The Indiscretion of an American Wife The Indiscretion ...
Vittorio De Sica's 1954 Indiscretion of an American Wife is one of the great what-ifs in movie history: What if its tantalizing potential worked? This collaboration between De Sica, the most popular of the Italian Neorealist directors, and David O. Selznick, the producer of Hollywood's superfantastic, non-realistic Gone with the Wind, proved to be a ruinous clash of sensibilities, resulting in an almost legendary mishap. Yet its possibilities remain enticing.
The newly issued Criterion two-film DVD offers both De Sica's original 89-minute European version (known as Terminal Station) and the 72-minute version that Selznick released in the United States. You get the unusual opportunity to compare seriousness to commercialism. Seeing both cuts of this story about an American woman (played by Jennifer Jones) who has an affair with a young doctor (played by Montgomery Clift) while visiting her relatives in Rome, helps resolve speculation about the contrasting notions of prudence in two different cultures. The naughty subject matter can also be the stuff of intense moral and erotic surmise?and that's always been the basic attraction of this dramatic jigsaw puzzle.
De Sica had reached the peak of his artistry. He started out as an actor but retained his popular entertainer's instinct as a director. (By the early 50s in Umberto D, Miracle in Milan?two different strains of neorealism?he took post-war hardship to opposite extremes). There shouldn't have been a problem. De Sica had mastered the subject of infidelity and its emotional consequences in his memorable first film The Children Are Watching Us (1942). Here, reworking that theme with his long-time screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (who wrote the original story Stazione Terminale), De Sica was prepared to explore the subject more intimately. He had just completed his return to acting in Max Ophuls' romantic-triangle masterpiece The Earrings of Madame De, and now the influence of that movie can be felt in his work with two American actors noted for exposing their emotional and sexual vibes.
But somehow De Sica's attempt to weave the personal agonies of undercover yet indiscreet lovers into a nighttime vision of humans in transit wasn't perfectly judged. Terminal Station shows that the broader scope of De Sica's vision (his good-natured view of peculiar social behavior) clashed with the lovers' private passions. Selznick's American cut, surprisingly, emphasizes sex, but that isn't enough either. In fact, it's too much. Both Jones' and Clift's emotionalism are in competition. Physically they're a striking a pair: both dark-haired and sensitive. Their romantic profiles recall Clift with Liz Taylor in A Place in the Sun, but in that film the woman's confidence complemented the man's insecurity; her innocent radiance blessed his guilt. This movie, suffused with turmoil and anguish, is a series of collapses as the haunted lovers keep bickering, re-embracing and embarrassing themselves. In both versions, the high point is when they're caught making out in an empty train car, marched to a police station and threatened with public humiliation. De Sica treats it sympathetically, while the American version is more leering and suspenseful.
Because the film's dialogue was written by Truman Capote, buffs have long imagined an alternate version of this movie, alluding to Clift as a sexual renegade indulging a train station pick up (combining Breakfast at Tiffany's with Tennessee Williams to anticipate Pasolini). But these two extant versions are each over-explicit and under-realized to sufficiently inspire more grounded speculation.
?Armond White
Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy is a cornerstone of conspiracy literature. It's an 800-plus-page, deliberately confounding, strychnine-laced literary leviathan about the secret society that may or may not control the world?basically, a mind-bending work of staggering bullshit.
Except for when it's true. Dig: "[T]he Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip." Consider that line, then consider that the original Total Information Awareness eye-in-the-pyramid-shining-over-the-world is imagery directly related to this 1975 book?MDMA for paranoids.
Maybe Logic, the recently released documentary about Wilson, contains few synapse-stir-frying conspiracy revelations. Wilson currently lives in constant pain brought on by post-polio syndrome (a condition obviously brought on by the Illuminati). He speaks in a halting voice. The darkness that informs Wilson's best ideas is absent, and the soft-boiled California post-hippie quackery that almost ruins his work is on full display. The acolytes interviewed seem to be Dead fans who work in IT departments, dress up for Renaissance fairs and quote choice lines from Red Dwarf to each other.
The doc is mostly tedious and/or silly, until something noteworthy occurs near the end. Because of Wilson's debilitating post-polio condition?and because he's Robert Anton Wilson?he needs to take marijuana as a medicine. Footage from a pro-medical marijuana rally in Santa Cruz shows Wilson at his most lucid, talking about needing marijuana to cope with his pain and wishing this pain upon George W. Bush. He stays on message, never once mentioning Jungian collective consciousness or the Illuminati or other such nonsense. His clarity and anger inject life into the movie, which then squanders its earned goodwill with a final dose of ill-conceived computer editing, New Age background music and unintelligible hippie rambling.
?Adam Bulger