Jones takes lovers Louis Jourdan and Alf Kjellin and runs up bills that put Heflin into financial disaster. In the novel he does the operation and it ends in disaster all around. In fact in the film he refuses to perform an operation that might gain him fame and success because he knows he's not qualified to do it. In the novel he's as much desiring of social climbing as Jones is.

Here he's an upright guy, a lot on the dull side, but dependable. It's in Heflin's character that the Code watered down what Flaubert was trying to say. She marries solid, dependable Van Heflin who's a doctor and who she hopes will give her a better life. She lives in a pretty dull town in Normandy which was also where Flaubert himself hailed from and which he satirizes in acid in this work.

She reads a whole lot of romantic novels who give her exaggerated notions about the nature of love. Jennifer Jones is Emma and imagine Bernadette Soubirous who instead of having a divine experience has the misfortune to have other things peak her interest as an adolescent. While on the witness stand defending his work, he tells the story of his creation Emma Bovary, a girl with silly romantic notions who brings tragedy all around because of them. James Mason plays Gustave Flaubert and the film opens with him on trial for authoring indecent material as the French censors of the day saw Madame Bovary. MGM's version incorporates the author right into his story. Jennifer Jones, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan, and James Mason were unfortunately hampered by the Code in this version. Though I'm sure that the various French dramatizations of Madame Bovary are probably superior to this film, this English language version that MGM did in 1949 is as good as any we would have gotten from Hollywood.

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