Men have been marrying older women since Oedipus married Jocasta.  Of course, when Oedipus discovered that Jocasta was actually his mother, he blinded himself, and she committed suicide.  So, that didn’t work out too well.

But suppose she had not turned out to be his mother.  Could their marriage have been a happy one? There are two problems confronting a couple in which the woman is older than the man.  The first concerns how the man and woman will feel about each other as the years go by.  The second concerns the approval or disapproval of society.  At first, the man and woman may think that only the first consideration is relevant, taking the attitude that that they aren’t hurting anyone, and that it’s nobody’s business but their own.  They may soon learn just how wrong they are, however, that happiness often depends on having the approval of society, as unfair as that might seem.

A lot of people do in fact disapprove of a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman. At the same time, those who do disapprove realize that, indeed, it’s none of their business. After all, there is nothing immoral about such a relationship.  Rather, it is unaesthetic, as it is when the woman is taller than the man.  People just don’t like the look of it.

Because people feel like busybodies in objecting to the woman’s being older than the man, they may look around for other reasons to supplement their disapproval.  For example, French President Emmanuel Macron seems to be happily married to his wife Brigitte, who is 24 years older than he is. There is a conspiracy theory embraced by Candace Owens to the effect that Brigitte is actually a transgender woman.  Of all the wives of politicians that she might have imputed this to, why was Brigitte singled out for such calumny?  No doubt Candace Owens and others feel themselves to be on firmer ground in objecting to the marriage of the Macrons if Brigitte is also transgender.

Movies are good indication of what people approve or disapprove of, and in most movies about a young man having sex with an older woman, things do not work out well for them.  Classics such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Graduate (1967) readily come to mind.  In other words, such movies act as a morality tale, saying, “See what misery comes to a man if he has sex with an older woman!”

Of course, in some movies, it is the woman who comes to grief.  In Dodsworth (1936), the movie based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is married to Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston).  While they are in Europe, she has an affair with Kurt von Obersdorf, who is younger than she is.  She intends to divorce Sam and marry Kurt, but Kurt’s mother, Baroness von Obersdorf (Maria Ouspenskaya), disapproves:  first, because Fran would be a divorced woman, while Kurt and the Baroness are Catholics; second, because Fran is 42, too old to bear Kurt’s heirs.  As an added consideration, the Baroness says to Fran, “Have you thought how little happiness there can be for the old wife of a young husband?”

This remark is especially painful for Fran, desperately afraid of becoming old. She has been lying about her age, saying she has just turned 35, and concealing the fact that she has recently become a grandmother.  Although Fran is the villain of the piece, and we are glad when Sam leaves her at the end of the movie, we nevertheless feel sorry for her.

Neither the movie nor the novel tells us how old Kurt is, but if we may infer the ages of Fran and Kurt from the actors who played them, then Fran is 8 years older than Kurt.  By itself, that might not seem worth worrying about. Perhaps that is why, in writing this story, Sinclair Lewis made religious and fertility considerations be the main objections to the marriage.  As noted above, a lot of people object to the idea of a man marrying an older woman, but they sense that it is none of their business.  So, they need other reasons to justify their disapproval, and Sinclair Lewis has helpfully provided them.

The movie with the greatest disparity between ages, and one in which the relationship is a happy one, is Harold and Maude (1971).  In this quirky comedy, Harold (Bud Cort) is 20, and Maude (Ruth Gordon) is 79. They become lovers.  In the end, Maude commits suicide, not because she is unhappy, but because she has had a good life and decides to avoid a miserable end by finishing it on her own terms.

In none of these movies do the couples get married.  Whether a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman ends happily or not, in most movies of this sort, they do not get married. Society is more tolerant of the age difference if the relationship is a brief affair rather than one resulting in marriage.  For that reason, there are more movies of the former sort than the latter.

One movie in which we know the couple will end up getting married is All That Heaven Allows (1955). Jane Wyman stars as Cary Scott, a widow with two grown children.  When Wyman made this movie, she was 38 years old.  At the beginning of the movie, Cary’s friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead) stops by her house to return some dishes she borrowed.  She mentions in passing that she has to find a date for some last-minute weekend guest for her party that night. Cary says, “A Date?” showing an interest.

Sara dismisses the idea that it might be Cary, saying, “Look, he’s 40, which means he’ll consider any female over 18 too old.”  Instead, Sara suggests that she come to the party with Harvey, the only bachelor around that she thinks is suitable for Cary.  Harvey is played by Conrad Nagel, an actor who was 58 at the time this movie was made.  Sara says she’ll call Harvey and have him pick her up.

