INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE/TERMINAL STATION: Blu-ray (Columbia/Selznick, 1953) Kino Lorber

It is more than a bit of a schlep to digest Montgomery Clift as the swarthy Italian Lothario in Vittorio De Sica’s exquisitely told, Terminal Station (a.k.a Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953); the disconnect, marginally smoothed over by Clift’s undeniable handsomeness, as yet undisturbed, either by audiences discovering his homosexuality, or, by the harrowing car wreck in 1956 that would forever alter his fine-boned features and good fortunes as the closeted beefcake of Hollywood. Born into poverty in Sora, Lazio in 1901, De Sica’s rise to prominence as one of Italy’s foremost proponents of cinema neorealism was as meteoric as it proved incapable to be translated into American picture-making in the mid-1950’s. De Sica’s love of the arts began in 1933, when he founded his own theater company with wife, Giuditta Rissone, and, Sergio Tofano. His alliance with screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini yielded his most prolific period of creativity, resulting in irrefutable masterworks - Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), two of the touchstones in the neorealist movement.  Because De Sica preferred gambling to picture-making, his losses often resulted in his taking on projects that otherwise were of little interest to him. As such, both the work and his reputation within the community of artists began to suffer. At this juncture, De Sica – brilliant, but troubled, compounded this confusion in his private life by marrying Spanish actress, Maria Mercader (the sister of Leon Trotsky’s assassin), even though he was still married to Rissone.  Eventually divorced, De Sica would keep up the pretext of their union, hosting double celebrations on holidays and special occasions with each of his families separately.  So, perhaps it is not all that difficult to understand what about Terminal Station, a picture about an illicit love affair turned tragic, appealed to De Sica.  

Precisely how Terminal Station morphed into Indiscretion of an American Wife is a tale worth telling; the concept for the film outlined by Zavattini, and later, fleshed out by screenwriters Luigi Chiarini, Giorgio Prosperi, and with additional dialogue supplied by Truman Capote for the American cut. That American producer, David O. Selznick – since having prematurely entered his emeritus years – believed De Sica had overshot his mark, endeavoring to make another tear-jerker as poignant and similarly themed as David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) forced Selznick to re-cut the movie drastically before it found its way into American theaters. Alas, neither version was to meet with the critics’ approval. Succumbing to the lure of Hollywood, De Sica was cajoled by Selznick to cast his second wife, Jennifer Jones in the lead, and, due to contractual rights, in the part of the dark and flashing-eyed suitor to fire her imagination, Montgomery Clift, hotter than ever, since his turn in George Steven’s A Place in the Sun (1951). While most critics felt De Sica and the movie were best served by its tender moments, the general impression left behind by advanced screenings of Terminal Station was De Sica had front-loaded the picture with an air of self-importance, deflating these intimate moments by adding preposterous girth, but precious little more to the focus of the centralized illicit affair.  Evidently, Selznick concurred – as he elected to hack 20 min. from the movie, re-issuing it under the title, Indiscretion of an American Wife.  In De Sica’s 89 min original, the director had cleverly embellished the frantic nature of this strained love affair by expanding upon an impressively integrated backdrop of other stories and characters which Selznick – for the American 63-minute reboot – felt diminished the importance of the romance.

Thus, the ‘Indiscretion’ cut left only the Jones/Clift relationship intact; Jones’ Mary Hughs consternation over her infidelity, even as her lover, Giovanni Doria seethed with covetous lust as she hurriedly parted, getting off one train, then waiting for another, all the while soothing the wounded confusion of her disillusioned nephew, Paul (Richard ‘billed as Dick’ Beymer). As all this was somehow meant to translate into an inconsolable appetite for sex, Hughs and Doria inadvertently drew attention to themselves and their dishonorable intentions, resulting in an even more contrived finale. The shooting was thrice complicated: first, by Jones, an actress whose personal insecurities required much mollycoddling from her directors to give a consistent performance; second, by Jones not speaking any Italian and De Sica, zero English; and third, by Jones’ attraction to Clift, whom she uncannily likened to her first husband, Robert Walker, whom Jones had divorced in 1944 to marry Selznick, and whose untimely death in 1951 from a lethal dose of amobarbital and alcohol had since left Jones’ devastated. Clift and Jones may have remained amicable throughout the shoot, if only Jones had not managed to unearth her co-star’s homosexuality. This emasculated her fascination with Clift. But Jones increasingly came to resent her co-star, blaming her bitterness on his method-based approach to acting. To compound tensions on the set, Selznick’s vision changed daily – in some cases, hourly – as he struggled to make sense of the story. Despite these setbacks, De Sica’s cut was rather concisely resolved; infuriating U.S. censors with its unvarnished account of an adulterous romance. To Selznick’s discredit, he could not leave well enough alone. So, together with his own editors and writers, he began to cobble together an alternate version, his Hollywoodized rendition of De Sica's neorealist masterpiece, bludgeoning its most intelligent moments with groundswells of underscore, cutaways and unnecessary fades to black.

