How to Dig a Hole

There is one thing that the gangster films of the thirties and forties share in common with Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. In both, the protagonist goes to extreme and terrible ends to dig themselves out of a hole, yet merely end up deeper in it. Like George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Muni or James Cagney, Madame Bovary is simply a moral lacking, yet very human flunk. Wife to a boring doctor, Mistress to a boring clerk, debtor to a sketchy merchant, and mother to an ignored daughter. What is interesting about this is that she, more than almost anyone, wants the glamorous life she has read about in her Parisian magazines.
To achieve these high standards of life and social grace upon which she has set herself she looks to affairs. They leave her nothing but grief and a poor conscience. She seeks an abundance of material luxuries. They leave her hopelessly in debt. She wants a comfortable home life, yet she isolates her good husband and daughter with her web of lies and misplaced loves. She slowly digs her hole so deep that there is but one level remaining. In the final parallel with the Warner Bros. Gangster films, the conflicted protagonist dies and long and dramatic death, the only way that justice could be served. Swimin with the Fishies.