MADAME BOUVARY: Blu-ray (MGM, 1949) Warner Archive

During its golden epoch, MGM relished transforming time-honored and contemporary literature into lavishly appointed period spectacles. The 1930’s in particular had yielded a formidable girth in such riches, thanks to Production VP, Irving G. Thalberg’s insatiable interests in best-selling novels, and, moreover, film product directly aimed at the ‘adult’ film goer; the studio mingling the likes of Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare with Eugene O’Neill, James Hilton and Vicki Baum. This cycle of ‘historic’ celluloid translations was to be briefly delayed, though never entirely denied – first, by L.B. Mayer’s affinity for living within the white picket-fenced modernity of Carvel, U.S.A. – but also, by wartime rationing of badly needed materials necessary to build more grandiose sets to accommodate ‘period’ product. Nevertheless, Mayer had had the good sense to live up to the high ideals established by Thalberg after his untimely passing at age 36, the consignment of props, sets and costumes accrued under Thalberg’s prolific aegis, meticulously preserved and endlessly reassembled as a cost-cutting godsend during the cash-strapped forties. Due to Mayer’s begrudging adherence to Metro’s revered reputation within the industry for ‘period spectacle’ and Thalberg’s foresight in amassing a veritable warehouse of relics from virtually every period in history, at war’s end, MGM could boast an enviable stockpile to effectively represent any decade.

Alas, tastes had changed. The piss-elegance of a Louis XIII France or Victorian bric-a-brac that clicked so effortlessly with Depression-era audiences was followed by a decade’s worth of darker visions of America, the make-believe turned inward, then downward, and finally, asunder with what would later be collectively and critically assessed by Cahiers du Cinéma as ‘the noir style’. To be sure, Metro’s brand of brightly key-lit ‘escapism’ still ruled the roost in 40’s Hollywood. But now, it had to be cleverly calculated – masked, even - and cautiously fed in increments with a timely – and arguably, more relevant – narrative that connected with the unvarnished realism returning vets had lived through during the war and were beginning to demand reflected back at them from their movie art. While the powers that managed 2oth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. sensed this aesthetic shift, and veered on the side of less extravagant artifices throughout the late 1930’s to build their in-house styles, accepting the present as irreconcilable with the past, MGM continued to reimagine the world on its own fairytale landfill of dreams, perhaps even believing audiences would desire to remain happily ensconced within these idealized ‘never-never-lands’ of rarified and diverting chic good taste and rarified beauty.

Part of the reason for – and the problem with – the enduring longevity of this artistic retardation was owed Mayer’s obstinacy to move with the times. A showman of the old school, Mayer had practically reinvented America’s world view of glamor. Now, he could no more surrender the belief it had fallen out of fashion than convince himself his own life had been wedged into an Andy Hardy-esque dramedy, eventually to topple him from his throne. Even as profits dipped, the overall slump had not yet egregiously impacted the bottom line; at least, enough for its parent company, Loewe’s Incorporated to insist on a change of pace. Still, company president, Nicholas Schenck did implore Mayer to find himself ‘a new Thalberg’ - a quest ultimately leading to Mayer’s dethronement and the true beginning of the end for the studio’s glory days.  Even so, Mayer, then the highest paid (and most heavily taxed) personage in America, could point with pride to the staggering profits derived from his ‘happy’ little movies, more clean-cut and antiseptically wholesome homages to an America that never was, substituting youth for the wanton exploitations of a Marie Antoinette, or desperately in love Romeo and Juliet. So, more middling musicals, and the occasional ‘prestige pic’ tricked out in the very best finery Metro could afford, and, dappled in kilowatt star-power, heaped with increasingly weighty dollops of excess and featuring a cavalcade of headliners, all under one roof, assembled by Mayer’s royal command for a name-dropping luncheon to inaugurate Metro’s 25th year in showbiz in 1949. 

Mayer’s flimflamming of the stockholders might have dragged on a little longer, except by the end of the forties he had all but delegated the daily operations of his kingdom to practically run itself with his casual ‘stamp of approval’ given almost as an afterthought, while Mayer busied himself with a burgeoning romance involving wealthy socialite, Lorena Danker. And this after a proposed flagrante delicto with Metro contract player, Ann Miller failed to gel. Mayer’s other great passion of the post-war period was horse-breeding/racing. Even as the klieg lights were dimming on that golden-era epoch all over Hollywood, thanks to the tenacious proliferation of television, Mayer remained oblivious to the inevitable decline, turning a proud, if blind eye in mere reflection from his box at the race track, reveling in his private competition with Harry S. Warner to see who would ultimately possess the most perfect stable of thoroughbreds. 

