Indiscreet

Movie Review: Indiscreet

Year of Release: 1958
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Stanley Donen
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman

Plot outline: A tycoon pretends to be married while courting a beautiful actress (IMDb).

Based on Norman Krasna's successful play, "Kind Sir" (with Krasna here supplying his own script adaptation), Indiscreet takes over an hour to move from a hearts-and-flowers romantic piffle to a comedy, with far more subdued results considering the cast and crew involved. The script fills Indiscreet with those fake society matrons and old-world politicians and businessmen that only exist in the movies, but then fails to capitalize on the stereotypes, making Indiscreet a seemingly endless ordeal of pointless blather. Matching the inert script every step of the way, director Stanley Donen plants his camera firmly at a mid-two-shot, and lets the actors recite their lines; it's an exceedingly boring visual design, with an emphasis on close-ups to maximize the film's star power. As for those stars, it's obvious that Grant and Bergman, so memorably paired twelve years before in one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, Notorious!, have a certain chemistry together. But very little in the leaden script allows them to strike sparks together. Bergman, a tad stolid in her take on a world-famous actress, seems in good spirits, which isn't surprising when you consider Indiscreet was a big boost in her campaign to return to the good graces of the American public after the Rossellini scandal. Grant, looking drawn and tired in his early scenes, is tightly controlled as Philip, offering an obvious surface performance that no doubt met the requirements of what audiences expected from "a Cary Grant performance," but which offers little in the way of energy or nuance. A criminally slow start focusing on the patently phony romance (watch both of them literally sigh at each other in one scene) with a less-than-inspired denouement (and with too few genuine chuckles), add up to a whole lot of nothing in Indiscreet, a vapid, boring trifle overmatched by the underutilized skills of its stars. (PM)

My judgement: ** out of 4 stars