Indiscretion of an American Wife became a jumble of tastes and temperaments; the focus, teetering between an exaltation of Jones’ melodramatic screen persona. This, Selznick had always endeavored to deify beyond her natural limitations. Now, he further endeavored to promote Clift to the upper echelons as everyone’s heterosexual hunk du jour. Whatever Selznick’s intent, the result herein was a distillation and wan ghost flower of De Sica's Terminal Station which would remain unseen in America for many years. The plot, such as it remained in both cuts, revolves around Philadelphian housewife and mother, Mary Forbes (Jones) who impetuously falls for Italian-American professor, Giovanni Doria (Clift) while visiting her sister in Rome. Mary indulges in her impromptu romantic escapade, though increasingly, the reckoning of her infidelity plagues her conscience. Eventually, she decides to leave Italy. She boards the first train bound for Paris. But before it can depart from the station, Mary spies Doria on the platform. He implores her to reconsider her decision to leave him. But before the couple can share their most intimate truths, Mary's young nephew, Paul intrudes. Ushering the boy away, Mary reconsiders her hasty departure. She exits the train and engages Doria in a quiet corner of the terminal’s restaurant.

Doria reminds his lover of the first time she professed her real feelings for him. And although she cannot deny those emotions now, Mary is haunted by thoughts of her husband and young daughter, Catherine. Doria suggests Mary can be happy again, with Catherine and him in Pisa and this, she briefly believes too.  He coaxes her into returning to his apartment. However, as they depart the terminal, Paul catches sight of them.  Anxious, Mary offers to buy a hot chocolate for the boy and sends him ahead to the restaurant to wait for her. She then informs Doria their relationship is doomed. Her suggestion, that they should amicably say their goodbyes while each is certain in their reality, infuriates Doria. He slaps Mary across the face and abruptly leaves. Paul and Mary now wait for the next train, seated next to an Italian woman (Liliana Gerace) who has gone into labor.  Mary finds a doctor (Bill Barker) and cares for the woman’s three children while the next baby is delivered. Now, a remorseful Doria reappears and is nearly struck by a passing train on the loading platform. Instead, he boards Mary’s train and, in a darkened compartment, engages her in a passionate kiss.  Unfortunately, the couple is arrested for lewd behavior and taken before the police brigadier (Enrico Glori) on a formal trial. Taking pity on Mary, because she is a wife and mother, the brigadier releases her to return home at once. Tearfully, Mary and Doria say their forever goodbyes on the platform, moments before the train pulls out of station.

In its complete form, as Terminal Station, De Sica’s neo-realist take on this impromptu and sincerely flawed affair almost makes sense. Indeed, others have judged it to be a masterpiece. Alas, as Indiscretion of an American Wife, we lose virtually all of the sobering moments Selznick thought superfluous to the central plot. The American cut is, in a word, a travesty, revealing both the delicateness and tautly constructed ardor in De Sica’s original vision. While Terminal Station charts the purest timeline for these characters, adroitly to canvas their tortured love in barely 1 ½ hours, Selznick’s re-imagined 69 minutes, under the more notorious title, ranks as a second-tiered bastardization, dealt a lethal artistic blow, merely to satisfy the business end of the picture-making biz – and, in the final analysis, not even that, since Selznick’s version was an abysmal flop at the box office. We should also consider that while De Sica was toiling at the peak of his picture-making prowess in 1953, the essence of Selznick’s greatness had all but evaporated with the loss of his autonomy and studio in 1950. Indeed, Selznick, once glorified with back-to-back Oscar-winning Best Pictures in 1939 (Gone with the Wind) and 1940 (Rebecca) had lost touch, not only with the realities of the picture-making biz, but the artistic merits that could bring audiences back into cinemas.