From this vantage, director, Vincente Minnelli’s 1949’s adaptation of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is even more an anomaly in Metro’s pantheon, increasingly top-heavy in Esther Williams’ aquacades, Jane Powell musical programmers, and, the occasional flight into uber-extravagance, a la prestige pictures like Green Dolphin Street (1947) and Minnelli’s own failed attempt to musicalize and update the Douglas Fairbanks Sr. swashbuckler, with The Pirate (1948). Miraculously, no major Hollywood studio had ever attempted to bring Madame Bovary to the screen. Part of the reason was likely the novel’s incendiary tone. For in Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones), here was a creature more heartless and relentless in her pursuit of happiness, virtually at the expense of everyone else’s, than Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara. These two ‘heroines’, separated by a century in literature, nevertheless share a distinctly tragic characteristic; a willful incalculability to throw happiness away with both hands while reaching out for some intangible joy never theirs to possess. Like Scarlett, Emma Bovary is invested in the futile pursuit of phantom pleasures, wholly imagined from picture books and other adolescent fancies – as Flaubert suggests, “…a reality that never was” and, thus very destructively a figment of the mind. Re-imagining the world on her terms creates a malignancy in all of Emma’s earthly relationships, estrangement from her chronically doting husband - country doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin), and their child, Berthe (Dawn Kinney), later, to be pursued by her male counterpart, Leon Dupuis (Christopher Kent) – a man faking success and prosperity to impress her – only to be spurned by the more aristocratic, Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). 

Perhaps acutely aware of the provincial morality built into Hollywood’s enduring Production Code of Ethics, to have stifled a good many literary adaptations, transforming them into elegantly tricked out moving tableaus of the ‘Illustrated Literary Classics’ ilk, doubtlessly popularized to appeal to a more contemporary strain of romantics while simultaneously appeasing the code’s pretentious refinements in good taste, Mayer gave his nod of approval to producer, Pandro S. Berman, who assigned Minnelli the task of preserving Flaubert’s incendiary intent on the big screen. And Minnelli would prove himself exceptionally worthy of this task, subverting Metro’s brand of sentimentality and glamour to produce a remarkably subversive and haunting, noir-ish historical epic, framing the novel’s premise around the real-life trial of Gustav Flaubert in 1857 in which Emma Bovary was branded ‘a disgrace to France’ and ‘an insult to womanhood’ derived from Flaubert’s ‘monstrous and degenerate imagination’. In his own defense, the cinema’s Flaubert, supremely realized by a stoic James Mason as the patron saint of all wretchedly flawed feminine ambitions, proposes a compassionate ‘justification’ for Emma Bovary. By counterpoint, he illustrates the vicious to preserve the virtuous, adding, there are countless women like Emma Bovary, spared a similar fate – not by their virtue, but by their lack of determination.

Sadly, Minnelli could likely draw on his own marital quagmire for Emma Bovary’s darkest inspirations. His life with MGM zeitgeist, Judy Garland had already suffered the fitful highs and toxic lows of the star’s chronic addiction to studio-sanctioned barbiturates. Garland’s phantoms and hellish retreats into fantasy increasingly made their lives unbearable. Perhaps, Minnelli’s great respect for Garland as more the star, his devotion and constant vigilance during her many crises, afforded him a certain empathy for Flaubert’s doomed heroine.  And truly, the greatest curiosity to be unearthed in Minnelli’s impeccably lush adaptation is his ability to exude a genuine pity for this contemptuous and otherwise evil woman, her suicide from arsenic poisoning near the finale, perceived as utterly tragic rather than mere escape from an impossible situation.  Interestingly, the pinnacle of Emma Bovary’s blossoming into privilege – that is to say, the edifying moment that seems to justify her unbridled greed – comes barely twenty minutes into the picture. Emma has successfully seduced and wed country physician, Charles Bovary, elated to have been invited, along with her husband, to the mannered estate of the Marquis D'Andervilliers (Paul Cavanagh) for a grand ball. For this briefest wrinkle in time, tricked out in one of Walter Plunkett’s ravishing gowns, Emma Bovary becomes the center of attention. Suitors flock to meet this ‘new edition’ to their social circle, the most amiable of the lot, Leon Dupuis, whirling her about the dance floor in a dizzying succession of pirouettes while, from the fringes her adoring husband quietly gets drunk.

