Indiscretion of an American Wife
Stazione Termini
Vittorio De Sica (1953)
David O Selznick commissioned it from Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattani, the writer of all four of the films that, in the early post-war years, had made De Sica a leading figure in Italian neorealist cinema (Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D). It seems that, at the outset at least, Selznick was looking for an exciting marriage of neorealism and Hollywood romantic drama – and, more specifically, a vehicle for his wife of the time, Jennifer Jones. The result was a persistent disagreement between Selznick and De Sica during production and a commercial and critical failure when the film was released. Selznick reduced De Sica’s ninety-minute cut to a picture lasting little more than an hour – so short that, when Indiscretion of an American Wife arrived in US cinemas in 1954, a musical short called Autumn in Rome was needed to create a programme of standard feature length.
Jennifer Jones plays Mary Forbes, a Philadelphia housewife and mother who, while visiting her sister in Rome, has a relationship (one assumes a sexual relationship) with a younger Italian man – Giovanni Doria, a teacher, who’s played by Montgomery Clift. Giovanni’s mother, he tells Mary, was American. This is meant to explain his perfect English and I assume that was the language in which the movie was first released in North America and and Britain. The film screened by BFI as part of their De Sica retrospective, however, as well as being the director’s original one-and-a-half-hour version, is complicated in the combination of its Hollywood-Italian elements. Two American film stars are playing a native and an accomplished speaker of English but their lines are dubbed into Italian by other actors. English subtitles on the screen tell us what Jones and Clift, behind the dubbed voices, are saying in English. In the early stages of Indiscretion (its full title in the UK), the linguistic palimpsest makes for intriguing but rather frustrating viewing – especially as far as Montgomery Clift is concerned. Jennifer Jones’s portrait of Mary (or, as Giovanni calls her throughout, Maria) is an honourable effort but we’re obviously watching a Hollywood performer. In contrast, Clift is evidently capable of capturing and conveying the interaction of the two cinematic cultures brought together here. The viewer familiar with his voice experiences not hearing it as an almost physical barrier to receiving his full screen presence. (I don’t know Jennifer Jones’s voice nearly as well so felt less deprived when Mary’s lines were spoken.) Clift’s acting is so potent in other ways, however, that the loss of his voice comes to matter less and less[1].
In the film’s opening sequence, Mary goes to Giovanni’s apartment. Her finger is poised to ring the doorbell but her courage fails her; she hurries from the building and looks anxiously for a taxi that will take her to Stazione Termini – Rome’s main railway station. (Stazione Termini originally opened in 1863. A rebuilding project, begun during the Mussolini era, was completed shortly before the film was made, in 1950.) Once Mary arrives at the station, all the subsequent action takes place there and in nearly real time. Mary’s immediate destination, before she travels back to her husband and daughter in America, is Paris: she can get there direct on the 8.30 pm train from Rome or catch the 7 pm train and change in Milan. She means to get the earlier train: Mary knows the longer she delays her departure, the more time she will have to change her mind about abandoning Giovanni. Her decision to leave is evidently a sudden one: she telephones her sister’s home and asks her nephew Paul (a fifteen-year-old Richard Beymer, credited here as Dick Beymer) to bring a suitcase to the station for her. She is, we suppose, looking out for Paul when Giovanni appears on the platform, a few minutes before the Milan train is due to pull out. Paul then arrives too, excited to have completed his errand just in time. The boy goes on his way. Mary decides not to travel on the seven o’clock train.