That night, Cary’s two children, Ned and Kay, arrive home from college.  They don’t think Cary should have sex at all.  Kay sums up why Harvey is just right for her:

I like Harvey. He’s pleasant, amusing, and he acts his age. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s an old goat. As Freud says, when we reach a certain age, sex becomes incongruous. I think Harvey understands that.

However, Kay has no objection to the fact that Cary looks attractive in the red dress she is wearing for the party:

It’s about time you wore something besides that old black velvet…. Personally, I never subscribed to that old Egyptian custom…of walling up the widow alive in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with his other possessions, the theory being that she was a possession too. The community saw to it. Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore.

“Doesn’t it?” Cary responds dryly.  “Well, perhaps not in Egypt.”

That goes right over Kay’s head.

When Ned sees Cary’s red dress, he is disconcerted, saying it is lowcut and that he hopes it doesn’t scare Harvey off.  When he goes to answer the door, Kay continues with her psychoanalytic observations, saying of Ned:  “A typical Oedipus reaction….  A son subconsciously resents his mother being attractive to other men. We call it an Oedipus complex.”

The party is not much fun for Cary.  First, she gets a backhanded compliment from a “friend,” who says, “It’s indecent to have two grown children and look as young as you do, attracting attention, isn’t it?”

Later, a married man makes a crude move on Cary, saying they could meet in New York and have sex on the sly.  Finally, when Harvey brings her home, he proposes marriage, indicating that it is only companionship and affection that he has in mind.  Cary rejects both the proposal and the proposition.

Cary’s gardener is Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson).  When Hudson made this movie, he was 30 years old. So, she is 8 years older than he is.  This was thought to be enough of an age difference to be problematic in Dodsworth, and it is enough to cause a problem here too.

They are attracted to each other and gradually start getting to know each other on a more personal basis. He invites her to meet some friends of his, Mick and Alida, who live out in the woods.  These friends are very different from those she is used to, the ones at Sara’s party.  They are warm and genuine.  In other words, there is not one society whose approval or disapproval will be important, but two:  Cary’s society, which will disapprove of her romance with Ron, and Ron’s society, which does approve.  That will make things easier for her in the end.

Cary sees a copy of Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.  Guess which line she just happens to come across.  That’s right, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  She continues without turning a page:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises…? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The line about “quiet desperation” is in the first few pages of the book, while the quotation above is at the end, in the conclusion, but this is a movie, so we have to make allowances.

Anyway, these lines are suggesting that one should live the life one thinks is right, regardless of the opinions of others.  At the same time, the opinions of those in Ron’s society are not judgmental. They will not disapprove of the age difference between him and Cary.  It’s nice when you can step to the music you hear while those around you like the same music.

Alida says that Walden is Mick’s bible.  When asked about Ron, she says that she doesn’t think Ron has ever read it.  He doesn’t have to.  “He just lives it.”  And, indeed, he always has a look on his face that bespeaks of spiritual wisdom.

At the party being thrown by Mick and Alida, all their friends seem to have something to do with nature:  beekeeping, birdwatching, etc.  In contrast to this, Sara insists that what Cary needs is a television, so that she will have something to do.  Presumably, we are supposed to think of television as being artificial.  But then, so is the movie we are watching.

When those in Cary’s society learn that Ron and Cary intend to marry, they are scandalized, her children most of all.  The essential objection is the fact that Cary is older than Ron.  At the same time, because age difference alone might not seem to be enough, a class difference was added to the story to give some additional justification for the disapproval of their marriage.  And as noted above, people will sometimes make up stuff to justify their disapproval, for which reason people start spreading a rumor that Cary and Ron were having an affair while her husband was still alive.

To keep from alienating her children, Cary breaks off her engagement to Ron.  But then she finds out she won’t be seeing all that much of her children anymore, for Kay is getting married, and Ned will be spending the next year in Paris.  Ned says that since he and Kay will no longer be living at home, she might as well sell the house.  However, Ned bought her a television for Christmas. After it is placed in the middle of the room, we see Cary reflected in the screen, which means her life will now be as artificial as the shows that she can watch on that television set.

