WE, THE WOMEN (Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Luigi Zampa, Gianni Franciolini, Alfredo Guarini, 1953)

Called in the U.S. either We, the Women or Of Life and Love, Siamo donne is a composite film from Italy whose overall idea legendary screenwriter Cesare Zavattini originated. Each of four segments showcases a major star/actress; one tedious segment, with a labored postmodern spin, a starlet. The four “celebrities,” each ostensibly playing herself, are Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani, Isa Miranda and Alida Valli. Each segment is directed by someone else; for instance, her husband, Roberto Rossellini, directed Bergman’s segment, while Luchino Visconti directed Magnani’s.

Giving an exquisite performance that borders on delicate tragedy, Valli also is beauteous and glamorous almost beyond belief in her segment directed by Gianni Franciolini. (It is ironically launched by an unflattering glimpse of Valli as she is readied for the party that occupies most of the segment.) However, gossip-mongers as we are, our principal anticipation centers on the two titans who successively shared Rossellini’s bed: Magnani and Bergman. One disappoints; the other soars.

Despite the satirical brilliance of their collaboration with Bellissima (1951), Visconti and Magnani are involved in a forced farcical episode where, en route to the theater where she is performing, Magnani is being driven around Rome, where she is dispensing diva-dimensional gaiety and (intentionally) ill-fitting glamor at different stops. What a downer all this is—and coming at the tail end of the film. Filmmaker and star fail to conjure the comic fantasy they intended; spirits never quite lift off the ground.

But Rossellini’s contribution had me wiping away tears of laughter. I know, I know: Rossellini—funny? On this occasion, the generally tragic artist, as he and his wife go about debunking her myth, are a dazzling riot.

Bergman, expecting guests for lunch, discovers a crime on her grounds: her carefully groomed rose-bed has been utterly ruined! Did the kids do this? The dog? The culprit turns out to be her neighbor’s chicken! The spectacle of Bergman’s pursuit of the dumb bird, urged to the boiling point by her irresponsible neighbor’s condescension, unfolds outdoors and in-; in addition to providing an unexpected vision of Bergman engaged in lovely slapstick, the ordeal also provides superlative respites where she speaks directly into the camera. At the last she explains she wasn’t really trying to kill the chicken, at which she has directed her dog, but hoping to give it a good scare, even if this meant—for the chicken—a heart attack! Wait till the U.S. Congress hears about this!

Bergman’s agile, beautiful acting, lightning-quick yet throughly relaxed, is a sight to behold. This is by far her best comic performance, including the  one that brought her her third Oscar.

 

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INDISCREET (Stanley Donen, 1958)

Married financial analyst Philip Adams, who works for NATO, and stage actress Anna Kalman, who is single and still looking for Mr. Right, are having an affair in Anna’s London hotel suite. “I love hard currency,” Anna tells him, in an example of the double entendres she dispenses. Both are middle-aged, and Philip, fastidious and high-minded, covers up their illicit union for the sake of Anna’s reputation, hoodwinking hotel staff during the pair’s telephone conversations. All is going well until Anna discovers marriage-avoiding Philip’s dirty little secret: he also is single. Anna explodes to sister Margaret: “How dare him make love to me and not be married!” Anna plots revenge that goes awry.
     Based on the play Kind Sir, which its author, Norman Krasna, has beautifully adapted, Indiscreet is a witty, sophisticated romantic comedy that intermittently explodes into hilarity while stealthily exploiting memories of star Ingrid Bergman’s past indiscretions. It also revives the onscreen romantic team of Bergman and Cary Grant from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) a dozen years earlier. It is a charming adult entertainment, which is lent a stylishness and grace by director Stanley Donen in what is certainly his finest film. But, without doubt, it is too light and fragile to withstand the shadow of Notorious and the expectations that this Hitchcock romantic thriller effortlessly conjures. Add to that the fact that Bergman, although fine and very funny, is not the best possible Anna (Katharine Hepburn would have ripped into the part more deliciously) and a sense of disappointment creeps into the sometimes stuffy, stage-bound air. Stanley Kauffmann leveled the interesting insight that Bergman’s Anna seems more the movie star than a theater light, and the National Board of Review, in naming Bergman the year’s best actress for Inn of the Sixth Happiness, tellingly excluded her Indiscreet performance from the citation.
     On the other hand, Cary Grant, Cecil Parker and Phyllis Calvert are all perfect as Philip and Anna’s brother-in-law and sister. Calvert indeed steals the show as supportive, protective Margaret, giving the performance of a lifetime under arduous circumstance: the death of her spouse during the shoot, which possibly explains why much of the actress’s audible contribution had to be looped in. That year, the National Board of Review accorded Robert Donat a special prize for his courageous farewell film appearance in Inn of the Sixth Happiness; the group should have set aside its Roman Catholic moralism, given the nontraditional slant of Indiscreet, and similarly honored Calvert. I am embarrassed to say I keep forgetting how good she was.

