Very well executed

Good idea lost in the noise

Brilliant and touching

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

I loved this movie! I wasn't really expecting to, since I'd seen the 2014 remake and was highly disappointed by the story and characters. In that version, the title character was incredibly unlikable and without motivation, her husband was unsympathetic, and her lover wasn't convincing. The 1949 version was fantastic! If you've never seen a film adaptation of the classic story, start with this one.Jennifer Jones is raised in a convent and pins all her hopes and dreams on getting married when she grows up. She reads romantic novels and believes she'll feel alive, wild, and sensational once she falls in love and gets married. This early portion of her life is very important to the story, because it sets up her character's motivations for the rest of the film. Plus, it's wonderful to see Jennifer transition from wide-eyed innocence to disappointment and maturity.When Jennifer falls in love with Van Heflin, she truly believes her life will follow the storybooks she read as a child. Instead of spoiled, immature, and bored-as she might have seemed if the beginning sequence was left out-Jennifer is heartbroken and dissolutioned with everything she every believed in. Then, when she meets the handsome cad Louis Jourdan, she thinks she'll find the passion she craves. . .I love Jennifer Jones and think she's a very fine actress; Madame Bovary is a classic Jennifer Jones vehicle. She's sweet and beautiful, easily influenced, can cry at the drop of a hat, and no matter what her character has done through the course of the film, you can't help but feel sorry for her and love her unconditionally. I don't usually love Van Heflin, but in this movie, I was almost reduced to tears by his performance. Robert Audrey wrote a wonderful script and made Van's character incredibly heart-wrenching. And when he's up against Louis Jourdan, it's important to have a strong foundation so the audience can understand Jennifer's conflict.Madame Bovary is a beautiful classic, full of intricate set designs and breathtakingly gorgeous costumes. Walter Plunkett and Valles were ignored by the Academy, though, and I have no idea why, since Jennifer's gowns are just as beautiful as those Walter designed for Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. I highly recommend watching this glamourous drama. You'll get to see beautiful people in beautiful clothes, narrated by James Mason's incredible voice. What else do you need?DLM warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. There's a scene where Jennifer is at a ball and when she dances, the camera spins. It will probably make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"

Jennifer Jones was a star I knew well from visits to the cinema with my family during the 1950's: "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", "The Barretts of Whimpole Street", "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" and "A Farewell to Arms".I cut in on her at a certain stage in her career. She was a bit older than my mum, and although I liked her she didn't have the effect on a prepubescent lad that Yvette Mimieux or Tuesday Weld were having.It wasn't until later, when we got television, that I saw the movies she made earlier in her career; "Song of Bernadette, "Duel in the Sun", "Portrait of Jennie", "Carrie" and this one: Vincente Minnelli's "Madame Bovary". What an absolute stunner she was.Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones) is the beautiful daughter of a poor French family, but she has an overactive imagination fostered by romantic novels.She marries a country doctor Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) who she doesn't really love hoping to advance her standing in society and pursue her romantic dreams. However she soon outspends her husband's capacity to earn. In an era before credit cards, she maxes-out on credit notes.Emma attracts men like moths to a flame, and cheats on her husband who still loves her despite everything. There are tears before the final fade out.The film is bookended with the trial of Gustave Flaubert who wrote the original novel. Apparently the story so outraged the French hierarchy that they took old Gustave to court. He got off and of course the book became a bestseller.The filmmakers used the trial to allow Gustave (James Mason) to narrate the story - quoting passages of Flaubert's prose. Although narration can be a lazy device in film, in this case, Mason's mellifluous voice puts us in the picture quickly. More importantly, Emma is seen sympathetically despite being hopelessly self-focused.Two actors added the final touch of class to the 1949 version. Van Heflin is such a nice guy here that we are waiting for someone to smack Emma to her senses. Louis Jordan gives another variation on that smooth roué he played in "Letter to an Unknown Woman" - a not dissimilar drama.Composer Miklos Rozsa surpassed himself with the score. With its beautiful main theme for Emma and flowing melodies it sweeps you along.A 2014 version did away with narration. It's more low-key, but quite good with a totally different vibe to the Minnelli version. It was filmed in France and is more explicit with a fair bit of nudity. Jennifer Jones was fortunate that her movie career was in an era where she didn't have to worry about getting in shape for that kind of thing.

Vincente Minelli's Madame Bovary does whatever a studio film can do, of the period, to make a book like Flaubert's into a more than competent production. And it does work out for Minelli as one of his better films that his Madame Bovary is a tale that tries to get us to understand, though likely not to sympathize, with its (anti) heroine who cheats on her loving husband and sells out his home from under his nose, only to do himself in in the end. It's pretty bleak stuff, but there's an air of exhilaration to it, like a fresh Lifetime TV movie that hasn't yet been over-dampened with the conventions that plague it, and has a grace and daring to it as well. It might strike some as a little much that Minelli book-ends the picture with the trial of Flaubert as it should have nothing to do with the story itself. But, there is that attempt, that try at getting the readers of its time to get a grasp on disillusionment in marriage, which is something that is instantly recognizable, and to make compelling literature and to never have it silenced. It's even adiramble in post WW2 America to make a point via a French novel how marriages can go wrong. That's not all there is, of course, as countless English classes have taught us with the book.It goes without saying the book is far richer and with more emotional depth in the descriptions that go into Flaubert's writing. But it should be said that Jennifer Jones is also the best Bovary that has yet been brought to the screen, a woman who is very, very hard to like at all for what she does, particularly to an everyman. Albeit, arguably, a very plain and average guy like her husband doctor who doesn't want anything more than to do his duty and go through the daily grind. Jones makes her in a small way sympathetic, something to her presence has her poised as a tragic figure, hard to pinpoint but not easy to grasp either. You want to hate her as the film rolls along through its second half, as she becomes more desperate and more and more indebted to a world of men who have come to hate her too. But her desperation, in a way, makes her all the more human, less entranced by the ultimately foolish ideals of her storybook romances and grounded to a halt with reality.Flaubert doesn't give us the easy route of making it a statement of blame- which might set it apart from what would be a "Lifetime" movie of the present. Jones is terrific in the part, wavering between being a bad mother (the baby always cries in her presence), a neflectful wife (when is she home?), and a sour of a mistress (keeps that Italian waiting for years, what the hell?) And it's pulled off quite nicely from her. Credit where it's due to to Minelli, who constructs that ballroom sequence that spins and spins like the perpetual loop from that superimposed shot from Shadow of a Doubt; it's one of his true virtuoso sequences, a high-wire act done all for the sake of enlivening and critically molding the mood of Emma Bovary, a woman who can be taken away by the exuberance of escapism, ignorant of what she's really getting into in the midst of a plastic sort of world. There's a lot to be read into the source itself (just see the arguments thrown around in the book club scene in Little Children). The movie, however, is an exquisite time capsule where it's given an intro like with a new book edition, but with its own space and freedom to succeed on its own terms.

"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.