Herein, Minnelli takes petit-bourgeois elegance to the nth degree, debasing it into a fin de siècle demimonde, the axis gradually thrown off kilter, courtiers, as planetoids orbiting an all-consuming sun, suddenly possessed of Emma’s overindulgence, smashing French doors and windows to accommodate her with a breath of fresh night air. Those who would criticize Minnelli for this overpowering inanity (does no one share the presence of mind it would have been more prudent to casually open these panes than gleefully shatter them with wild abandonment?), are remiss of the supreme theatrics that strike a resonant chord in perfect beat with Emma’s pounding heart. Are we actually witnessing the idle rich dismantling their world for a societal underline? Or is this idiocy imagined by the prima donna? If only Emma Bovary was of their class. Alas, she is not. Therefore, she cannot maintain her status as its centerpiece. She shares only in their affectation for the art of gracious living – only, and rather ravenously, for she can exploit and take from it. Such moments cleaved to her caprice, vaguely mimic pages in a picture book or fashion magazine, excised and pasted on the walls of her attic. Emma has stitched together a life, but one absurdly recreated from an insidious desire to live in a daydream.

From this vantage, the ball is a tour de force for Minnelli’s fitful artistic expression, outwardly mirroring Emma’s impossible purgatory of her own design, an inward human suffrage, exercising – and exorcising – demons soon to topple her self-anointed queen. Emma’s tragedy is, no man of flesh and blood – least of all, Charles Bovary – can equal, much less conquer her unquenchable thirst for grandiloquence. Nervous and woefully out of step with the Marquis and his crowd, Charles indulges in too much drink, unable to circumnavigate the other dancers without disrupting their mobile trajectory surrounding his wife. His interference in Emma’s supreme moment of triumph, so jovially obtuse he has made transparent fools of them both, wounds her; all eyes suddenly drawn for a very different reason as she hurriedly exits the ballroom in disgrace. It does not take long for Emma to recognize her blissful impressions of their life together are simply that – impressions – and, never to be satisfied. Charles’ genial nature, his blind respect and adoration, that had so appealed to Emma when she was a country waif, are now the terms of a life sentence to be spent miserably buried in the pastoral enclave of Yonville. This is not such a bad prospect for most women. But it becomes a veritable death sentence for Emma Bovary, as Yonville’s citizenry and opportunities available to her pale to those she imagines to might have known in Paris.

Despite Charles’ token salary, he allows Emma to indulge in a lavish makeover of their modest home. The changes are presided over by a conniving moneylender, Lhereux (Frank Allenby) who, in time, will allow Emma’s greed to dig her family into an impossible debt. Alas, Emma is also after prestige for her husband’s humble profession. To this end, she makes devious inquiries as to a cure for the simple-minded servant, Hyppolite’s (Henry Morgan) clubbed foot. Mind you, Emma cares not for the cure, only the status such a daring operation could bring to her husband’s practice and, by extension, to the name of Bovary she now shares. The apothecary, J. Homais (Gene Lockhart) and the mayor, Tuvache (John Abbott) are in agreement that such a surgery, performed expertly, would put Yonville on the map. They treacherously conspire to convince the terrified Hyppolite to partake in this highly experimental operation without first gaining Charles’ confidence. Prudently, at the last possible moment, Charles retreats from making the biggest mistake of his life, instinctively realizing he cannot complete the surgery without permanently maiming his patient. While his refusal momentarily creates doubt about his skills amongst the townsfolk, it all but destroys Emma’s faith in him. From this moment on, Emma Bovary shall seek her distractions elsewhere, increasingly pursued by men of lesser character who report the means to satisfy her passions, though ultimately bring ill-repute to both her name and reputation.

The first of these is Leon Dupuis, a clerk in a law firm who overextends his modest salary to satisfy Emma’s longing for riches and excitement. At some point in their clandestine rendezvous, Leon’s mother (Gladys Cooper) encourages her son to end the affair. Leon is sent away to France to further his studies and advance his prospects. In his absence, Emma becomes entangled with suave sportsman, Rodolphe Boulanger, unquestionably, a man of means. Boulanger first met Emma at the ball. Now, he persists in reuniting for out of the way hunting jaunts, professing mad love until Emma reciprocates these affections. Confiding in Lhereux of this affair, Emma plots to leave Charles in the dead of night. Lhereux reasons Emma’s new love will be able to pay her debts. And Rodolphe has ensured Emma he has tipped the coachman to make an unscheduled stop in Yonville. He will be waiting for her in Paris. Alas, Emma discovers the cruel truth as she waits. The coachman pushes his team of horses hard as the carriage careens through the heart of Yonville without stopping. Humiliated and miserable, Emma returns to her husband’s home. While Charles is seemingly oblivious to his wife’s extramarital dalliances, the Bovary’s nanny, Félicité (Ellen Corby) sees and understands all. Increasingly, Félicité becomes disenchanted with the mistress of the house who is making a fool of its master, while all but neglecting the child they share. Indeed, from the moment of her birth, Berthe is a source of constant disappointment for Emma, a reminder of her failure to produce a male heir, unencumbered by the protocols and expectations inflicted on women that bind Emma begrudgingly to her duty to Charles.

