film that hypocritically censors Flaubert's work in order to make it more palatable to Christian sensibilities.However, in someone other than Minnnelli's hands this script could have turned into full-on misogyny. Instead he and Jennifer Jones (in the title role) created a reasonably nuanced portrait of the woman. And what really puts it over is Minnelli's unparalleled sense of how to use the environments to enhance the characterization, from Emma's little farm room with tacked-up depictions of noble knights and ladies, to the bric-a-brac "luxury" apartment she constructs for her adult life. One of the things about Minnelli which is fascinating, and has been studied by various authors, is the way that Minnelli uses decor not just as a way of describing his characters but also as a way of actually conditioning them. Not only do the settings show the influence of the characters, and thus describe them, but they also have a direct impact on the characters. Minnelli has great sympathy with Emma Bovary's desire for escape and transcendence through fantasy, and he makes us feel it too with the great technique in the ballroom dance sequence. In all cases, Madame Bovary's surroundings dictate her behavior while she consciously believes that by purchasing all kinds of "luxury" items to surround herself with, she will thereby be able to control her own destiny through interior design.Minnelli's film is about a woman who is afraid of the "ordinary", for whom childish romantic notions of escape become a suffocating influence on her entire life. The Charles Bovary character is played as a very down-to-earth type perhaps in order to elicit the audience's pathos but also to provide a contrast to Emma. Minnelli is conscious of the fact that film itself is often guilty of feeding these very same notions of "escape" and fantasy, and he uses this film as a way of subverting that process.