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.

The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica, 1944)

Luciano De Ambrosis and Emilio Cigoli in The Children Are Watching Us

Andrea: Emilio Cigoli
Pricò: Luciano De Ambrosis
Nina: Isa Pola
Roberto: Adriano Rimoldi
Agnese: Giovanna Cigoli
Grandmother: Jone Frigerio
Aunt Berelli: Dina Perbellini

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Screenplay: Cesare Giulio Viola, Margherita Maglione, Cesare Zavattini, Adolfo Franci, Gherardo Gherardi, Vittorio De Sica
Based on a novel by Cesare Giulio Viola
Cinematography: Giuseppe Caracciolo, Romolo Garroni
Production design: Amleto Bonetti
Film editing: Mario Bonotti
Music: Renzo Rossellini

The title, The Children Are Watching Us, carries a warning that threatens to turn Vittorio De Sica's film into a moral fable. Which would probably have been okay with the Fascist and Catholic censors watching over De Sica's shoulder, since it ostensibly serves the cause of God and family, meting out punishment to the careless parents who let young Pricò suffer from the failure of their marriage. The mother here bears the chief burden of scorn for letting her carnal desires lead her away from the path of duty, though the father also gets blamed for letting his workaholic tendencies distract him from his role as husband and father. But of course a director as sophisticated as De Sica can't allow himself to be so morally didactic, especially since he's working here with, among a raft of writers, Cesare Zavattini, who became his greatest collaborator on the classics to come: Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us is an unabashed tearjerker, with an often heartbreaking performance by young Luciano De Ambrosis, but there is a substance to the film, a clear-eyed look at the characters and the milieu in which they exist, that transcends its implicit sermonizing and anticipates the neorealistic postwar works.

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Bicycle Thieves

Antonio: Lamberto Maggiorani 
Bruno: Enzo Staiola 
Maria: Lionella Carell 
The Charitable Lady: Elena Altieri
Baiocco: Gino Saltamarenda 
The Beggar: Giulio Chiari
The Thief: Vittorio Antonucci

Director: Vittorio De Sica 
Screenplay: Oreste Biancolli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vittorio De Sica, Adolfo Franci, Gheraldo Gherardi, Gerardo Guerrieri, Cesare Zavattini
Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini
Cinematography: Carlo Montuori
Production design: Antonio Traverso
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 
Music: Alessandro Cicognini

One of the many things I love about Bicycle Thieves* is the omnipresence of bicycles. At the beginning of the film, we spot them whizzing by the bike-deprived Antonio, as incidental and elusive as birds in the sky. But by the climactic scene, when Antonio and Bruno are sitting despondently on the curb, they are everywhere: There are hundreds of them parked outside the nearby sports arena; a bike race whizzes by only inches from the father and son; and of course there's that fateful bike outside a doorway just around the corner. Bikes become as tempting to Antonio as bottles and glasses would be to a recovering alcoholic in a bar. I wonder how much of the greatness of Bicycle Thieves depends on that list of no less than seven screenwriters: Did Vittorio De Sica really need six other people to tell what is essentially one of the simplest of stories? I think perhaps he did, for the film is crowded with incidentals, with scenes and details that give it such a wonderful texture, from the relationship between Antonio and Maria to the crowd of job-seekers outside the employment office to the bustling bike market scene, and so on. Details such as Antonio's ignoring the fact that Maria is carrying two heavy buckets of water when he finds her to tell her of his job add immeasurably to our sense of his flawed, self-obsessed character. Did the scene in which Antonio watches a man climb up and up and up stacks of shelved, pawned sheets arise from observation on location, or was it suggested by a writer as a way of signaling the depth of poverty in postwar Rome? There are small, non-essential but telling moments in every scene, such as the man at the bicycle market who is clearly a pedophile trying to lure Bruno astray. De Sica and his writers have loaded every rift of Bicycle Thieves with ore. But only De Sica could have been responsible for drawing such miraculous performances from unknown actors like Lamberto Maggiorani, who has the haunted look of a young Robert Duvall, and Enzo Stailolo, whose Bruno verges on cute -- especially when his face lights up at the thought of food -- but never becomes cloying, and at the end exhibits a wonderful mixture of disappointment and love for his father.

*This seems to have become the official English-language title of the film, sanctioned by IMDb among others, after many years of being known as The Bicycle Thief. It is, of course, the literal translation of the Italian title, Ladri di Biciclette. But it's not only preferable because of fidelity to the original but also because, as David Thomson puts it in his entry on the film in Have You Seen...?, "in the world it shows, there are thousands of bicycle thieves because of the terrible economy."

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.