Madame Bovary (1949)

I hadn't intended to do posts on two late-1940s literary adaptations in such close proximity following the airing of the British Anna Karenina the other day. But I only realized last night, not having looked closely enough at the TCM schedule, that the 1949 version of Madame Bovary is on tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. So I made it a point of watching it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with an establishing story. Gustave Flaubert (James Mason) wrote the novel Madame Bovary in 1856, and the publication of the novel caused a scandal in France, at that time ruled by Napoleon III. Flaubert was put on trial for indecency, where he claimed that the Madame Bovary he was writing about was just the face for a real type of woman in French society. He proceeds to narrate that story....

Flash back to the early life of Emma (Jennifer Jones) before she met Bovary. She went to a convent school that she hated, and realized she wanted the better things in life. But when she grows up and leaves the school, she winds up in the provincial town of Yonville. One day, the town's new doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) shows up, and he immediately falls in love with Emma. She must think that a doctor will command a good salary, because she marries Charles.

As you can guess from everything that's happened up to this point, Emma and Charles don't live happily ever after. Charles is very much provincial, and thinks he's not particularly a good doctor, so the family isn't well to do. Emma meets the boy next door, Léon Dupuis (Alf Kjellin who was credited as Christopher Kent because MGM must have thought American audiences wouldn't be able to pronounce Kjellin), who is hoping to become a lawyer, a profession which will definitely be for financially rewarding than what Charles is bringing in. By now, Emma is already starting to rack up debts to keep a better lifestyle than Charles can provide her.

The doctor and Emma get invited to a society party in the nearest big city of Rouen, which is where they meet Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). Emma decides he's going to be her lover now that Dupuis has gone off to Paris and Boulange can dance with her the way that Charles definitely can't. Charles is understandably pissed when he sees what his wife's actions are doing to his reputation, but he's powerless to stop it. Emma goes into more debt in order that she may run off to Italy with Boulanger. But Boulanger plays a trick on Emma in that he leaves beforehand so on the appointed night they're supposed to go off together, he's already jilted her.

And now those debts are about to start catching up with her. L'hereux (Frank Allenby) had been lending Emma the money she needed, but he needs money himself, so he sells off the notes to another man who is going to sue if he can't collect. By this time, Emma and Charles have run into Dupuis again, now in Rouen, so Emma thinks she can go back to him to get him to pay off the debts. She doesn't realize that he's still not a lawyer at all, and there's no way he's going to be able to pay off those debts. What options does Emma have left?

Madame Bovary is an example of the sort of film that it was perfect for MGM to make, the period literary drama. MGM always had high production values and a sort of glitter that didn't work for certain genres of movies, as I've mentioned with Johnny Eager or East Side, West Side in the past. But, here, that sort of gloss is exactly what the movie needs in trying to show Emma's living above her means, especially, for example, with the ball where she meets Boulanger. She's wearing a fabulous gown/shawl combination, and there's something about Jourdan and Jones dancing together that looks surprisingly glamorous.

As for the acting, I'm not terribly enamored of the job that Jennifer Jones did, but I though Van Heflin was quite good as the country doctor who sinks into the bottle as the realization begins to dawn on him that he's got a wife he can't support in the way he wants. The supporting roles are handled well enough, although most of them are also relatively small.

I couldn't find a DVD release of Madame Bovary, which is a big surprise, since it was released by MGM, and as a prestige picture, should have been a prime candidate for either a standalone Warner Archive DVD or as part of a box set. It does, however, seem to be on a bunch of streaming services if you can do the streaming thing.