Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Indiscreet Blu-ray Movie 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 Movie, 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).

Indiscreet Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Indiscreet's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono audio is in about the same general condition as the image quality— certainly acceptable, but in the "could it have been better?" range. There's noticeable distortion in the midrange with regard to the film's piano based score, though dialogue is largely free from any distracting issues (Grant's official speech early in the film sounds a little strange, but I'm assuming that that was intentional, meant to mimic the sound of his amplified voice in a large hall). There's a rather narrow sound to the track at times, but generally speaking things sound fine if not fantastic.

Indiscreet Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are included on this release.

Indiscreet Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Indiscreet is a film that on paper looks like it couldn't possibly miss. How could a film helmed by Stanley Donen and starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant be anything other than a wonderful entertainment? Well, just watch Indiscreet to find out just how far "on paper" is from "finished film". This is a slow and pretty dreary exercise in scattered titters and unnecessary melodrama. Something must have attracted these fantastically talented people to this project, but I for one am at a loss to say what it was. For those wanting a little old school Hollywood glamour, you could probably do worse, but the fact is just cherry picking any other Stanley Donen film will probably guarantee you'll do considerably better.