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SARATOGA TRUNK (Sam Wood, 1943, 1945)

Based on Edna Ferber’s novel, Saratoga Trunk reteamed Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, again under Sam Wood’s direction, right after their triumphant success, in and out of sleeping bags, in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), during the making of which they became lovers. However, the second film’s release was delayed to maximize its profits—until 1945 in New York City; until 1946 elsewhere in the U.S. When it named Bergman the year’s best actress, though, the New York Film Critics Circle excluded mentioning her wily half-Creole adventuress Clio Dulaine in Saratoga Trunk. Her prize was based instead on her brilliant work in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, as a woman psychoanalyst coping with father-figures and the male domination of her profession, and Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s, where Bergman is again brilliant—this time as a nun and parochial school teacher—if only in the last five or so minutes, where her character wages an interior battle against disappointment and pride. Subsequently, Pauline Kael praised Bergman’s Clio for liveliness, wit and brio; but after making a scintillating early impression along Scarlett O’Hara-lines, Bergman’s acting sounds the same one or two notes—to the point of tedium. Clio’s striving for “security, protection and respectability” never quite comes to aching life. Cooper is more assured in his role of a testy Texan schemer, Clint Maroon, but Wood’s wooden filmmaking casts a pall over everyone and every thing. This is an unpleasant and unconvincing film.
     It proved a financial success, though, and Flora Robson won her only Oscar nomination for the role of Angelique Buiton, Clio’s Creole servant but (as they say) her own woman. This made up a little for the Academy’s failure to nominate Robson for either We Are Not Alone or Wuthering Heights.

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ANASTASIA (Anatole Litvak, 1956)

Despite its uncertain tone that unexpectedly resolves itself in comedy and romance, Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia touches on momentous subjects: historical ambiguities; the exploitation of these due to greed and the spirit of adventure; the problem of identity, including the eternal mystery of identity; however embroiled one is in history, an individual’s right to self-determination. However muddled and indistinct it may be, this film is likely to fascinate us, if only around the edges.
     The play on which it is based, by Guy Bolton and Marcelle Maurette, and adapted by Bolton and Arthur Laurents, is in turn based on (considerably amended) actual events. A patient in a German asylum came to be considered an impossibly surviving daughter of the Red massacre of Tsar Nikolai II and his imperial family—in certain quarters, an index of public fancy and nostalgia. Anna Koreff, the film’s central character, is based on this “Anna Anderson”; destitute and suicidal in Paris streets in 1928, she is “rescued” and trained to convince the world—or at least who would be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna—that she is who her promoters, a group of White Russian exiles, say she is. In the course of his training her, however, General Sergei Pavlovich Bounine himself comes to wonder whether Anna isn’t indeed Anastasia. In any case, he falls in love with her—or with whoever.
     Ingrid Bergman won best actress prizes for her vivid, remarkable work: the David di Donatello Award, Oscar, Golden Globe, the prize of the New York critics. (In an irritatingly overly technical performance, Helen Hayes is considerably less effective as the Dowager Empress.) But the film’s cold, distanced and (what he saw as) disdainful nature drew young critic François Truffaut’s contempt.
     Yul Brynner strikingly plays Bounine.

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A MATTER OF TIME (Vincente Minnelli, 1976)

Many of us recall the scandal. Vincente Minnelli, who had such high hopes that A Matter of Time would be his masterpiece, repudiated the result after the studio re-edited his material, making nonsense of the plot, which became a string of loose beads revolving around an ornate hand mirror, which more or less became the film’s protagonist. Martin Scorsese, the year of Taxi Driver, took out a huge ad in Variety supporting Minnelli and condemning American-International. Of course, we would all prefer to have Minnelli’s cut; but A Matter of Time is a lovely thing even in its mutilated state. It is intermittently affecting and even moving (and gorgeously photographed by 2001’s and Cabaret’s Geoffrey Unsworth); and, as everyone agreed at the time, Ingrid Bergman gives a vivid performance as mad Countess Sanziani, whose memories of her fabulous life may or may not comport with reality. “The Contessa” lives in Rome, in what was once an elegant hotel, by pawning jewelry, and she is down to her last piece. Fortunately, Nina, the chambermaid who befriends her, discovers that some of The Contessa’s paper money is worth something; but it hardly matters when the old woman is hit by a car in traffic
     Minnelli’s last film, set in 1949, is based on Marcel Druon’s 1955 novel La volupté d’être (The Voluptuousness of Being), which was published in the U.S. as Film of Memory. The Contessa shares her “memories” with Nina by replaying her mental film of them, the object being to infuse the scattered 19-year-old girl with her passion for life; Nina takes to this “film,” sometimes appearing in it (to our eyes) as a substitute for The Contessa, and to real films thereafter, becoming a popular movie star. Regrettably, The Contessa’s philosophy of life is cornball-Auntie Mame-ish, and one wonders whether Vivien Leigh transcended this element of the role in a 1960s stage adaptation. Bergman doesn’t quite.
     Minnelli mines the same theme here as he does in Gigi (1958): old age’s generosity in yielding to youth. In Gigi, the baton is passed from uncle to nephew; here, spirit is passed between the two women, a figurative aunt and niece.
     Liza Minnelli, the director’s daughter, is the star of the film; her Nina—a role that twenty years earlier Bergman herself had wanted to play—is delicious and delightful; she is very nearly as good here as Bergman is, if a bit theatrical at times. (Or is it mock-theatrical?) Charles Boyer, in his one long scene as Count Sanziani, who has been estranged from his wife for forty years, is effortless.
     Isabella Rossellini, beauteous Bergman’s beauteous daughter, plays Sister Pia, who tends to The Contessa in her last hour. Scorsese would have an affair with Liza and would marry Isabella. Hm.
     Of Russian Jewish origin, Druon was the nephew of Joseph Kessel, with whom he wrote the lyrics of the song that the French Resistance embraced as its anthem: “Chant des Partisans.”

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