Masterpiece of Melodrama
This week’s special showing of Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 Madame Bovary at
Film Forum comes close to the 107th anniversary of his birth (Feb.
28)—an event that should matter to every devotee of American movies.
It’s time that Minnelli’s expertise of the melodrama be as widely
acknowledged as his mastery with the movie musical.
Also
timed for this reassessment is Warner Archive Collection’s first-time
DVD issue of three Minnelli melodramas: The Reluctant Debutante (1958),
Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) and the great Tea and Sympathy (1956).
Despite the conventional prejudice against Hollywood melodrama as an
inferior form, Minnelli showed how tasteful, subtle and complex movie
melodrama could be—usually through his expressive compositions and
visual textures.
Madame Bovary makes
this argument special by subjecting a literary masterpiece to a fully
imagined Hollywood adaptation. He finds precise images for Flaubert’s
prose that are also expressive of his own artistic sensibility. The
ballroom sequence illustrates Minnelli’s command of movement within
screen space. The swirling camera and mounting, vertiginous hysteria
keep pace with Emma’s spiraling ambition (played by Jennifer Jones at
the beginning of her most lush period).
After
Madame Bovary, Minnelli
went on to refine his dramatic temperament and visual form in such
original ways that even his adaptation of Robert Anderson’s
forward-thinking Broadway hit Tea and Sympathy, about
socially-assigned sex roles, no longer seems like a stage play; it has
the power and beauty of a personal vision. It complements all the
signifiers of Minnelli’s auteurship that can be found throughout his
career. His later films—Tea and Sympathy’s radical social ideas, The
Reluctant Debutante and Two Weeks in Another Town’s sumptuous
imagery—all tell infectious stories through incomparable, trademark
visual rhyme and color coordination.
Minnelli’s
audacious gambit to cast James Mason as Flaubert, delivering the famous
“Madame Bovary, c’est moi” line, perfectly suits a Hollywood
professional who was more than a mere adaptor but whose private feeling
suffused his imagery; he was among its most sincere creators of
astonishments.
>>
Madame Bovary
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
At Film Forum 7pm, March 8 only