Unable to reason the source of his wife’s melancholia, Charles offers to take Emma to Rouen on a holiday. The trip proves fortuitous when Charles and Emma are accidentally reunited with Leon at the opera. Despite their disparate ages, Emma is lovelier than ever and Leon, now sporting a moustache, gentleman’s cape and top hat, appears to be living a more aristocratic lifestyle. As Charles is called back to Yonville, Emma elects with his blessing to remain in Rouen for a few more days. Leon wastes no time in rekindling their amour. Alas, unbeknownst to Emma, Leon has wasted these years. Despite furthering his education, he remains a meager clerk, now in the employ of Monsieur DuBocage (George Zucco) who cruelly advises Leon to rid himself of this female distraction. In the meantime, Lhereux has reentered the picture, this time, to collect payment for the mounting debts he has incurred. Lhereux threatens to expose Emma’s clandestine trysts if she fails to come up with the money. He slyly suggests she deceive Charles by secretly gaining power of attorney over his late father’s estate, liquidating its assets and using the money to settle her creditor’s debts before Charles is any the wiser. Emma begrudgingly obliges, hurrying to Leon in the hopes DuBocage will handle the sale. But DuBocage is no fool and casually sets the matter aside. The property is therefore worthless to Emma. She cannot sell it.

Returning to Yonville in disgrace, Emma discovers her husband is out of town. In his absence, Lhereux has posted creditor’s notes all over town, announcing the auction of the personal effects of Charles Bovary to commence at once. As Lehereux has settled his debts with the auctioneer, Guillaumin (Henri Letondal) Emma now appeals to him for clemency. Knowing of her past, Guillaumin instead hints Emma may wish to ‘work off’ her debts by extending to him sexual favors. Repulsed by his insinuations, Emma retreats to the apothecary and without his knowledge, consumes a considerable amount of arsenic from his laboratory. Reentering her home already under the ill effects of the poison, Emma is confronted by an angry Charles who demands to know why their house is being repossessed. He quickly deduces something is terribly wrong. His suspicions are confirmed when Homais frantically arrives to reveal the source of Emma’s seemingly rootless malady. Hurrying his wife to bed and sending for a more experienced physician in the hopes to ply his craft to save her life, Charles is too late to spare Emma from suicide. With the blessing of the church, Emma quietly slips into a coma and dies as Charles looks on. In the final moments, we return to the court room with Flaubert still on trial, concluding his defense of Emma Bovary – not as a wanton, but a tragic figure of the ‘modern age’. An epitaph declares Flaubert was exonerated of the crime of moral indecency, his novel, long since considered an inspired piece of great literature.

Madame Bovary is an underrated masterpiece. Mayer had commissioned it more to reestablish MGM’s prestige. When it also managed to turn a tidy little profit, Mayer was pleasantly surprised. Moreover, the picture confirmed that Minnelli could be counted upon as a formidable talent capable of crossing genres. While Minnelli would always consider Madame Bovary the movie that profoundly reshaped his career, he could not entirely dismiss the epic hurdles endured while making it: one in particular – David O. Selznick. By 1949, Selznick’s reputation in Hollywood was on the downswing, thanks primarily to his overwrought – and over-budgeted – super-colossal western/drama, Duel in the Sun (1946), referred to by one critic as ‘Lust in the Dust’ and all but to have bankrupted Selznick’s chances to remain an independent in Hollywood. Selznick had wooed Jennifer Jones away from her marriage to actor, Robert Walker, as the next Mrs. Selznick, a move to become the brunt of cruel jokes that would eventually deny Jones her place among the truly great stars of her generation. Selznick’s overbearing star-making presence soured other studios from signing Jones to a long-term contract. After Jones’ Oscar-winning performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943) a decade’s worth of pretentious efforts followed, capped off by the leaden fairy tale, Portrait of Jennie (1948).

