The New Pictures

Madame Bovary (M-G-M), when the novel was first published in France in 1856, created a major scandal. Haled into court, Author Gustave Flaubert was charged with defaming French womanhood and corrupting the public morals. The Hollywood version, by framing the story within the court proceedings against Flaubert, has neatly combined fact with fiction to produce a fascinating close-up of provincial manners & morals in igth Century France. By the same device it deftly short-circuits the Johnston office, incorporating its apologia into its action.

According to the testimony of Gustave Flaubert (James Mason), Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones) was by temperament more sybarite than sinner. Corrupted by her early reading of "lush "romances, she developed a love of fine clothes and luxurious emotions which her life as a peasant's daughter did little to satisfy. Her difference from other women lay not in her tastes and temptations, but in her ruthless talent for translating them into fact.

Neither marriage nor motherhood could save her. In her husband (Van Heflin), a dull-witted country doctor, Emma discovers an ideal cuckold. Thereafter her course is clear: the well-beaten path from boredom to eroticism to ruin. When she learns at last that her lovers--a handsome philandering landowner (Louis Jourdan) and a petty law clerk (Christopher Kent) --are only men of clay, when she has lost the love of her child and squandered the family fortune, Emma takes the bitter way out: arsenic, agony and death.

Much to their credit Producer Pandro Berman and Director Vincente Minelli have stoutly refused to spice up the sin or gloss over the grimness of Emma's life. Instead, at a leisurely and often-lagging pace they have pried into every nook & cranny of Emma's avid, neurotic soul and the drab existence that nourished it. The handling of bumbling peasants and pompous tradesmen has an acid authority. One memorable scene--a whirling, overheated ball at a local chateau--is a wonderfully skillful projection of Emma's half-swooning sense of her own seductiveness.

Backing the handsome production values are several fine performances--notably those by Jennifer Jones, Heflin and Jourdan. Miss Jones, in her best picture to date, manipulates Emma's moods and caprices with sensitive dexterity. Hardly ever out of sight of the camera, she gives a performance that is hardly ever out of focus, a feat that even the finicky Flaubert could admire.

Anna Lucasta (Security Pictures; Columbia) suffers from a piece of inspired miscasting. Originally written by Philip Yordan as the story of a Pennsylvania Polish family, the play became a resounding Broadway hit five years ago after it had been adapted for an all-Negro cast by Producer Harry Wagstaff Gribble. The part of Anna, a generous, warmhearted girl gone wrong, was played by Hilda Simms, a talented actress with a superbly natural stage presence. The movie, not illogically, was based on the first script, with Yordan as producer. But Anna's earthy role was turned over to Paulette Goddard, a skin-deep beauty whose chief acting prop is a flirtatious wink.

Until Miss Goddard arrives on the scene, the picture is almost as good as the play. The Lucastas, with their beat-up family jalopy, their coarse domestic rows and loutish clowning, have a kind of raw, straightforward vulgarity that rarely reaches the screen. Papa Lucasta (Oscar Homolka), addled by drink and dim, incestuous urges, has driven his favorite daughter Anna out of the house and into a life of prostitution. The others of the family, bullied along by son-in-law Frank (Broderick Crawford), are scheming to bring Anna home. Their motive: to hook into some easy money by marrying Anna off to an earnest young man with good prospects.

Miss Goddard puts a serious crimp in the family's plans and a deep chill on the film's illusion of warmth and vitality. Most of the time she slouches through her role like the party of the second part in a nightclub Apache dance--all sin, scintillation and sex. In the glare of hef tinsel brilliance, the rest of the cast and the plot itself unavoidably take on the look of routine beerhall melodrama. At times the picture is partially redeemed by a combination of impressive talents. Oscar Homolka plays the sodden father with cunning cloddishness; Director Irving Rapper handles the shabby sets and shabby people with an astringent bite. But their best efforts cannot conceal the fact that Playwright Yordan, who had his own story to work on in his first venture as a cinema producer, did not do right by Anna.

Scene of the Crime (MGM) tries to give Van Johnson a much-needed rest from pounding the polished boards of M-G-M musicals and romances by setting him to grimmer work on a routine homicide beat. Rich in underworld argot but rickety in plot, it turns out to be not such a grim job after all.

Van's quarry is a gang of hoodlums, most of whom act like unpromising candidates for a backward children's school. While tracking them down, breaking them up and running them in, Van manfully risks a tactical flirtation with a gangster's doxy (Gloria De Haven) and the loss of his adoring wife (Arlene Dahl). Meanwhile, with Scene of the Crime, his M-G-M bosses have risked nothing and gained nothing.

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