Posted 26 days ago
keramikos
(21 items)
I've seen 1949's "Madame Bovary before, and indeed knew that a piece of the "Gigi" Louis XVI-style furniture set puts in an appearance in it, but a recent viewing revealed something I hadn't previously noticed.
In an early scene, new bride Emma Bovary is shopping for home furnishings, and discovers an exquisite piece of upholstery fabric. In the same scene, you see an unupholstered chair that she's already selected.
In the next scene, you see the chair upholstered with the exquisite upholstery.
Who on the staff of this 1949 film loved that upholstery fabric enough to have a sample made so that it would seem like the chair had been freshly upholstered with it?
Insofar as I can tell, the common denominator between "Madame Bovary," and "Gigi" is director Vincente Minnelli.
The "Gigi" furniture puts in an appearance in at least one other Minnelli film, 1962's "Two Weeks in Another Town." That movie is a prime example of a film that can have all kinds of great resources (director, actors, etc), but still be a flop.
I don't know exactly what all went wrong; however, Minnelli himself was quoted as saying, "It's painful to talk about the ruin of that film even now."
REFERENCES:
Images one through three are low-tech captures made by me from a recent viewing of "Madame Bovary" on Turner Classic Movies.
Image four is from the archive dot org digital copy of the 1970 MGM auction catalog:
https://archive.org/details/19700503-mgm-auction-catalog-copy/page/n7/mode/1up
Madame Bovary (1949)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041615/
Gigi (1958)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051658/
Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056625/
Vincente Minnelli quotes
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0591486/quotes/
Amazing to find they reused this furniture in so many movies, I think the bird pattern is especially beautiful
(BTW that movie Madame Bovary with Jennifer Jones was terrific, it was on a binge repeat TV channel when I was a kid & my mom didn't want me to watch it because of the adultery theme - so of course I binge watched it when she wasn't around lol :))
Newfld, I think it's beautiful, too. <3
Oddly enough, though, the one thing that might break my obsession with this furniture set would be to find out that the design on the upholstery was painted rather than embroidered.
Yeah, painted fabric was a thing.
One of the few people still alive who would know the answer to that question is Leslie Caron.
As to binge-watching old movies: I did that when I was very young. I would watch the late show, the late late show, and the early show on weekends and during the non-school months.
My poor, long-suffering mother would come out into the living room around midnight, squint at me, the clock, and the television. Then she'd turn down the sound on the latter, and go back to bed. };-)