3 Minnelli (1949): Hollywood Rediscovers Emma

It was in Hollywood, California, during an era that was characterized, not by an economic depression and an attendant pessimism but by an ebullient, post-war optimism, that Vincente Minnelli decided to try his hand at adapting Flaubert’s “scandalous” novel of 1857. Like Renoir, Minnelli accepted without hesitation when a producer (in this case Pandro Berman) phoned to ask him if he’d be interested in the project. Having experienced a year of inactivity that coincided with a fallow period for MGM, as Hollywood Studios struggled to find their niche in a country that had just been introduced to the marvels of television, Minnelli was eager to get back to work, and he knew Flaubert’s novel and liked it (Minnelli 201). He was not the first director to bring Emma to Tinseltown. That distinction, as we have seen, went to Albert Ray who, in 1932, had made Unholy Love, a film based loosely on the novel. Nor was Minnelli the first filmmaker after Renoir to adapt the novel to the screen. In the fifteen years that separate Renoir’s version from Minnelli’s, two other adaptations were released: the first, in 1937, was a German production directed by Gerhard Lamprecht and starring an actress of silent screen fame, Pola Negri; the second, just ten years later, was an Argentine version directed by Carlos Schlieper. However, there is one distinction that belongs to Minnelli alone, that of having brought Madame Bovary—or rather, a sanitized version thereof—to the American film-going public in a major Hollywood production that won critical acclaim and achieved a box-office 70 Madame Bovary at the Movies success.1 Nominated for an Academy Award for best set decoration, Minnelli’s adaptation has not however been spared sharp criticism from film scholars familiar with the novel and from literary critics, who decry the considerable liberties the director took with Flaubert’s masterpiece. Robert Stam encapsulates the principal objections to the film as follows:

Minnelli “mines” the novel, as it were, not only for possible production numbers but also for potential melodramatic and spectacular scenes. [...] On every register, Minnelli cultivates an aesthetic of crescendo and excess, in contradiction [...] with a dedramatized “novel about nothing,” but effective in terms of mainstream entertainment norms. (Literature 173)

Among the episodes “amplified” by Minnelli, the Vaubyessard Ball is the most famous. Indeed, the waltzing scene, filmed with gleeful disregard for the 180-degree rule, is still shown in film classes today, and scholars’ continuing discussion of this adaptation testifies abundantly to its importance. Clearly, Minnelli’s Bovary, filmed by an audacious director who was truly master of his craft, provides an exemplary illustration of 1940s Hollywood style. However, this film was shaped not only by the filmmaker’s boldness and his taste for melodrama but also by a certain subservience, perhaps more feigned than real. In order to understand the film’s principal characteristics, some familiarity with the director’s life and some knowledge of the socio-historical context in which the film was made are essential. First, the director. Prior to his career in cinema, Vincente Minnelli (1910-1986) had worked at the Chicago department store Marshall Fields as a display artist.2 He subsequently became involved in theater as a costume designer, working for a time at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Not until 1940 did he move from theater to film, signing on with Metro Goldwyn Mayer at the invitation of producer Arthur Freed. In 1944, he directed Judy Garland in the nostalgic musical Meet Me in Saint-Louis, a film that—ostensibly, at least—celebrates family values and traditional morality. During the

1 In his Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Stephen Harvey tells us that U.S. returns were estimated to be $2,000,000 by the end of 1949 (the film opened in August), a very respectable box office performance. 2 Minnelli lied often about his age, and for this reason, scholars disagree about the date of his birth. However, the most authoritative sources (e.g. A Biographical Dictionary of Film) list 1910.