The disparity between De Sica’s genius and Selznick’s maniacal need to control it, reveals a staggering dearth in Selznick’s own, once Teflon-coated virtuosity.  The Americanization of Terminal Station miserably fails to identify or even acknowledge the intentions of its director, but instead reveals Selznick’s folly for man-handling another’s artistic vision to gratify his own desperate, artful gain, presumably to restore his reputation within the industry. Yet, without the sequences Selznick misjudges as extemporaneous, Indiscretion of an American Wife topples into a very pedestrian cesspool of circumstances beyond either star’s control. As though, in viewing his rough cut, Selznick suddenly realized how misguided his efforts were to re-invent De Sica for American audiences, his even more obscure inclusion of two Patti Page songs to kick start the movie – adding a little over 8 min. to its meager girth - is about as meaningless as it proved increasingly popular a few years later; main titles exploited as a showcase for a hit song to buoy pop singers’ careers in perpetuity. This trend has continued at the movies ever since. Viewed comparatively, ‘Indiscretion’ and ‘Terminal’ are disparate examples of the same material, neither to attain the bittersweet romantic pathos found in David Lean’s infinitely more satisfying Brief Encounter.

As De Sica was, in 1953, one of the most celebrated filmmakers of his generation, Selznick’s last-minute tinkering with the director’s neorealist approach to the material really makes no sense at all. Clearly, Selznick had hoped to advance Jennifer Jones’ movie career, even as his other efforts had had the adverse and opposite effect; the actress, quietly becoming a laughing stock in heavily padded melodramas that usually cast her in some incarnation as the lusty vixen. Clift’s participation derived from his own passion for neorealism, unadorned by the superficial glamour usually ascribed Hollywood’s filmic output, also, allowing its actors the freedom to explore their characters. And, of the two star turns in the picture, Clift’s is easily the standout; less encumbered and more free-flowing, nee liberated, by De Sica’s direction. Selznick’s exile from Hollywood did not reinvigorate his prospects as a European ex-pate. Although he had considerable success as the producer of The Third Man (1949), mainly because he remained apart and allowed Carroll Reed’s vision to shine through, his daily quarrels with brilliant film-makers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, on the set of Gone to Earth (1950), eventually resulted in his complete takeover of that project, and, like Terminal Station, going to extremes, even having the bulk of the picture reshot by Rouben Mamoulian, then retitled The Wild Heart for the American market. When Columbia Pictures released Selznick’s cut of De Sica’s movie in 1954, it did so with a very flashy short, Autumn in Rome, directed by William Cameron Menzies and photographed by James Wong Howe to precede the picture. And while the short was, in and of itself, impressive and stylish, it did nothing to smooth over the rough edges of Selznick’s revamp once the main body of the movie began.

 Terminal Station was essentially faithful to the precepts of neorealism, shot on location and populated with a diverse cross-section, ranging from the penurious peasant class to the President of the Republic. De Sica affords even the lowliest extra a moment in which to be distinguished, made integral, rather than incidental to the motivations and principles of our two stars. By contrast, Selznick omitted virtually everyone from this backstory - his most profound intrusion made at the start of the picture. In De Sica’s cut, Jones’ Mary is seen approaching her lover’s apartment; suddenly, inextricably, stricken with a bout of conscience as she runs off to write a letter of farewell. We intuitively understand this is not her first trip to the place, and likely the aforementioned ‘indiscretion’ in Selznick’s title has already occurred. Thus, these introductory moments are fraught with guilt, sexual anxiety, conflicted shame and loyalties, as well as remembrances of that not-so-long-ago desire and off-screen consummation leading up to this single moment of frantic remorse. Selznick’s version cleaves this entire opener from the first act, introducing Jones’ disgraced wife already awaiting a train on the platform, ready to flee from paradise and return to her duties as wife and mother. Whereas De Sica’s cut takes great pains to establish the emotional liabilities incurred by this love affair, Selznick excises the heart of these protagonists – each, now appearing needlessly bitter, even indifferent in regards to the intimacy they once shared.

