INDISCREET (1958)
Directed by Stanley Donen
Warner Brothers, 100 minutes, not rated.
★
It would be safe to say that 1950s values were not like those of today. We don’t expect movies made earlier than World War Two to reflect current sensibilities, but the Fifties are a challenge if, for no other reason, a lot of people remember them. You are left with two choices: You can either go with what you see on the screen without judgement, or smugly congratulate yourself for having left those values behind. In the case of gender expectations such as we see on display in Indiscreet, my vote goes for smugness. This Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman vehicle is a Model T in a Maserati world.
Indiscreet was the first time that Grant and Bergman acted together since Notorious in 1946, but whereas the latter Alfred Hitchcock film is considered a classic, the 1958 Stanley Donen-directed flick now seems classically bad. Renowned London stage actress Anna Kalman (Bergman) is searching for Mr. Right. She meets economist Philip Adams (Grant), who is attracted to her, and she’s over the moon. Yet despite their chemistry, Philip is a distressing combination of romantic wooing and ghosting. Anna’s friend Margaret “Megs” Jenkins (Doris Banks) is wary of that pattern. When Philip subsequently tells Anna he’s married but estranged from his wife, Megs advises Anna to retreat with all haste. Because this is a romantic comedy, that’s the last thing she’s likely to do!
Anna imagines herself a worldly, mature woman capable of just enjoying the moment. That is, until Philip tells her that he’s being transferred to NATO in New York City for five months and will be mostly incommunicado. (It’s 1958, so no email, Skype, or Zoom, and overseas phone calls were both unreliable and wicked expensive.) Things get even more dicey when Anna tells an old friend Alfred (Cecil Parker) that she plans to surprise Philip by sailing to New York to see him. Alfred spills the beans that Philip is a confirmed bachelor who has never been married.
There’s a now arcane proverb that goes: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Anna responds with a bit of subterfuge of her own. She pretends that everything is fine, but plots to lure Philip to her apartment where a former boyfriend David will pretend to be her current flame. At the last minute, though, David can’t make it, so she asks her elderly building superintendent Carl (David Kossoff) to hide in her bedroom, open the door when Philip arrives, quickly peek into the room, then retreat behind closed doors. Think that will work? Think Philip will see the folly of his ways and propose?
From the vantage point of 1958, Anna’s desperation to corral a husband was in keeping with social expectations. Sixty-five years later it looks sappier than sugaring season in Vermont. Still, there’s a disconnect in having our two principals looking outwardly sophisticated while inhabiting roles more appropriate for younger actors. It was one thing for Bergman to play a lovestruck young woman in Casablanca when she was 27, but it’s weird to crawl back into such a role at 43. The part she plays–and I swear her Swedish accent had grown thicker–would have been more appropriate for ingenue types such as Doris Day or Audrey Hepburn. One might also think that the 54-year-old Grant would be well cast as a cad, but too long in the tooth to be convincing as a fraternity boy-style seducer. To be clear, I’m not saying that older actors shouldn’t be cast as romantic leads, but I am suggesting that we should see at least some connections between their accomplished careers and their past unrequited affairs. On screen, though, Philip is a wolf on the prowl and Anna his she-wolf shadow, the difference being that he wants to mate and she wants a mate. At times it felt cruel to laugh. Imagine Bergman and Grant reduced to emotional cripples.
Perhaps, though, I over-intellectualize. It might be enough simply to say that this is a dumb movie whose major virtue is that it looks good in Technicolor.
Rob Weir
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