De Sica’s realisation of the station is masterly. (The black-and-white cinematography is by G R Aldo.) The sights and sounds of this huge, impersonal place, and the people in it, have a documentary reality; they’re also charged with various emotional and metaphorical meanings in relation to the principals of the story. We are introduced, often only for a few seconds, to station staff or to other travellers whose situation, although it may be less fraught than that of Mary and Giovanni, is, to the individuals concerned, thoroughly absorbing. (As Mary composes a telegram to Giovanni – a telegram she doesn’t send – an elderly couple is preparing one to their son: the husband reads the text to his wife, who has second thoughts – ‘Forget the kisses’.) The interval between the two train departures includes a short period in which Mary or Giovanni are apart on the station, after they’ve argued, and he has struck her. During this time, Mary encounters a group whose circumstances are, in a very different way, as urgent as her own. (She is now with Paul. He hung around the station after leaving the platform. Mary, while she was walking with Giovanni, spotted Paul on the concourse.) A pregnant woman (Liliana Gerace) has been taken ill. As Paul waits with the woman’s three children and she receives medical attention, Mary talks with her husband. He is a miner, recently returned to Italy after failing to get work in England. A doctor gives the wife a clean bill of health and Mary attempts to give the couple money but the husband politely refuses. Mary buys chocolate for the couple’s three young sons instead. I may be in a minority of one but I found these children’s faces more eloquent than those I saw in Shoeshine a couple of days earlier.
I could have done without the several appearances of Paolo Stoppa as an eccentric, ogling travelling salesman but the repeated voice of the station announcer is very effective. It functions as a reminder of reality – of what Mary sees, and Giovanni knows she sees, as the inevitability of her responsibilities as a wife and mother. As the clock ticks, the groups of people in evidence on the station, for a while at least, take on an increasingly theatrical and grotesque aspect: they give the place a disorienting, almost nightmarish quality. When a train carrying the Italian president arrives, a red carpet is rolled out; it’s rolled up again at the moment Mary and Giovanni walk through this part of the station. Giovanni, during his temporary separation from Mary, looks down the track. This anticipates the shot De Sica uses after the train carrying her has finally pulled out, and parted them for good.
Indiscretion of an American Wife has been compared, unsurprisingly and unfavourably, with Brief Encounter. Whereas the refreshments room is the epicentre of the little station at Milford Junction in David Lean’s film, De Sica and Cesare Zavattini exploit the much larger scale of Stazione Termini to great effect. Mary and Giovanni talk in a restaurant until a waiter tells them the place isn’t open until eight o’clock; they go to a bar instead; then they move on elsewhere. The shifting locations chime with Mary’s uncertain feelings about whether or not to catch her train but the couple, wherever they go, is in the same place: the size and the persistence of the station express the inescapability of their predicament. Mary refuses Giovanni’s plea that they go back to his apartment for a short while, knowing that, if they do, she won’t leave it. Jennifer Jones is good at suggesting, however, that part of Mary wants to get away from her lover. It’s convincing when she unexpectedly catches sight of Paul again and calls out his name as if to a potential rescuer.
An especially important stopping place in the story is a railway siding. Mary and Giovanni go there to be alone and are arrested by the police. Amy Lawrence, in her 2010 book The Passion of Montgomery Clift, describes this episode as follows:
‘When the couple is apprehended kissing each other passionately in a train compartment, Giovanni steps into the hallway [sic] to speak heatedly to the security guards. … Struggling to explain matters to Mary, he shields his eyes with one hand as he rubs his temples, trying physically to get his mind around a thought. “It seems we’re criminals.”
At first, the idea that a couple would be arrested in Rome for kissing seems not only implausible but wildly disproportionate. The audience has to do mental gymnastics to account for this illogical plot development. We could assume kissing is a euphemism mandated by the Production Code: they weren’t just kissing, but any sexual activity in excess of kissing could not be shown or alluded to. We can propose a moral-psychological reading: that the law crashing down on them for so slight a transgression serves as a metaphoric or unconscious acknowledgement of a deeper guilt regarding adultery; in other words, they are punished not for what they have done but for what they have desired. A third reading suggests itself via biography.