Despite Selznick’s constant meddling from afar, flooding Minnelli and producer, Pandro S. Berman with a barrage of memos how to ‘improve’ upon their efforts (virtually all of his suggestions ignored), Minnelli nevertheless managed to get the most credible performance out of Jennifer Jones since The Song of Bernadette. Jones’ sense of self, often distilled through Selznick’s rubric as an elegant clotheshorse, is fittingly reshaped by Minnelli as the epitome of Flaubert’s superficial and preening ‘heroine’.  There are moments imbedded in Jones’ performance where she completely disappears into the part. Her most outstanding scenes play near the end of the picture when her alter ego’s nerve is at low ebb. Herein, Jones emanates the sad-eyed fragility of a woman worn to the bone by the disillusionment of another promised, though failed life thoroughly wasted in spite of every reason she once had to be supremely happy. Art imitating life? Perhaps. Jones plays the outcome of this revelation with absolute surrender. Emma’s greed is beaten into submission, its maleficence captured in a glazed over stare. While no one could confuse many of Jones’ prior and subsequent career choices as evolving her craft, at least with Madame Bovary she stemmed the tide of decline and half-hearted, cheap seat chuckles from the more artsy critics. It is Jones’ performance that sustains and occasionally nourishes the picture, giving it stamina and scope as a compelling – even lasting – adaptation of Flaubert’s masterwork.

That Madame Bovary is rarely listed among the truly outstanding literary classics is a tragedy in and of itself, particularly since audience response to the picture in its own time was uniformly very enthusiastic. Robert Ardrey’s screenplay is a miracle of concision, omitting virtually every incident from Flaubert’s novel in which our heroine does not figure directly. Minnelli’s direction telescopes the essence of Flaubert’s epic tragedy into a cinematic language all its own. Part of the collective amnesia that continues to afflict the picture’s reputation today may stem from the fact that even in its own time, Madame Bovary came at the tail end of Metro’s cycle in period costume dramas. While the studio would make – and remake – more costume dramas throughout the 1950's, the pull and push of these was decidedly toward glossy Technicolor swashbucklers and adventure/dramas rather than philosophical tomes about dire and self-serving cruelties inflicted upon the human spirit.  Minnelli’s approach to Madame Bovary is tinged with an ominous strain of self-delusion. Having offered a plausible defense for Emma Bovary’s despicable behaviors, Minnelli manages a wholly unanticipated and thoroughly unsettling empathy for her otherwise diseased and unforgivable madness.

This effect is amplified most effectively by Van Heflin’s superb performance that gives credence and a certain careworn dignity to Charles Bovary’s ever-understanding of his wife’s destructive nature. Charles can forgive Emma virtually anything. Yet, he is not a weak man. Minnelli and Heflin never allow the audience to confuse the character’s own virtues, his awkwardness and kindness with that oft played-out ineffectual strain of usurped masculinity.  Instead, Heflin emanates a quiet rectitude, nobler because it is repeated tested, yet never broken. Charles Bovary does not tolerate his wife’s behavior so much as he sympathizes with the afflictions of her mind that continually sabotage their chances at marital happiness. And yet, his empathy never devolves into pity.  As for the rest of the cast: Louis Jourdan offers yet another variation on the cultured cad he would continue to be typecast as until Gigi (1958). The rest of the supporting players are uniformly solid and memorable. The best of the lot is the virtually forgotten Frank Allenby. His Lhereux a delicious variation a la George Sanders cool, calculating and decidedly up to no good. In the final analysis, Madame Bovary is an exquisitely heartrending masterpiece in which Vincente Minnelli’s formidable skills are brought to bear against the statesmanlike craftsmanship of Metro’s celluloid homages to great literature.

The Warner Archive has finally come around to a Blu-ray release for Madame Bovary and it has been well worth the wait. This new-to-Blu sports exceptionally nuanced gray scale tonality, in addition to exquisite amounts of fine detail and a light smattering of film grain looking very indigenous to its source, newly scanned in from original elements in 4K.  Robert H. Planck’s glorious B&W photography looks immaculate. Age-related artifacts have been eradicated. This is a smooth, film-like and visually arresting presentation, sure to please. The DTS 2.0 mono offers exceptionally nuanced dialogue, music and effects. WAC has once again given short-shrift to extras. A 1949 promo reel for ‘some of the best’ and a Warner Bros. cartoon, plus movie trailer are all we get. Bottom line: Madame Bovary is a skillfully told, A-list MGM classic, afforded much finesse and style by Minnelli’s enterprising skill. A great film has been given a great Blu-ray remastering effort. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

2