Jennifer Jones Centennial: "Indiscretions of an American Wife"
Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 5:48PM
NATHANIEL R in 10|25|50|75|100, Costume Design, Great Moments In..., Indiscretions of an American Housewife, Jennifer Jones, Kissing, Montgomery Clift, Oscars (50s), Vittorio de Sica, melodrama, real time, women who lie to themselves

We're celebrating Jennifer Jones's centennial. By your request (you voted on which two movies we'd cover), here's Nathaniel R...

Your viewing assignment should you choose to accept it, and you really should, is Vittorio de Sica's Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), a floridly emotional 65 minute drama (you read that right) in which a very thirsty Jennifer Jones engages in some illicit behavior because what else can you do when confronted with the beauty of Montgomery Clift in the 1950s?

Though 1953 was arguably Monty's peak (he also starred in Hitchcock's I Confess! and the Best Picture winner From Here to Eternity that year), this melodrama from the Italian master Vittorio de Sica is Jennifer Jones's film from fussy indecisive start to farewell heartbreak finish...

Jones plays Mary Forbes, a married woman visiting her sister in Italy. She's been there for a spell, obviously, and can't quite bring herself to leave her Italian lover Giovanni (Clift) though she knows it's time to break it off.

Baby, you're gonna miss that train.

The film begins with that hoary old device of a letter being written -- what is it with old movies and shots of handwritten letters? -- Mary hoping to slink away from her sins without a face-to-face confrontation. But Giovanni finds her at the train station, just as her nephew has delivered her luggage for her quick getaway (Richard Beymer in his screen debut, acting in all caps: BESOTTED with Auntie Jones, SUSPICIOUS of Monty).

Throughout the cinematography is stunning (though the print streaming at Amazon Prime leaves much to be desired), the choreography and peaks at the local Italians are interesting, and Jones looks incredible; Christian Dior scored what must have been the easiest Costume Design Oscar nomination of all time as Jones and Clift both wear exactly one thing for the whole picture. Were it not for the scant running time, this might qualify as a "shot in real time" picture. (Perhaps it is in the longer European version which goes by Terminal Station). Jones keeps changing her mind about which train she'll take so you can feel the clock tick-tick-tocking out on this affair.

That opening letter is the only attempt to convince you, in that 1950s sort of way, that this has been a chaste affair, and it's not successful. Clift and De Sica, at least, know what's-what; these two have already done the deed. As for Jones, the guilt she's exuding works no matter how you interpret the story. The fact is she wants Giovanni, all of him, and that's bad enough for this bougie wife. 

What follows their initial reunion is an uncomfortable hour of furtive kissing, love spats, impotent pleading, fantasizing about an impossible feature, and one very suggestive potentially ruinous moment when they're discovered by the police in an empty train car in the throes of passion (by which we mean making out in the shadows - HOT). Now Mary really might miss her train and not because she couldn't make up her mind this time.

In short, Indiscretion is a full hour of Jennifer Jones doing that Meryl with her hand on the truckdoor sequence in Bridges of Madison County.  And, to my surprise, she moved me. Is this Jones's best performance? We haven't seen enough to say definitively but we have seen enough to suspect that it is. Montgomery Clift was, perhaps, less enamored of her work. At the end of filming, or so the anecdote goes, Jones gifted him a Gucci briefcase but the clasp was broken. Clift has been quoted as saying

It's beautiful but it doesn't quite work -- how like Jennifer."

 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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