It makes more sense to consider the scene as queer. It is queer to be arrested for kissing. …’
Lawrence then goes on to note that Montgomery Clift was ‘reportedly arrested more than once for cruising’ and to describe the circumstances of the couple’s interview, elsewhere on the station, by the Rome police, with ‘passers-by peeking in the windows to see them’ and Giovanni, in particular, ‘most concerned about being looked at’. It’s an interesting reading, albeit one to be expected in view of the blurring of Clift’s biography and his screen roles that’s an essential element of Lawrence’s study. It’s hard to see, though, why Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini would have had such an interpretation in mind; and Lawrence omits to mention that the compartment that Mary and Giovanni use is in a darkened and an otherwise empty train – a train that’s not currently in use. Lawrence’s suggestion that ‘the law crashing down on them for so slight a transgression serves as a metaphoric or unconscious acknowledgement of a deeper guilt regarding adultery’ is more persuasive than her queer reading but it doesn’t require ‘mental gymnastics’ on the part of the viewer to make sense of their arrest. Isn’t the couple’s boarding a train in the sidings an act of trespass that demands investigation, regardless of what they get up to in the compartment?
The arrest and police interrogation are dramatically effective because they upset the lovers’ – and the audience’s – priorities. Suddenly, Mary and Giovanni are desperate to be released. We want them to be released too yet we know that, if that happens, Mary will no longer be prevented from catching her train to Paris. The reminder of this comes when Mary says to Giovanni, while the couple are under arrest, that she’s going to tell her husband the truth about what’s happened in Rome. Giovanni’s face lights up: he has been given hope (although it’s a short-lived hope) of something more than being set free by the police. (Gino Cervi gives a well-judged performance as the police commissioner who eventually does release the couple – to their unhappy ending.) The script isn’t entirely free of clumsy moments (Mary’s asking Paul to bring her case at fifteen minutes’ notice and his locating her on the crowded platform is one such) but De Sica and Zavattini do a great deal more that’s admirable[2]. The structure of the screenplay repeatedly takes the viewer by surprise. Brief Encounter and plenty of other films have prepared us to expect, in this kind of set-up, the lovers’ story to be told in a series of flashbacks. There is none in Indiscretion. When Mary decides not to leave on the earlier train, she tells Giovanni, ‘I couldn’t leave you here like this’. As they walk from the platform, you know it can’t be a happy ending – certainly not already – yet you share Giovanni’s incredulous hope. Once they’re back on the main station concourse, Mary makes clear that she’ll take the later train instead.
Montgomery Clift’s apprehension that Mary’s staying with him must be too good to be true, followed by Giovanni’s back-to-earth deflation, is powerful. The look on his face immediately after Giovanni strikes Mary is a marvel – an expression of pain and anger that he’s hurt her and of the pain and anger she’s causing him. (Giovanni’s violence has been foreshadowed in an exchange in which he tells Mary to remove her hat – ‘it’s a smug little hat’ – and, when she doesn’t do so immediately, removes it himself.) Although the intensity of Jennifer Jones’s reaction to the blow to her face makes this one of her strongest moments too, she has nothing like the expressive range of her co-star. Clift brings to his character an extraordinary combination of urgency and weakness. He alternates between accesses of passion and needing to be comforted like a child. There’s a shot in which Giovanni stands next to Paul (who’s well played by Richard Beymer) and you feel he’s less grown up than the teenager beside him. It’s striking too that Mary’s description of her husband’s helplessness particularly offends Giovanni. In their final walk towards the Paris train, it’s he who looks purposeful and Mary who is obviously distressed and seems borne along by Giovanni and against her will. This impression makes Giovanni’s eventual collapse – which is both emotional and literal: he falls heavily on the platform after jumping down as the train starts to move – all the more abject. Clift’s intensity makes the doomed affair much more than an indiscretion (and justifies the intensity of Alessandro Cicognini’s fine music). The actor may have been disappointed with the eventual film – according to Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth, he dismissed it as ‘a big fat failure’. But his performance was something he should have been proud of – and for which we can still be grateful.
17 August 2015
[1] Postscript: I’ve since seen the 63-minute ‘Selznick version’ on DVD. This has Montgomery Clift’s and Jennifer Jones’s own voices on the soundtrack – although they’re often hard to hear. The poor technical quality of the film and the ruthless cuts made by Selznick reduce the narrative to near incoherence. Yet they also give what remains of De Sica’s film an affecting fragility and an odd kind of vérité: it’s as though you’re looking at excavated fragments of something that really happened, and was caught on camera.
[2] The names of Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi and Truman Capote (who contributed dialogue) also appear on the credits.