Cary realizes she made a mistake.  She drives over to his Ron’s house to talk to him.  Ron, who has been hunting pheasants, sees her from up on a cliff.  He tries to get her attention, but he slips and falls a great distance, rendering him unconscious from a concussion.  There is some concern about his condition. Cary sits by his side all night.  In the morning, he opens his eyes and sees her, saying, “You’ve come home.”

Cary replies, “Yes, darling.  I’ve come home.”

I have read that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder, is not exactly a remake of All That Heaven Allows, but rather is an “update” or an “homage” to that movie, which was directed by Douglas Sirk, whom Fassbinder admired.  On my own, that the one was inspired by the other would never have occurred to me.  Although Sirk was a German immigrant, his melodramas are Hollywood all the way.  Fassbinder, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Germany, and in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, his version of this story is quite the other thing.

The movie is set in Germany.  Emmi, a German woman who appears to be in her sixties, stops in an Arab bar to get out of the rain. She meets Ali, who is from Morocco. If we may infer from the ages of the actors, Emmi is 26 years older than Ali.  One thing leads to another, and he ends up spending the night with her.

In addition to an age difference much greater than the 8 years in All That Heaven Allows, the added factors that also lead to society’s disapproval are equally excessive.  First, Emmi and Ali are a mixed-race couple.  It is no longer considered politically correct to say there is such a thing as race, but when this movie was made, people would have said that Emmi was a Caucasian and Ali was a Semite.  And just as people are more likely to disapprove of an age difference when it is the woman that is older than the man, so too are they more likely to disapprove of a mixed-race couple if it is the woman that is white. And though religion never comes up, we suspect that she is Christian and he is Muslim.

As the bartender says of their relationship, thinking it will be just a passing thing, “Of course it won’t last. So what?” But this movie manages to get them married anyway through a contrivance that strains our credulity.

The rudeness and bigotry they experience from almost everyone is over the top, with people calling Emmi a whore and ostracizing her.  Whereas Cary’s son bought her a television in All That Heaven Allows, Emmi’s son kicks in her television set.

In All That Heaven Allows, Ron and Cary knew they were right for each other, and it was only the disapproval of Cary’s society and her children that was a problem; in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, both Emmi’s society and Ali’s society disapprove of the marriage, and Emmi and Ali themselves begin to have misgivings about what they have done.  Ali becomes sullen, cheats on her, and seems to be ashamed of her. And Emmi begins to exhibit prejudice against foreigners: she tells him to carry stuff down to the cellar, as if he were the hired help; she refuses to cook him couscous, saying he should get used to eating German food; and she and her friends talk about him while he is standing in the same room, discussing how clean he is.

As we wonder how all this is going to work out between them, Ali collapses on the dance floor from a perforated ulcer, brought on by stress.  But was he not stepping to the music he heard?  Try to imagine Ron Kirby having a stress-induced ulcer in All That Heaven Allows.  

In the final scene of the movie, Ali is unconscious in a hospital bed.  Now, it would have been no trouble to add a scene in which Ali regains consciousness after a successful surgery, with Emmi sitting by his side.  Instead, it’s an unpleasant ending to an unpleasant movie.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that Fassbinder didn’t approve of their relationship either.

One of the paradoxes about the movie Gone with the Wind, as well as the book on which it is based, is that, politically speaking, though reviled by many on the left, yet there is much in it that they might otherwise find congenial to their way of thinking.

First, it is feminist. Its protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), who starts out as just another Southern Belle, but who rises to meet the horrors of war, lives up to her vow, “I’ll never be hungry again,” and who then manages to “beat the Yankees at their own game” during Reconstruction.

At one point in the novel, she realizes that the male-dominated world she had grown up in was based on a lie:

A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.  Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true, but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind.  Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words.  She sat quite still, with the heavy book across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise, thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came.  Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.

Second, it is secular.  In the novel, it is said of Scarlett that “religion went no more than lip deep with her.” Reflecting on the hardships forced upon her and her family after her return to Tara, she gives up on religion altogether, irritated whenever she sees her sister Carreen praying:

If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers. Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.  She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.  God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.

Third, it is anti-war.  When the movie begins, the Tarleton twins are heartbroken when Scarlett tells them there isn’t going to be any war.  The next day, at the barbeque, the men are talking about how they will defeat the North in the war that is now inevitable, that the Yankees will turn and run after only one battle, because gentlemen always fight better than rabble.  In the movie, only Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) are opposed to the war:  the former saying, “Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars, and when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about”; the latter noting sarcastically that it is hard to win a war with words, that with its industrial might, the North will be able to overwhelm the South.  In the novel, an old man, Mr. McRae, who is hard of hearing, becomes furious when he is told what the others in the room are arguing about:

“War, is it?” he cried, fumbling about him for his cane and heaving himself out of his chair with more energy than he had shown in years.  “I’ll tell ‘um about war.  I’ve been there.”  It was not often that Mr. McRae had the opportunity to talk about war, the way his women folks shushed him.

