|
ON THE VERGE Indiscretion of an American Wife is director Vittorio De Sica unexpectedly doing the Briefest Encounter with Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift in a hugely utilitarian, multimillion dollar Rome train station. Running only 63 minutes, it was originally a 90 minute “lay over” entitled Stazione Termini, padded with vignettes from others occupying the space. But Jones’s real life husband David Selznick, who owned the American distribution rights to the movie, as well as having financed most of it, edited out everything and everyone except Jones and Clift and the constabulary. Well, not quite: there are flashes here and there suggesting who the padders are, though only De Sica regrets we didn’t get to see them (and when we do, in the full version on YouTube, they and the crowds of passengers pirouette around or gawk at the two stars). Unlike Noël Coward’s technically virginal yet mentally adulterous hand-holding, married Jones and single Clift have had a hot affair before the movie starts, and, rather luridly during the movie, even though she’s deserting him out of guilt and shame, they get arrested for doing it—officially charged with “talking to each other” in an empty, isolated train car. Just before the coupling commences, the audience is clued in to the fakiest kind of moral squealing: a trainman spots the adulterers climbing into the car and we’ve got to believe he’s one of those right-wing Christers because who else in amorous Rome would have branded the lovers with The Scarlet Letter. The movie’s in trouble before this, even before Clift gives Jones a public slap across the face, which probably should be the more criminal offense if it hadn’t been so deserving. These two—on the verge of God only knows what nervous, crazed emotions; they don’t need to be arrested, they need to be committed. Filmed several years before his accident, Monty is at his most adult-handsome, for a change not looking skeletal, his outerwear advantageous. With a young Richard Beymer, previewing Jan Handzlik’s younger Patrick in Auntie Mame. Adapted from a Cesare Zavattini story, Carson McCullers was engaged to write the screenplay but was fired by Selznick, who would then hire Truman Capote, who wrote dialogue for a few scenes while Clift and Jones were waiting in the terminal. The name Christian Dior enough to get an Oscar nomination for the single suit Jones wears. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
|