Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

HeadlinesExotic Boring

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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.

cstotlar-1 I'm a big fan of Vincent Minnelli's films and had saved this one for a rainy day and the pleasure seeing another take on a book I thoroughly enjoyed. I lived in France for many years and could imagine a Norman village within striking distance of Rouen. The village looks like something from Disneyland and the "French" characters as French as fries at McDonald's. I would have to admit that Jennifer Jones is gorgeous to look at but even her beauty can't rescue this Hollywoodized attempt at Kulcha". The scene at the dance was entirely too long and drawn out and the mirrors throughout the film were forced and contrived. Of course, the criticism of Emma's behavior were necessary to please the censors but the film turns into a diatribe against her morals that reaches American Puritanical hysteria. Those of us who read the book in its original language can vouch for the fact the Mme Bovary's village was claustrophobic and the people could be crude - not as crude as in the film where their crudity reached the absurd. We wouldn't think for a moment about changing Thomas Hardy's novels to fit the code, but both he and Flaubert showed their countries as they really were, without the embellishment of prettifying or laundering. What a disappointment,helas...Curtis Stotlar

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.

carvalheiro "Madame Bovary" (1949) directed by Vincente Minnelli is now almost a so rare look as one of the versions of an old book that Flaubert as writer was on trial to make an open speech where he justifies the heroin of XIX Century when Karl Marx was still writing Contribution to the Critic of Political Economy. If it is in 1857 that occurs the main action of the plot in this movie adapted from the stylishly innovative novel, round the next years or even before this date anyway in Normandy, because this movie it is constructed as a flashback - within a court where a famous free expression trial it is subject of the dream's conception of this character from imagination, with his creator's speech about reality concerning equality of opportunities to print a given written fiction about sexuality, obliging dependence from a genre to another in the bourgeois couple at the time -, which in itself is never too much for the ambitious portrait of the hypocrisy of that same society, as universal reference in past history of morality, as well understood here for academic's proposals anyway around the world. Minnelli in rarely black and white had a figure of style very nice when in the scene of Madame imagining as though far away, when simultaneous drinking champagne before her husband - and that precisely in this moment - she asks for dance by her behavior another man than her doctor, it is still as noble intention of course. But instead, even imagining it on a novel, it was by no means a crime against Puritanism by the transfer of the character of a young woman, who needs life and sex because her body is free of conventionality. Nor prostitution concealed in the society as the mental disease of women condition. Apparently in this movie Minnelli is quite moralist at the time, when by his model shows us a character of a tiny woman, gentle but enough alienated in her own self esteem. Because by this story she lost too much quick her own mind in the situation where she was, after born her daughter for refusing the child from her doctor and husband to the care of a maid in a rich mansion. Yes. By this way Mrs.Bovary wins a new style of maternity indeed, even by no means it seems critically ill for the society at the time. Instead this is which allowed to her a new kind of glamor as woman searching her desire out of the marriage, protecting young fellows, dandies and even burglars from the high society of 1857, between speculative capital and its accumulation. It is also in 1857 that by each proper way either in the social and in the fiction were like unexpected fellows of universal feelings and thoughts, concerning the upper classes and women as the weak side of the working development, that affects here the provincial middle class. That took one big part of sharing in such technological discoveries the opportunity at the time - in this region of Europe decisive for the industrial revolution coming from Britain - with the opening of the market and affects with it for all, before rigid norms of conduct in society and religious condition of safe.