He stumped rapidly to the group, waving his cane and shouting and, because he could not hear the voices about him, he soon had undisputed possession of the field.

“You fire-eating young bucks, listen to me.  You don’t want to fight.  I fought and I know.  Went out in the Seminole War and was a big enough fool to go to the Mexican War, too.  You all don’t know what war is.  You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having the girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero.  Well, it ain’t.  No, sir! It’s going hungry, and getting the measles and pneumonia from sleeping in the wet. And if it ain’t measles and pneumonia, it’s your bowels.  Yes sir, what war does to a man’s bowels—dysentery and things like that—‘

Shortly thereafter, word comes that war has been declared, and the young, Southern boys are ecstatic, giving the Rebel Yell while firing their revolvers.

Little by little, we begin to see the miseries of war of which Ashley and Mr. McRae spoke. Scarlett’s first husband, Charles Hamilton, dies ignobly of dysentery.  Both of the Tarleton twins are killed.  Later, we see a nurse writing down the last words of a dying soldier in a letter to his mother, saying, “I’ll never see you or Pa again.”  Dr. Meade tells a soldier that his leg is gangrenous and will have to come off, even though they are out of chloroform. Finally, when Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) is about to have her baby, Scarlett goes to get Dr. Meade down by the railroad, where countless men are lying side by side, beyond all consideration of triage, dying from their wounds.  As the camera pulls back, we see the tattered Confederate flag in the foreground.

But for all that, the movie’s attitude toward slavery makes it irredeemably offensive to many of those on the left, owing to its “Southern point of view.” By that expression, I do not mean it is the attitude of everyone who lives in the South, nor restricted to those that do. Rather, it is meant to refer to those who believe that slavery was a benign institution, and who are still sympathetic with the Antebellum South. There is no better expression of this attitude than that of the prologue:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave.  Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

The inclusion of the phrase “Master and Slave” in all this implies that this way of life did not just happen to involve slavery, but rather that slavery was essential to it, a necessary complement to a way of life that was noble and fine, as opposed the egalitarian North, which was vulgar and crass.

In Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks:  An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, he discusses the five principal categories of black characters in old movies.  Gone with the Wind, the movie, has four of those five.  The Mammy is, of course, Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel. The very word suggests that she was like a second mother to the girls growing up on the O’Hara plantation.

The Buck, a big, muscular black man, is Big Sam (Everett Brown).  When he rescues Scarlett from two assailants as she crosses the bridge near Shantytown, his heroic action exemplifies the bond of affection that had existed between master and slave.  Just before that happens, we see him in in Shantytown, where it is obvious that his freedom has not made him happy. After the rescue, Scarlett’s husband, Frank Kennedy, gives Big Sam money to get back to Tara, knowing that he will otherwise be arrested.  Tara is where Big Sam had been a slave, and he is happy to return there, just as he would be happy to be a slave once more.

As an aside, Roger Ebert once said that In the Heat of the Night (1967) was the first movie in which we see a black man strike a white man.  He clearly had forgotten about Gone with the Wind.  Not only do we see Big Sam hit a white man with his fist, but he is never punished for doing so either.

The Tom, as in Uncle Tom, a black man that is loyal to his white masters, is Pork (Oscar Polk).  He is content being a slave.

Finally, the Coon, a black person who is funny on account of being simpleminded, is Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), who needs to be under the protection of her white masters.  At one point in the movie, we see Prissy walking down the street, in no hurry to get anywhere, singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” in particular, the part of the song that commiserates with the hard life of a darky:  “A few more days for to tote the weary load….”  The joke is that Prissy has never had to work a hard day in her life.

The Coon, by the way, was the preferred type during the Jim Crow South.  In a book on sociology that I read once, it commented on the fact that a lot of people believe that when a black man was lynched, it was because he had raped a white woman.  Far less serious reasons were often given by those who participated in these lynchings, however, one of which was that the black man “wasn’t funny enough.”

