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Flaubert himself (James Mason) has to defend a heroine accused of being "a disgrace to France and an insult to womanhood," his courtroom narration visualizes the novel with an extra reflexive wrinkle. (The discarded hat in the woods during her illicit liaison supplies "the censor's filthy synecdoche," as Beckett would have it.) Emma (Jennifer Jones) "the flower beyond the dunghill," the farm girl who presents herself with a white gown in a rustic kitchen for the local doctor (Van Heflin). Romantic novels in the convent, a private shrine of storybook pages, a most nervous Cinderella. The sensible clod she marries is tasked with being Prince Charming and fails, she looks elsewhere—the clerk moonlighting as a dandy (Alf Kjellin) and the aristocratic rake (Louis Jourdan) ultimately frightened by her abandon. "You asked for something that consumes while it burns, that destroys everything it touches. I don't want to be destroyed." Not the author's clinical detachment for Vincente Minnelli, his is the ardent camera plugged into the protagonist's intoxication and degradation amid provincial conformity. His Emma is recognizably the young dreamers of Yolanda and the Thief and The Pirate (and, later, Gigi), finally at home at the grand ball where her swirling fantasy matches the accelerating throb of Miklós Rózsa's neurotic waltz. (Windows smashed to keep her from fainting cap the magnificent sequence.) A matter of mirrors, the ornate one that embodies the picturesque ideal and the cracked one that exposes the shabby reality, Emma towards the end peers into one as she applies blush to the haggard visage. Vindication of "the monstrous creation," elegy for "images of beauty that never existed." Vidor is concurrent with his own unofficial telling, Beyond the Forest. With Gene Lockhart, Frank Allenby, Gladys Cooper, John Abbott, Harry Morgan, George Zucco, Ellen Corby, Eduard Franz, Henri Letondal, and Paul Cavanagh. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |