Indiscreet Blu-ray Review
Inexplicable.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 16, 2013
One might be forgiven for thinking that there was a bit of cynical marketing at work by casting Ingrid Bergman in a film
called
Indiscreet. It seems like pop culture chump change now, what with movie stars in and out of rehab,
vicious voicemails to their soon to be ex-spouses or estranged children played with relish on the evening entertainment
shows, and civil and criminal court cases piling up against various celebrities, but Ingrid Bergman's seemingly minor
peccadillo of having an affair (and the perhaps more major peccadillo of conceiving a child) with iconic Italian director
Roberto Rossellini wasn't just front page news around the world in the early fifties, it was cause for actual
denunciations in Congress (could you imagine a Senator denouncing Lindsay Lohan nowadays?). Bergman's career, at
least in the United States, seemed to be over. This was the woman who had been a virginal presence in everything
from
The Bells of St. Mary's to
Joan of Arc, and in that perhaps less celebrity conscious and decidedly
more star struck time, people tended to confuse performers with their roles. It wasn't until 1956 that Bergman was
able to rehabilitate her stateside image and career with
Anastasia, winning an Academy Award which not so
coincidentally was accepted by her longtime friend Cary Grant. Two years later Grant and Bergman would reteam for
the first time since having made the Alfred Hitchcock classic
Notorious, this time in a decidedly different and lighter offering, though one which it doesn't
take a rocket scientist to figure out was probably engineered to trade on Bergman's supposedly shaded past. If
Bergman in real life had been pilloried for having had an affair with a married man while married herself,
Indiscreet posits Bergman as an actress searching for a soul mate who falls in love with a debonair man played
by Grant, a man who
pretends to be married and is therefore carrying on an "affair". There's kind of a "nudge,
nudge, wink, wink" aspect to this slight twisting of then recent history, and while
Indiscreet was in fact based
on a not very successful Broadway comedy called
Kind Sir which had run for a few months in 1953 and 1954
with stars
Mary Martin and Charles Boyer, the fact that the film adaptation garnered its indicative new name and star was most
likely an intentional act on the part of producer-director Stanley Donen, who was certainly no fool and no doubt
understood the subliminal messages being conveyed to a potential audience.
Kind Sir's anemic run of only one season might not seem
that anemic were it not for the fact that the
play represented Mary Martin's first post-
South Pacific role, and interest surely would have been high. It is
certainly not unusual for straight plays not to run as long as musicals, so one wouldn't expect even a smash with a
major star to do anything close to
South Pacific's then record-breaking performance count, but 166
performances for a show with Martin (not to mention Charles Boyer) points out that audiences probably weren't exactly
flocking to this property even in its stage form. Writer Norman Krasna had a long if not particularly distinguished career,
more in the world of film than on the legitimate stage. But Krasna's approach to his material in
Kind Sir is
probably the major reason the show wasn't a multi-season smash on Broadway and isn't the most fondly remembered
film in either Grant or Bergman's long and storied careers.
This is material that fairly screams "farce", with a debonair bachelor pretending to be married so that he doesn't need
to make a commitment. But Krasna takes an almost dramatic, even soap operatic, approach to this fare, and the
results are not only rarely amusing (let alone funny), they fail to really provide much interest beyond the glamorous
setting. The strange thing is Krasna was a rather splendid farce writer, as some of his other screenplays prove, so why
he chose to craft a kind of creaky, weepy entertainment that gets by—sometimes just barely—on the combined
charisma of its two legendary stars is a quandary. There's really not much else there to
Indiscreet.
Indiscreet would seem to be a rather unusual entry in the filmography of Stanley
Donen. It's neither an ebullient musical like
Singin' in the Rain nor a comedically tinged thriller like
Charade. Even within the second tier of Donen's
oeuvre,
Indiscreet is a decidedly middling entry, one that fitfully sputters to life in the final act when Bergman's character
of Anna Kalman discovers that Grant's character of Philip Adams is trying to pull the matrimonial wool over her eyes, and
decides to create her own bit of subterfuge. But even that effort falls short of any real laughs, and once again Krasna
and Donen revert to dewy eyed close ups of Bergman weeping at the joy of having found happiness with a man who
has gone to great lengths to avoid making a commitment to her. One can only assume Donen's attention was more
absorbed with his film version of
Damn Yankees!, which was being done at around the same time. Who knows
what was on Krasna's mind.
Indiscreet Blu-ray, Video Quality
Indiscreet is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This film
was lensed by the legendary Freddie Young (
Lawrence of Arabia), but you'd hardly know it by the lackluster look of the film, partly due to its
claustrophobic "one set play" source material (Donen does attempt to open things up, to middling effect). The elements
here are in generally quite good shape in terms of damage, but the color is another matter entirely. Things have noticeably
faded, with flesh tones and reds tipped rather precariously toward the brown end of things. Young repeatedly filters
Bergman's close-ups in a gauzy soft focus technique: this is
not a transfer issue and is faithfully recreated here,
though no doubt some "experts" will insist there are problems where there are none. Ironically, a lot of the non-soft focus
material isn't particularly sharp, with midrange shots sometimes offering little more than blobs of color. The transfer looks a
good deal better in motion than some of these screenshots might suggest, but this isn't quite at the level we've come to
expect from Olive, perhaps because the elements were not curated particularly effectively by Paramount. The good news is
that Olive continues to leave well enough alone and has not tweaked this transfer in any noticeable way, shape or form.
This is in fact a rather grainy offering, especially in some of the opticals (a couple of split screen moments, which presage
Pillow Talk, suffer from added dirt and
softness, as should be expected).
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