At one point in the movie, Melanie is expecting a baby.  Prissy assures Scarlett that she knows what needs to be done to deliver a baby.  But when the moment arrives, and Dr. Meade is too busy taking care of wounded soldiers to attend to Melanie, Prissy admits that she lied, that she doesn’t know anything about “birthin’ babies.”  Scarlett becomes so angry that she slaps her.  This is what passes for slave-beating in Gone with the Wind.

Scarlett takes over from Frank the running of the lumbermill, which employs prisoners, who are mistreated by Johnny Gallagher, whom Scarlett employs as a foreman.  When Ashley complains about using enforced labor, Scarlett points out his hypocrisy, noting that he didn’t seem to mind owning black slaves.  He replies, “That was different.  We didn’t treat them that way. Besides, I’d have freed them all when father died, if the war hadn’t already freed them.”  In other words, for those who might still object to slavery in any form, even if only as a benign institution, the movie lets us know that slavery would have eventually been phased out by the more enlightened Southerners themselves, that the War of Northern Aggression was unnecessary.

Scarlett eventually marries Rhett.  Thanks to his wealth, they are able to move into a mansion, and she brings Mammy, Pork, and Prissy to live with them as servants. The fact that they gladly do so indicates that they will be just as happy being servants as they were being slaves.

If the movie whitewashes slavery in the Old South, it also softens much of the material in the novel. To put it differently, if the movie had been more faithful to the novel, the audiences would have seen a darker version, one that might have been acceptable to some white folks in the South, but which would have been disturbing to many others.  In these differences between the movie and the novel, however, it is the novel that is more realistic.

For example, of the five types of black characters mentioned in Bogle’s book, only the Mulatto is absent in the movie.  In the novel, Dilcey does not really count as a mulatta because, while one of her parents was black, the other was an Indian.  She is married to Pork, and Prissy is their daughter. Mulattoes are problematic because by their very existence they imply that a white man had sex with a black woman, or that a black man had sex with a white woman, neither possibility being compatible with what is acceptable in the idealized version of the Old South.  At least, it would not be acceptable if the white parent were a Southerner.  On the other hand, mulattoes are perfect for besmirching the Yankees.  In The Birth of a Nation (1915), there are two villains in that movie, both mulattoes:  one is a woman, who is living up north as the mistress of a senator; the other is a man, who has moved down south as a carpetbagger and has become a powerful leader of the recently freed black population.  In Gone with the Wind, the novel, there is much talk about all the “yellow babies” that have been showing up ever since the Yankees arrived, both during and after the war. The existence of mulattoes is completely avoided in the movie so as to avoid the uncomfortable idea of miscegenation.

In the movie, after Scarlett is attacked on the bridge, Frank and Ashley get together with some other men and burn down Shantytown.  There is no explicit reference to the Ku Klux Klan, and we certainly don’t see them wearing sheets.  In the novel, however, Frank and Ashley are members of the Klan, which finds the men that attacked Scarlett and kills them.

Of all the ways in which the movie softened much of what went on in the novel, there is one that stands out from the rest.  In the movie, Rhett is placed under arrest because the Yankees believe that he has made off with the Confederate Treasury, which is plausible, since he did a lot of blockade-running, for which he received payment in gold.  Eventually, the Yankees let him go, presumably because he purposely lost when playing cards with the officers, and they wanted him to be able to pay his debts to them.

In the novel, he is still suspected of possessing Confederate gold, but the charge brought against Rhett was that of killing a black man.  He gets himself released by a government official with whom he had corrupt business dealings during the war. Scarlett says she would take an oath that he wasn’t innocent. Rhett replies:  “No, now that I am free of the toils, I’ll frankly admit that I’m as guilty as Cain.  I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”

Not even in The Birth of a Nation could I have imagined a line like that.

In 1857, prosecutors in France brought charges of obscenity against Gustave Flaubert after he published his novel Madame Bovary. After he was acquitted, his novel became a best seller, of course. The best thing an author can do to promote his book is to get it banned somewhere.

It is strange that the title is Madame Bovary.  If you didn’t know better, you might think the story was going to be about Charles Bovary’s mother.  Then you might think it was going to be about his first wife Héloïse.  By the time you get to his second wife Emma, you might think, “I hope this one is it!” This confusion could have been avoided had the title been Emma Bovary, but I guess “Madame” was used to emphasize the fact that Emma is a married woman.

