tomsview 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.

FilmCriticLalitRao It is an undeniable fact that French writer Gustave Flaubert's classic "Madame Bovary" is very much a French work of art.This is the reason why acclaimed French directors Jean Renoir and Claude Chabrol have filmed their own versions of this classic tale which not only focuses on adultery but also gives a very vivid and accurate description of peasant life during eighteenth century France.However, American director Vincente Minelli's version is very much different from these Gallic versions as it is quite down to earth with an elusive American touch to it.This is something which makes it very much universal in its appeal and reach.It is really pure joy to see acclaimed American actors Ms. Jennifer Jones and Mr.Van Heflin playing their main roles as Emma Bovary and Charles Bovary.However,James Mason can be touted as this film's absolute real star for his marvelous performance as French writer Gustave Flaubert.It is he who carries the film on his shoulders by making viewers empathize with Emma Bovary's hapless plight.He is one of the primary keys to suggest that his work "Madame Bovary" is a work of our modern times to know how one should view male/female relationships especially relationships which are the cornerstone of all married people's relationships.

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

MisterWhiplash 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.