Despite delighting audiences with her work in such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), and Notorious (1946), Ingrid Bergman was banished from Hollywood when her extramarital affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini became public.
Because of the pure and innocent characters she played onscreen, the public felt betrayed. Becoming pregnant with Rossellini’s child added fuel to the fire. In a fit of manufactured hysteria that would be right at home in today’s political climate, democratic Senator Edwin C. Johnson denounced her on the senate floor as “a powerful influence for evil”, and that she had “perpetrated an assault upon the institution of marriage.”
“People saw me in Joan of Arc and declared me a saint,” Bergman said later. “I’m not. I’m just a woman, another human being.”*
She ran off to Italy and spent the next seven years making Italian films in between marrying and divorcing Rossellini. (And having three children with him, including actress Isabella Rossellini.)
In 1956, she filmed Anastasia in Europe for Twentieth Century Fox to test the waters. Her Academy Award win for the film paved the way for her return to Hollywood.
Though Anastaisa revived her career, it was her next film, Indiscreet, that endeared her once again to American audiences.
She paired up for the second and final time with her Notorious co-star and good friend, Cary Grant.
Notorious is the better film, of course, but it has more tools in its arsenal—an inherently tense premise, life and death stakes, and the master of suspense in Alfred Hitchock behind the camera.
Indiscreet, by contrast, lives or dies solely on the chemistry of Bergman and Grant. Not their individual talents, which are unquestioned, but how much the audience believes they are besotted with one another.
The film more than lives. It thrives.
The premise of this romantic comedy is simple—Bergman plays Anna Kalman, an actress in her early forties (as Bergman herself was) who has given up on love meets Cary Grant’s diplomat Philip Adams and finds the man she has been missing.
Philip is handsome, considerate, and fun. The rub?
He’s married, of course, and he can’t divorce his wife.
He tells Anna this right off the top, and so she goes into their relationship with her eyes wide open.
When a romantic comedy falls flat, it’s nearly always because the filmmaker is in such a hurry to get to the relationship’s roadblock that he neglects to show us what the two leads see in one another and why their relationship is worth saving in the face of that inevitable roadblock.
Indiscreet doesn’t make that mistake. It strolls along at a pleasant pace, letting us see how and why Anna and Philip fall in love. There is a cozy conversation at a restaurant table that goes on so long they miss the ballet. There are late night conversations, and a great split screen showing them saying goodnight over the telephone in their respective beds. Eventually, we see her cooking breakfast for him, the first nod that their relationship has reached sleepover status.
We know why Anna loves Philip—he’s charming, discrete, considerate, and so obviously her perfect match. We know why Philip loves Anna—she’s beautiful, beloved by her fans, confident but not clingy, and has a great sense of humor. She takes what Philip can offer but doesn’t ask for more.
When Philip is ordered to New York for five months for his work with the United Nations but Anna must stay in London to star in a play, she shows the first signs of strain. In a heartbreaking scene, Anna beseeches Philip to leave his wife and marry her. She apologizes, but it’s too late—she’s shown Philip that no matter how perfect their relationship seems, it is humiliating to be a mistress and not a wife.
And now, finally, when we’re fully invested and having a ball watching Cary and Ingrid flirt and play, the bomb is dropped.
Philip isn’t—and never has been—married. It’s a lie he tells his prospective lovers because he believes he’s not the marrying kind and doesn’t want to give them false hope.
The reveal of this fact to Anna—by her sister, and not Philip himself—has her shouting, “How dare he make love to me and not be married!”
The film’s comedy comes in the second half, when Anna pretends not to know of Philip’s deception and plans his comeuppance. Watching Anna secretly seethe behind Philip’s back at a party while he dances and drinks and generally has a grand old time is the highlight of the film.
Her plan goes badly, of course—she convinces him she’s been seeing another man just as he decides he’s the marrying kind after all—but it all turns out right in the end.
It’s the type of romantic comedy that Hollywood has given up on—it doesn’t have two leads who are constantly bickering until the final reel, doesn’t substitute sex for romance, and doesn’t have to cut down a strong woman by making her a klutz.
It’s a love story of two mature adults—Ingrid with the first hint of lines on her face, Cary with silver in his hair—but youth doesn’t hold a candle to the charm these legends exude with every breath.
And even at forty-three and fifty-seven, Ingrid and Cary look damn good in technicolor.
*Quote from Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, by Donald Spoto
“How dare he make love to me and not be married!’
They knew how to write them in those days!