Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, posited four types of personalities: the sensation type, the feeling type, the thinking type, and the intuitive type. Now, your typical sensation type (lecturer points to portrait of Madame Bovary) lives for the moment, switches allegiances on impulse, luxuriates in the indulgence of her sensory apparatus, cannot be depended upon, and is insensitive to the feelings of others except as they affect her. We may forgive a sensation type, but are we really supposed to like her? Says who? That's kind of how I felt about this story. I'd heard as a youngster that this was supposed to be a sexy novel. It was known as "Madame Ovary." So I struggled through it but it seemed boring. Maybe in French there were grace notes in the prose, absent from the English translation. But I really don't know how anything could have saved this from being a weeper.
The viewer gets the general idea quickly enough because the narrator, James Mason, gives it to us right off the bat. The young, poor Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones)is suffering an acute case of "Bovarism." She lives in a world of romantic fantasy, a kind of Ruritania of the mind, with dashing knights and love in Swiss chalets. Her walls are plastered with illustrations from fairy tales. And she never outgrows this world of make-believe.
She doesn't have enough insight to know that marrying the devoted but dull village doctor (Van Heflin, in a good, bumbling performance)is not the answer. She attributes her dissatisfaction to her need for a child, a boy. She eventually has her child, but it's a girl and the girl rejects her in favor of her husband and her housekeeper.
And who wouldn't reject Emma? Half the time she's hysterical, and the other half she's about to become hysterical. Anyway, the next thing you know, Emma has taken up with the local clerk and, when he's booted over to Rouen by his domineering mother, she takes up with the handsome, dashing, narcissistic, rich Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jordan). She decorates poor Doctor Bovary's house in expensive fabrics and furniture, borrowing secretly from a stone-faced usurer who will in the end bring her and her family down by selling the notes, which means bankruptcy for the Bovarys. She throws herself at the feet of an erstwhile lover and begs for money. "I haven't got it," he says, and throws her out. In an excess of self-pity (I didn't notice much in the way of guilt) she eats some arsenic and is called away to answer to a higher collection agency.
The movie has one or two neat set pieces, directed by Vincent Minelli. There's the scene at the first ball to which the Bovarys are invited, the ball at which Emma first dances with Rodolphe and the awkward, anxious husband gets drunk. I'm not much for balls. Everybody gets dressed up and dances in circles. "I don't know how to waltz," Emma tells Rodolphe. Well, Emma, neither does anyone else now. In a college class I was trying to get across the notion of dialectics and asked for a volunteer from the audience to help me demonstrate the waltz step. No volunteers because nobody knew how to waltz -- or what a waltz was, for that matter.
Minelli sets up this ball, though, so that it's not nearly as boring as most. The guys are boozing it up, the women look gorgeous in their elaborate Walter Plunkett gowns, and when one of the ladies feels dizzy from dancing, the host orders attendants to bash out the windows. There is also a wild wedding scene that might have come from Pieter Bruegel or maybe Sam Pekinpah's "Ride the High Country."
Jennifer Jones is Emma with a breathless lisp. Van Heflin is nearly perfect as the humble, inarticulate doctor. (Doctors in the 1850s weren't as high in the status-sphere as they are today. If they had been, Emma would have been not only foolish to betray her husband but downright loco.) This role must have stereotyped Louis Jordan because he seemed to play little but the same pavonine French lover in film after film.
However, although I may not have gotten very much out of it, others might. I haven't looked at the user's ratings but I'd be mildly surprised if women didn't give it a higher score than men. Sensation types of either gender are likely to switch channels before it's over.
The viewer gets the general idea quickly enough because the narrator, James Mason, gives it to us right off the bat. The young, poor Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones)is suffering an acute case of "Bovarism." She lives in a world of romantic fantasy, a kind of Ruritania of the mind, with dashing knights and love in Swiss chalets. Her walls are plastered with illustrations from fairy tales. And she never outgrows this world of make-believe.
She doesn't have enough insight to know that marrying the devoted but dull village doctor (Van Heflin, in a good, bumbling performance)is not the answer. She attributes her dissatisfaction to her need for a child, a boy. She eventually has her child, but it's a girl and the girl rejects her in favor of her husband and her housekeeper.
And who wouldn't reject Emma? Half the time she's hysterical, and the other half she's about to become hysterical. Anyway, the next thing you know, Emma has taken up with the local clerk and, when he's booted over to Rouen by his domineering mother, she takes up with the handsome, dashing, narcissistic, rich Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jordan). She decorates poor Doctor Bovary's house in expensive fabrics and furniture, borrowing secretly from a stone-faced usurer who will in the end bring her and her family down by selling the notes, which means bankruptcy for the Bovarys. She throws herself at the feet of an erstwhile lover and begs for money. "I haven't got it," he says, and throws her out. In an excess of self-pity (I didn't notice much in the way of guilt) she eats some arsenic and is called away to answer to a higher collection agency.
The movie has one or two neat set pieces, directed by Vincent Minelli. There's the scene at the first ball to which the Bovarys are invited, the ball at which Emma first dances with Rodolphe and the awkward, anxious husband gets drunk. I'm not much for balls. Everybody gets dressed up and dances in circles. "I don't know how to waltz," Emma tells Rodolphe. Well, Emma, neither does anyone else now. In a college class I was trying to get across the notion of dialectics and asked for a volunteer from the audience to help me demonstrate the waltz step. No volunteers because nobody knew how to waltz -- or what a waltz was, for that matter.
Minelli sets up this ball, though, so that it's not nearly as boring as most. The guys are boozing it up, the women look gorgeous in their elaborate Walter Plunkett gowns, and when one of the ladies feels dizzy from dancing, the host orders attendants to bash out the windows. There is also a wild wedding scene that might have come from Pieter Bruegel or maybe Sam Pekinpah's "Ride the High Country."
Jennifer Jones is Emma with a breathless lisp. Van Heflin is nearly perfect as the humble, inarticulate doctor. (Doctors in the 1850s weren't as high in the status-sphere as they are today. If they had been, Emma would have been not only foolish to betray her husband but downright loco.) This role must have stereotyped Louis Jordan because he seemed to play little but the same pavonine French lover in film after film.
However, although I may not have gotten very much out of it, others might. I haven't looked at the user's ratings but I'd be mildly surprised if women didn't give it a higher score than men. Sensation types of either gender are likely to switch channels before it's over.