Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953)
I wanted to watch it without boning up first; for I sensed this thing had a checkered history. It was commissioned by Selznick to showcase his wife Jennifer Jones, but fortunately Italian post neo-realist director Vittorio de Sica wanted to make it art. The casting is good, because Jennifer Jones is a spoiled woman playing one, and Montgomery Clift — who was kind of nutty as a fruitcake — is playing his own truth too. One online wiseguy calls it “a melodramatic, boring and dated romance.” Well, it’s certainly dated. Clift slaps Jones when she threatens to leave him, after going on about how American women are “too emancipated.” Jones and Clift had a rocky ride on set. When she discovered Clift was gay she “became so overwrought she stuffed a mink jacket down the toilet of a portable dressing room.” After filming Jones gave Clift a briefcase. He said: "It's beautiful, but it doesn't quite work - like Jennifer.” This film was made three years before the accident that slightly wrecked Clift’s face, so not only is he haunting, but movie-star-handsome. Jones calls him a lost child — and there are many children in the film. One of my favourite scenes is when Jones gives three little boys chocolate and then watches them eat — their frightened innocence is what we see in Clift’s eyes. He is desperate throughout, as he is chasing her (although at the beginning they seem literally ready to devour each other; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a naked expression of lovelorn lust portrayed on screen). The disparity in their deeper feelings is clear in a line for Clift (most likely written by Truman Capote): “When I saw you, I knew what morning was.” But let’s not talk about the love affair — that was Selznick’s concern — but instead the movie de Sica shot around it. Indiscretion of an American Wife was originally titled Terminal Station and it’s just as much about that, as ‘love.’ Sure, there’s Jones and Clift, but there is the world that surrounds them, teaming with life. Four fat priests appear, and one says to the ticket agent --‘Four tickets, please.’ Later they appear again and the same fat priest says to a waiter -- “Four cups of tea.” Nuns keep wandering in and out, wearing large white hats (as in The Flying Nun). A bunch of political-looking young men with armbands keep bursting into song. At one point three men in top hats appear, followed by someone carrying a large Italian flag. At another point a line of deaf children converse in sign language with their teacher. Finally Jones tries to help a fainting woman — the mother of the three boys — who is accompanied by her coal miner husband. As Jones leaves the family, the fainting wife says “I’ll pray Madonna for you” and the husband says “She — good wife, good mother, always her family, never her” — words which would weigh heavily on a guilty housewife (or someone venturing out during COVID-19). Sure, Clift almost gets run over by a train, and he and Jones get arrested for necking in a dark railway car (that scene is spooky and sexy beyond belief). But it’s the ambiance, the ebb and flow of need, the joy — or just sheer necessity— that is constantly rushing by — or getting crushed in the crowd — that gives Indiscretion of an American Housewife it’s truth. De Sica does everything to distract us from the love story in order to drag us into it. Like a magician he waves one hand saying 'look over here,’ and we do, and thus he is able to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The rabbit in this case is our suspension of disbelief; by consistently surrounding the melodramatic with the mundane, he convinces us of its reality. So what’s the point? Just to show us what he sees, I suspect. I’ve been writing movie reviews for nearly two and a half months, ranting about COVID-19 — and occasionally spilling the beans about my personal life. What’s the point of that? For me, it’s all about confession. Confessing is endemic to me. Whether I confessed to my mother that I hated God, or that I was a homosexual, or that I had just pulled by pants down and danced around a partly constructed house with my 9 year old friend Robert Steck in Buffalo in 1961 —she forgave me. But then I had to stop burdening her with my confessions, because I loved her — and her blessings — too much. Then I began to confess to the world. Now I always receive forgiveness, even when there is none. Just the act of confession itself precipitates release, for when my mother stopped forgiving me, I just forgave myself; and I now just imagine you forgive me too. Most of the time my confessions are met with awe or shocked curiosity (‘You’ve actually slept with more than 1000 men? How did that happen?') Part of it is a dare; a demand for love in even the most dire circumstances; when I fear there is very little in me to love at all. Part of it is in defence of confession as salvation: as a redemption for the world. But another reason for all this confessing is — I think — to sustain me though the biggest lie of all — imagining that no one will ever read this. Of course they won’t (there I go again!) but it seems that the more I reveal, and the more embarrassing my revelations are -- the more certain I am that you are there. I can, in this way conjure you. Because this social distancing is killing us. Doug Ford is talking about extending our prison time because a bunch of kids got frisky and had too much fun last Saturday in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park. Well if you really cared Doug, why didn't the police arrest somebody? We’ve been isolated in this dreary sameness until our eyes have glazed over and we can’t tell one day from the next; the routine is crushing us like a boulder, I need something, anything that’s different from yesterday, please! What other awful stuff about myself can I tell you — that I haven’t already told you — to keep us both occupied? Think of me like Montgomery Clift, peering at you from inside his perpetually wounded face — pleading — won’t you just love me a little bit? Under the circumstances, we can hardly blame Jennifer Jones for the cardinal sin of putting the love of her husband and child before her own happiness (after all, that new hypocritical requisite is the official moral code of COVID19!). But surely we also can’t blame Clift for trying.
