Indiscretion of an American Wife (Vittorio De Sica, 1957)

Indiscretion of an American Wife (Vittorio De Sica, 1957)

Cast: Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi, Richard Beymer. Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi, Truman Capote. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo. Art direction: Virgilio Marchi. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Alessandro Cicognini.

This plodding romance suffered from the micromanaging of its producer, David O. Selznick, who wanted a big hit for his wife, Jennifer Jones. Director Vittorio De Sica and Selznick fought constantly over the film, and when De Sica's hour-and-a-half version received disappointing comments in previews, Selznick took it out of his hands. Among other things he cut it to a little over an hour and changed De Sica's title, Terminal Station (in Italian, Stazione Termini), to the more blatantly sexy Indiscretion of an American Wife. It was a commercial flop that did nothing for Jones's career. Fortunately, De Sica's cut survived, and it the one more generally seen today. It contains some of the director's neorealistic elements, including the crowds that throng through the film's big set, Rome's railway station. They seem livelier and more real than the lovers played by Jones and Montgomery Clift, a well-to-do Philadelphia woman with a husband and child back in the States, and an Italian academic whose fluent English is explained by his having an American mother. Jones's Mary Forbes has decided to break off their affair and return home, but Clift's Giovanni Doria pursues her to the station, where he makes various attempts to persuade her to stay. They meet various impediments, including Mary's nephew Paul (played by a teenage Richard Beymer), who comes to the station to bring her some things she has left behind and lingers long enough to guess that her aunt and Giovanni are more than just friends -- especially when Giovanni gets so angry that he slaps her. Mary waffles a lot about whether she should stay, and at one point she and Giovanni sneak into an isolated railway car sidelined on the tracks for a last snog, only to be arrested and hauled to the station's police office. The lovers are not very well-drawn, and the scenes between them feel derivative of better movies: There are closeups of the embracing pair that recall the classic ones of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), and the railway station setting brings to mind scenes from Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1941). Ultimately we don't feel as involved with Jones and Clift as a couple as we do with the lovers in those movies.

Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)

Umberto D. is sometimes grouped with Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) and Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) as the completing element in a trilogy about the underclass in postwar Rome. Shoeshine could be said to be a film about youth, Bicycle Thieves about middle age, and Umberto D. about old age. All three were directed by De Sica from screenplays by Cesare Zavattini that earned the writer Oscar nominations. Although Umberto D. is unquestionably a great film, it also seems to me the weakest of the three, largely because De Sica and Zavattini can't fully avoid the trap of sentimentality in telling a story about an old man and his dog. Umberto D. also relies too heavily on its score by Alessandro Cicognini to tug on our heartstrings. These flaws are mostly redeemed by the great sincerity of the performances, particularly by Carlo Battisti as Umberto, but also by Maria Pia Casilio as the pregnant housemaid, and Lina Gennari as Umberto's greedy landlady. Battisti, a linguistics professor who never acted before or after this film, is the perfect embodiment of the crusty Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant living on a pension that's inadequate to his needs. We're told that he has "debts," which include back rent to the landlady. He has no family except his dog, a small terrier called Flike, whom he dotes on, and no friends except for the housemaid, whose plight, since she's pregnant by one of two soldiers who have no intention of marrying her, is not much better than his. The film is most alive when it follows these characters on their daily rounds: the maid getting up in the morning and starting her daily chores, which include a continuing battle against the ants that infect the flat, and Umberto walking Flike, encountering old friends who carefully avoid noticing his plight or helping him out of it. He's too proud to beg and unwilling to go into a shelter because he would have to abandon Flike. In the end, he is forced out of the flat by the landlady, and wanders into a park where he tries to give Flike away to a little girl who has played with him there before. Her nursemaid, however, refuses to consider it -- dogs are dirty, she says. In a desperate moment, he picks up Flike, ready to stand in front of an oncoming train and die with him on the railroad tracks, but the dog panics, squirms out of his arms, and runs away. The film concludes with Umberto, having regained Flike's confidence, playing with the dog, their future still uncertain. The inconclusiveness of the final scene helps reduce the sentimentality that has flooded the sequence and focus our attention on Umberto's plight, rather than gratify our desire for closure.