Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953)
** (out of 4)
An American wife (Jennifer Jones) needs to leave Italy for Paris but she's having a hard time letting go of her Italian lover (Montgomery Clift). Originally this was released as STAZIONE TERMINI at 89-minutes but when it hit America, the producer chopped it down to just 63-minutes and added this new title. I'm not going to try and review the original since I haven't seen it but I really do hope it's better than this thing here, which is just a boring mess. Again, I have no idea why David O. Selznick decided to cut this movie down and I'm not certain if it helped or hurt it. I can say that this version here is just one big, boring melodrama that thankfully features two good actors or else this would have been a real disaster. I knew I was in trouble early on during a scene where the woman is writing a note, can't finish it and just crumbles it up. This is when the first loud, swelling music happened and this here was a clue that we were just going to get a boring, wannabe tear-jerker. Throughout the movie there were at least a dozen moments where the music would go loud and over-dramatic but I guess they were trying to use the music to make up for the fact that nothing you were watching was dramatic or emotion. This movie is really, really trying to make the viewer feel for these characters but that's pretty much impossible especially when you know so little about them. The majority of the time they just come across as two people who need to get a life. Both Jones and Clift are good in their roles but I'd say that both of them had much better days. I think just knowing how great they are made up for the fact that they weren't given much and I'm not too convinced that Monty was the right person for the role. What's really shocking is that director Vittorio DeSica made the masterpiece UMBERTO D before this thing.
** (out of 4)
An American wife (Jennifer Jones) needs to leave Italy for Paris but she's having a hard time letting go of her Italian lover (Montgomery Clift). Originally this was released as STAZIONE TERMINI at 89-minutes but when it hit America, the producer chopped it down to just 63-minutes and added this new title. I'm not going to try and review the original since I haven't seen it but I really do hope it's better than this thing here, which is just a boring mess. Again, I have no idea why David O. Selznick decided to cut this movie down and I'm not certain if it helped or hurt it. I can say that this version here is just one big, boring melodrama that thankfully features two good actors or else this would have been a real disaster. I knew I was in trouble early on during a scene where the woman is writing a note, can't finish it and just crumbles it up. This is when the first loud, swelling music happened and this here was a clue that we were just going to get a boring, wannabe tear-jerker. Throughout the movie there were at least a dozen moments where the music would go loud and over-dramatic but I guess they were trying to use the music to make up for the fact that nothing you were watching was dramatic or emotion. This movie is really, really trying to make the viewer feel for these characters but that's pretty much impossible especially when you know so little about them. The majority of the time they just come across as two people who need to get a life. Both Jones and Clift are good in their roles but I'd say that both of them had much better days. I think just knowing how great they are made up for the fact that they weren't given much and I'm not too convinced that Monty was the right person for the role. What's really shocking is that director Vittorio DeSica made the masterpiece UMBERTO D before this thing.