There have been many movies or television series based on this novel, only three of which I have been able to see.  In comparing the 1949 version with the 1975 television series and with the 2014 movie, the most striking difference is the faces. Hollywood sure knew how to pick actors with star power in those days: Jennifer Jones as Emma, Van Heflin as Charles, and Louis Jordan as Rodolphe. The 1975 and 2014 versions are full of ordinary faces, so unremarkable that one might easily forget who’s who.  For this reason alone, the 1949 version is the most enjoyable to watch and easiest to remember. Strictly speaking, the 1949 version is actually about the trial of Flaubert, played by James Mason, where he tells us how we are supposed to understand his novel, so that we won’t think it obscene.

An important difference between the 1949 version and the novel is the way the former improves the character of Charles Bovary.  In the novel, his first wife is much older than he is, and she is described as being “ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds.” He marries her because she has money.  The novel says something about her being the woman his mother picked out for him, which is a little creepy right there.  But it also says, “Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money.”  All right, so it doesn’t work out the way he planned, this wife being something of a termagant, but his intention remains the same, that of marrying for money rather than for love.

The 1949 version leaves out this first marriage, as does the 2014 version. Perhaps the constraint of time was a factor, since the longer 1975 version includes it.  What every version of this novel must include, however, is the part about Hippolyte, played by Henry Morgan in the 1949 version (another interesting face).  In the novel, Emma pressures Charles to perform an operation on Hippolyte, who has a clubfoot. She figures that if the operation is a success, she will rise in society as the wife of the brilliant surgeon who performed it.  However, the operation is a failure, and the leg ends up having to be amputated.  As a result, Emma feels disgraced and becomes even more contemptuous of Charles than ever before. Such is the case in the 1975 and 2014 versions.

In the 1949 version, however, Charles realizes his limitations at the last minute and refuses to perform the operation.  The difference is that while Emma still feels contempt for her husband, in this case for what she regards as his failure of nerve, we admire him for doing the right thing.  So, just as this movie avoids having Charles be a mama’s boy and a second-rate fortune hunter, so too does it avoid having him be an incompetent surgeon who should have known better.

This change in the story cannot be attributed to any need to conform to the Production Code, which does say that surgical operations should be treated within the careful limits of good taste.  But if that had been enough to change the story of this novel, the movie King’s Row (1942) could never have been made, since that is the movie where a malicious doctor amputates both of Ronald Reagan’s legs. No, this movie simply wants us to like Charles Bovary. But even with the omissions and modifications, he still comes across as someone whose wife will cheat on him.

And cheat she does, for the story is about an adulteress who ends up committing suicide.  You would think that her suicide would have satisfied the prosecutors, the novel having punished Emma for her misdeeds.  We can only wonder what would have happened had she run off with Rodolphe as she had wanted, the two of them living happily ever after.  Flaubert would probably have been drawn and quartered.

Actually, it is not the adultery per se that brings about Emma’s downfall, but her willingness to go into debt to buy herself beautiful clothes and to furnish her house with fashionable finery.  It doesn’t cost much for a woman to have an affair, and Charles was enough of a cuckold that she could have gone from one lover to the next with impunity.  On the other hand, had she been completely faithful to Charles but still spent extravagantly to satisfy her vanity, her ruination and his would have been the same.

In any event, it might be that the prosecutors were upset that while Emma was punished in this world, Flaubert allowed her to escape punishment in the next. After Emma consumes arsenic at the chemist’s shop, she goes home to die. Charles tries to save her but eventually calls for a priest, who administers the sacrament of extreme unction.  The novel tells us that “her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.”  Moreover:

The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought.

Maybe this is what offended the prosecutors.  Emma had been absolved of her sins through divine intervention, and who would dare to question the will of God? Flaubert is assuring us that instead of burning forever in the fires of Hell, Emma is now in Heaven, smiling sweetly as she looks down on those she left behind.

About twenty years later, Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina, in which another adulteress ends up committing suicide.  Like Emma, she also has a child that she is willing to abandon to be with her lover, which makes her adultery especially reprehensible.  And like Emma, she escapes eternal damnation by way of last-minute repentance.  Just as Anna throws herself beneath the wheels of a train, she regrets having done so, saying, “Lord, forgive me all,” after which she is sliced in two.

Of course, there are those who would say that God did not intervene to prolong the lives of Emma and Anna, giving them enough time to repent, that it was just good luck on their part that they managed to slip through that Christian loophole at the last minute, causing God to shake his head in exasperation, saying, “Once again, a sinner gets off on a technicality!”