When Ingrid Bergman won the Academy Award in 1957 for Anastasia, it read like the end of a tinseltown screenplay: tarnished star, humbled by exile for her shameless behavior, returns to the city that made her famous, and is welcomed home with open arms. Of course, the truth was a little more complicated. Bergman was unable to attend the Academy Awards. Instead, she received the award from Roberto Rosselini while in the bathtub.
More importantly, despite the years of alienation and recrimination, the Swedish star was far from humbled. Even while attempting to attain a divorce from Rosselini, Bergman refused to regret her decade of tempestuous marriage and moviemaking with the neorealist director. She had taken risks, romantically and artistically, and the result had been more artistic freedom - if not mainstream acceptance - and three beautiful children. Neither did Hollywood fully embrace her. A pre-recorded intervew with Bergman was pulled from The Ed Sullivan Show when an audience poll rejected the idea. So, in 1957, with 2 Oscars, 2 divorces, 4 children, and tenuously positive box office appeal, the question was: what's next?
The answer came from Ingrid Bergman's old friend, Cary Grant. [More...]
He and director Stanley Donen had the script for a failed Broadway comedy called Kind Sir, about a woman who falls in love with a married man, only to discover after months of flirtation that he's been single and lying in order to keep from being tied down. This kind of battle-of-the-sexes comedy was common enough in the 1950s. However, it was uncharted territory for the dramatic actress more used to playing saints and serious roles. Still, Ingrid Bergman needed the money, and she was always up for a challenge, so she joined her friend Grant in England to film this little sex comedy - renamed Indiscreet as a nod to both its theme and its lead actress's notoriety.
Indiscreet is a silly, sexy piece of fluff that benefits highly from Bergman's ill-repute. Any questions about whether Bergman could do comedy are completely laid to rest - it turns out, she's pretty good! Though slapstick comedy is not her forte, it helps that Ingrid Bergman still has the same sizzling chemistry with Cary Grant as they'd had in Notorious a decade previous. Grant dances - sometimes literally - through the film. The real fun, however, is hearing the scandal-plagued Bergman toss off lines like, "How dare he make love to me and not be married!"
This wink-and-a-nudge tone is the appeal of late 50's sex comedies. Whereas in the early 50's, Bergman had been excoriated for her affair with Rosselini, as sexual mores were loosening and Hollywood was playing faster and looser with the Hays Code, now Bergman could laugh at the absurdity of it all and - at least in the film - sleep with a married man (offscreen, of course). Indiscreet itself holds all of the genre cliches, from the beautiful costumes, to the silly dialogue, to a splitscreen shot of the two in bed that looks straight out of a Doris Day picture. However, the elegance and fire of Grant and Bergman together elevates Indiscreet from cute to classy. Well, mostly classy.
With Indiscreet completed, Ingrid Bergman started a new phase of her career in a dramatically different Hollywood from the one she'd left. The studio system was crumbling, the star system was fading, and new opportunities were hard to come by. However, Bergman had more control over her career than she'd ever had before. Her next few films would show just how well she could use her newfound freedom.
previously: Intermezzo (1939), Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942), 10 Best Ingrid Bergman Kisses (1935 through 1970), Notorious, (1946), Joan of Arc (1948), Journey to Italy (1954)