Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953)
Indiscretion of an American Wife came out in the United States in 1954. That was David O. Selznick's ridiculous title devised as an alternative to the less misleadingly-provocative Stazione Termini, or Terminal Station.
The title wasn't the only thing Selznick changed. He gutted the movie; its 89 generous minutes became, in Selznick's fickle hands, a jumbled, inchoate 64, replete with an accompanying short commissioned by the studio to pad the running time out to feature-length.
Happily, both Selznick's Indiscretion of an American Wife and the original Terminal Station – the one conceived and cut by Vittorio De Sica – remain with us today. (The latter will screen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this summer as part of More Than Life Itself, a retrospective of De Sica's work as actor and director.) A comparison reveals differences not only in length and structure but also, more remarkably, in style and sensibility. It seems clear, on the evidence of their work in the editing room, that the creative war waged between Selznick and De Sica was one of first principles. It was De Sica's way of thinking about the movies that galled Selznick: it was what we can only call neo-realism.
De Sica, alongside screenwriter and long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini, helped found the Italian neo-realist movement in the mid-1940s, filling the aesthetic vacuum left by the war with a more engaged and contemplative cinema. Bicycle Thieves, from 1948, is considered an exemplar of the form, and its merits are representative: its action unfurls slowly and naturalistically; its actors are largely non-professionals; it concerns itself with issues of class and morality. The movie is a tragedy about a father and son desperate to recover their only means of supporting the family, a bike used for posting advertisements around the city, after it's stolen in the street. Like nearly every neo-realist film, it is devastating.
It was to the surprise and consternation of many that in 1952, De Sica and Zavattini were whisked by David O. Selznick to Hollywood to write and direct their first English-language film. And all things considered, Terminal Station, as it was still then called, seemed an auspicious production: Its script boasted contributions by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, and it was to star Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones, both at the height of their craft.
These are Hollywood hallmarks, to be sure. Yet despite its conventional furnishings Terminal Station hardly seems a Hollywood film: it's too conspicuously guided by the De Sica's neo-realist impulses. What Terminal Station makes apparent is that neo-realism is not so much a style of filmmaking as a philosophy of the same. It has to do with time and space – what the camera observes, takes in, lingers over, and why and for how long. The additional minutes in De Sica's cut of the feature are not dedicated to expanded characteristics or the deepening of the story. They're dedicated to simple, seemingly purposeless observation: His movie drifts and loiters, hovering over extras for a superfluous moment or stopping to peruse an unrelated nearby scene. This excess is what makes Terminal Station so sublime. Naturally, Selznick cut out all of it.
What's intriguing is what this means for neo-realism in a contemporary context. Clearly the sensibility, as distinguished from the historical movement, could be meaningfully applied beyond the borders of its time and place – and, as De Sica's foray into Hollywood proved, quite fruitfully.
How and where has the neo-realist impulse endured? We might look to the new frontiers of naturalism: to the social realism mastered by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, or, a decade earlier, to the systematic rigour of Dogme 95. Or we might look to the new wave of independent filmmaking in New York, where, as in classical neo-realism, spaces are opened up, time is liberated from the demands of action, and characters aren't exactly goal-oriented or poised to move ahead.
Neo-realism persists, even if only as residue, in a strain of independent cinema that resists precisely the rules of moviemaking imposed by Selznick on De Sica's Terminal Station. The virtues excised for Indiscretion of an American Woman – the shortening of long takes, the removal of what Selznick felt was trivial – are the same qualities that would be streamlined out of any modern Hollywood production. They're the qualities of a different kind of movie, a different way of thinking about how movies are made: They suggest that diversions are as important as main events, that action on the sidelines is as significant as action in centre field, that every person is as worthy of attention as the heroes of the story being told.
It's in that sensibility that neo-realism endures. And it's exactly that which proves vital.