Such modifications are not merely cosmetic but have, in fact, wrought an ethical transposition. While Terminal Station taps its significance and trepidation in the opaque and hopeless clash to link ownership in one’s decision, either to purely selfish quixotic satisfaction or a retirement to familial indebtedness, Selznick’s cut dismantles our heroine’s ambiguous opportunity to choose for herself the future direction of this life; Mary’s unseen daughter, far more prescient in the Selznick cut.  Terminal Station was, arguably, the penultimate jewel in De Sica’s neorealist crown before he ventured into bawdy comedies and middling melodramas. As for Selznick; he had reached the end of the line in meaningful collaborations. His final picture, the turgidly-scripted remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) marked the premature death knell for his reputation as a once prominent independent Hollywood film-maker. Selznick would die in 1965, with no more opus magnums to mark the occasion.

Despite Truman Capote having received sole writing credit on the American version of the picture, Capote would later confide he barely contributed two scenes and only a few bits of dialogue to the film. An international co-production between De Sica's indie company and one-time mogul, Selznick, neither was ever entirely satisfied with these results. Carson McCullers, originally hired to write the picture, was fired by Selznick and replaced with Paul Gallico, Alberto Moravia and, eventually, Capote. Selznick’s fastidious nature, and his renown for controlling virtually every aspect of production, resulted in a barrage of lengthy memos dictated to De Sica who, again, speaking no English, simply disregarded all correspondences and did things his own way. The battle lines were even more clearly drawn when Montgomery Clift took De Sica’s side in these disputes, claiming Selznick’s vision of a traditional glossy colossus flew in the face of De Sica’s desire to accurately depict a decaying romance. Meanwhile, Jennifer Jones, saddened by the loss of her ex, Robert Walker, transferred her affections to her co-star, unaware of Clift’s sexual preferences for men. Worse, Jones’ marriage to Selznick was, at this point, rocky at best. Although Jones remained wed to Selznick until his death, their last years together were hardly happy ones. When everything was in the can, Selznick went to work reassembling De Sica’s footage his way. The results so infuriated Clift that he denounced the American incarnation as a ‘big, fat failure’ – a kick start to all the negative publicity Indiscretion of an American Wife would receive shortly from the critics.

Whatever its virtues and vices, Indiscretion of an American Wife, as well as Terminal Station, are now available for comparative consideration via Kino Lorber’s newly minted Blu-ray. Curiously, only the American cut warrants a 4K-restoration, while De Sica’s has received a 2K remastering – each derived from the best surviving film elements. Selznick’s cut includes the 8-minute, Patti Page prologue, ‘Autumn in Rome’ and ‘Indiscretion’. While the American cut in 4K looks marginally better than De Sica’s original, the improvements are not all that noticeable. The differences amount to this; a slightly darker image on De Sica’s cut, as well as a modest shift in framing on the left, with dirt and scratches more pronounced on Selznick’s version. Both advance with richer and more prominent film grain and textures. The main titles are radically different in tone. But both expose the ‘rounded corners’ of the film frame on all four sides, usually concealed in projection.  The 2.0 mono track for both versions sounds identical. De Sica’s cut includes an Italian track.  The main titles sound quite tinny. I don’t think sound design was much considered while the picture was being edited.  Interestingly, Kino bills the 8-minute prologue to the American cut as a ‘bonus’ even though it always preceded the American release. The studio also foregoes giving us an audio commentary to accompany either version. In either version, the battle over creative control is quite evident. Terminal Station is not De Sica’s best effort, nor is Indiscretion of an American Wife, anywhere near Selznick’s finest hour. This two film Blu-ray edition is a definite step up from previous home video releases and should please. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

Both versions – 3.5

EXTRAS

0