- Director: Vittorio De Sica
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Romance
- Movie Type: Romantic Drama, Melodrama
- Themes: Brief Encounters, Americans Abroad, Dangerous Attraction
- Main Cast: Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi, Richard Beymer
- Release Year: 1953
- Country: US/IT
- Run Time: 89 minutes
Plot
Indiscretion of an American Wife began its life as a romantic drama entitled Terminal Station, directed with extraordinary skill and sensitivity by neorealist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica and starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift as a visiting American housewife and her Italian lover. Their tale was depicted against the backdrop of a hundred other stories and characters that De Sica presented in his 89-minute Terminal Station. In Indiscretion, however -- which was cobbled together at 63 minutes by producer David O. Selznick for the U.S. market -- theirs is the only one. Jones' Mary Hughs wrings her hands and wrestles with her conscience, but with no real depth, while Clift's Giovanni Doria emotes with jealousy and lust as she tries to leave him, gets off one train, waits for another, attempts to soothe the feelings of her confused and disappointed nephew (Richard Beymer), and ponders the idea of leaving her husband and marriage. The two accidentally run afoul of the authorities in the process, and risk exposure of their affair. This was a difficult shoot, beginning with the fact that Jones -- who always required lots of direction to give a consistent performance -- didn't speak Italian and De Sica spoke no English. In addition, the actress reportedly found Clift attractive in ways that reminded her of her first husband, Robert Walker; she also found his method-based approach to acting a challenge which she might have met, if only her husband at the time, Selznick, hadn't been deluging them with script changes on a daily basis. To further complicate matters, at some point after Jones found herself drawn to the Clift, she discovered that he was attracted to men, not women, and she reportedly flew into a destructive rage for the afternoon. Despite these problems, De Sica ended up getting a lot more of what he needed than Selznick did of what he wanted. Unhappy with the Italian director's finished 89-minute film and unwilling to challenge the American censors over some of the content (in connection with the tale of an adulterous wife and mother), Selznick, his editor, and writers (including Ben Hecht) went to work on it and delivered Indiscretion of an American Wife, a Hollywoodization of De Sica's neorealist masterpiece, but which lacked almost all of the most subtle elements of De Sica's movie. At times it seems like another attempt (à la Portrait of Jennie) to celebrate Jones' melodramatic screen persona, while elsewhere it focuses on Clift's tempestuous, exciting screen persona; but otherwise, there's very little "there" there, and the setting and scenes are a mere shadow of what was seen in De Sica's original Terminal Station. In 2003, both films -- and they are two separate movies that just happen to utilize the same footage -- were finally compiled under one cover, and in their optimal states, on a Criterion Collection DVD, and can be seen and compared for what they are. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie GuideReview
Indiscretion of an American Wife is the 63-minute "producer's cut" of Vittorio De Sica's 89-minute Terminal Station, assembled specifically for the American market, for which producer David O. Selznick had total control over the film. It reflects the sensibilities of Selznick much more than De Sica in almost every detail and edit, and demonstrates how a director's work can be subverted or even completely submerged by a producer working with a totally different agenda. Terminal Station was built around a rich, neorealist tapestry, woven from little moments of life, its seeming "background" characters -- almost everyone at the Stazione Termini, the Rome railway station where virtually the entire film is set -- treated with as much care and dignity as the characters portrayed by its two presumed "stars," Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift. Selznick, working from a traditional Hollywood mentality, chose to delete virtually all of the shots referring to anyone onscreen other than Jones' Mary Hughs and Clift's Giovanni Doria. In De Sica's cut of the movie, the Stazione Termini and all of the people in it are the "stars" -- assuming that the movie has stars at all -- while Selznick treats anyone other than Jones and Clift as little more than scenery and set decorations to be brought forward only to enhance Jones' performance. Indeed, the way Selznick treats the material that De Sica shot, the director might just as well have been filming on a Hollywood soundstage. Yet, strangely enough, Selznick also stripped out all of the depth and complexity from Jones' character, principally by deleting the film's original opening minutes that depict the depth of her romantic dilemma. With the Production Code and its restrictions still largely in force, presenting an adulterous wife and mother was a dicey proposition in Hollywood in 1954, but one can't help but think that Selznick's marriage to Jones, coupled with the fact that she was his most valuable star under contract, made him too careful and even borderline (or perhaps way over the border) neurotic in dealing with her onscreen image.In the broader context of Selznick's career, however, the changes that he made aren't entirely surprising. He had, after all, made his biggest mark in movies telling the story of the Civil War (and Reconstruction) through the eyes of the empty-headed, but emotionally tempestuous, Scarlett O'Hara. He was, for obvious reasons, even more involved with Jones and anything she touched as an actress, and saw no point in cluttering up audiences' attention with what he apparently saw as De Sica's version of "local color." As a movie, if Terminal Station didn't exist to show how De Sica got it right, Indiscretion of an American Wife wouldn't even merit serious comment, possessing less depth than good television dramas of the same period. Curiously, once Selznick was done making hash of most of De Sica's work, he was left with a 63-minute movie. As much as Columbia Pictures was glad to get Jones' and Clift's newest movie to distribute, they couldn't issue something that short to theaters; luckily, rather than simply pad it out with a couple of Three Stooges shorts, the studio raised the movie's exhibition length to 72 minutes by grafting on a nine-minute "prologue" entitled Autumn in Rome, directed and designed by William Cameron Menzies, with James Wong Howe as photographer. The highly stylized short depicted Patti Page in a New York apartment singing a pair of songs, "Autumn in Rome" and "Indiscretion" -- connected in the most peripheral way possible to the feature -- amid some highly mobile and graceful camera work. That's why the running time of Indiscretion of an American Wife sometimes to varies in different listings: It's usually shown without the prologue, although The Criterion Collection's 2003 DVD restores the music short to its place at the head of Selznick's movie, in addition to presenting De Sica's complete film. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Cast
- Jennifer Jones - Mary Forbes
- Montgomery Clift - Giovanni Doria
- Gino Cervi - Commissioner
- Richard Beymer - Paul, Mary's nephew
