Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

MADAME BOVARY (1949)

Emma Bovary’s journey from page to screen is surprisingly well-traveled considering all the difficulties. Madame’s personality fascinates & appalls in the Flaubert novel, but can seem little more than coarse & stupidly willful when acted out. (It might work better as ballet, opera or silent film.) In numerous dramatizations, her appeal (to us and for the characters in the story) seems arbitrary, there simply to move the tragic plot. That said, this posh M-G-M version works better than most, with unmissable set pieces, including an astonishment of a ball sequence set to a terrifying La Valse by composer Miklós Rózsa. The film was a major step for director Vincente Minnelli, moving him up to first-class dramatic vehicles alongside the famous musicals. Yet it’s that very musical experience that technically grounds his audacious waltz sequence. Robert Ardrey’s script is cleverly (if a little too conveniently) structured around the indecency case Flaubert (a world-weary James Mason) won for his book. While as the ruinous lady, Jennifer Jones makes rare good use of her sickly neurotic beauty (slightly corrupt from every angle) as she urges husband (Van Heflin) and lovers (Louis Jourdan, Kent Montgomery - aka Alf Kjellin) down various paths of moral & financial destruction. Reduced to a cautionary tale, the film may be Bovary-Lite, but compelling within its limited terms.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The DVD comes with an entirely inappropriate, but hilarious Tex Avery DROOPY cartoon, loaded with far-out metaphysical gags and a tea-drinking fox who talks like Ronald Colman. Hopefully, it wasn’t shown at the feature’s theatrical engagements.

DOUBLE-BILL: Max Ophüls' entirely successful LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN/’48, has many similar elements (including M. Jourdan) and a story that translates beautifully to the screen.

No comments: