Song of Bernadette
(1943) Jennifer Jones got her official introduction to movie audiences in 1943 as St. Bernadette Soubirous. She landed the Oscar for this “debut” (she had acted in small parts under her real name Phylis Isley). Jones won partially for this hit’s strong religious punch and partially for her breathy-voiced freshness (a mode Marilyn Monroe appears to have imitated), as well as a new naturalism akin to what Ingrid Bergman brought to the screen.
Bernadette was the backward, asthmatic Pyrenees girl of the mid-1800s whose visions of the Virgin Mary in some barren rocks close to a public dumping site put Lourdes on the map. “For those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible,” says the film’s introduction. Yet atheists get more than a few bones thrown to them. Vincent Price plays a jesting Pilate of a prosecutor, always shown with some hell-like flames flickering around him. Price proves the real purpose of a good villain: not to give the audience someone to hiss at but rather to provide counterpoint, to expand a story by providing a different perspective to consider.
Henry King’s film has a very rough hide on it at times. There’s realism in the crowded, dungeonlike lair of the Soubirous family; Bernadette’s father, played by Group Theater vet Roman Bohnen, is a day laborer. Take that with moments of the frail girl clawing at the spot where the spring will arise and rubbing mud on her face and note the authentically bleak convent scenes at the end—note also the film’s insistence that the granting of a vision of heaven can leave a person in a hell on Earth. In short, if Song of Bernadette isn’t Robert Bresson, it’s quite far down the road to Bresson.
Today, as seen in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lourdes is a Catholic Disneyland with more hotels than any place in France outside Paris. One bears this in mind when being quite touched with the kitschy holiness of an uncredited Linda Darnell as the glowing Virgin. Many weep also at similar kitsch in The Wizard of Oz, so the faithless get a pass. For those who do not believe in movies, no explanation is possible.
Madame Bovary
(1949) In muddy 1800s Normandy, Emma (Jones), a farmer’s daughter, meets a clumsy village doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin). She marries him, is bored to tears and gets tangled up in romantic intrigues, first with a student (Christopher Kent), then with a local playboy, Rodolphe (Louis Jourdan). Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation is memorable for its waltz sequence—the happiest night in Emma’s life—which is worthy of Max Ophuls, with whirling camera work spinning out of control into a fiesta of broken glass. The gowns were created by Walter Plunkett, the same costumer as Gone With the Wind. Composer Miklos Rozsa’s tendency to musical hysteria is, for once, just right in this sequence.
As Emma, Jones is lovely, girlish, plaintive and slightly cold: the perfect image of our heroine. The film’s biggest problem: it’s produced like an MGM classic, a post-romantic movie made in a romantic style. To please the censors, Minnelli stresses the prophylactic view of the tale: it’s bracketed with sequences of James Mason playing Gustave Flaubert undergoing his trial for obscenity. One can imagine that Emma’s discontent was reflected all over America as the suburbs—often raw, treeless and remote—were being settled in the late 1940s by returning GI’s and their wives. When Emma says that her doctor husband must be used to rooms that smell of “sour milk and children’s vomit,” that’s also not the kind of language one heard onscreen in 1949. Something like a feminist consciousness is stirring in this movie, as in Jones’ most touching moment, when Emma weeps over her daughter’s birth, despairing over another girl who will grow up to be another trapped woman.
Jan. 11–12: Song at 7:30pm, Bovary at 5:25 and 10:20pm
