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Trains and train stations are cinematic things, the camera tracks with Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift as they push through the crowd waving at a departing express and suddenly it's as if Vittorio De Sica brought a bit of Ophüls with him from Madame de... She's a Philadelphia housewife on a brittle Roman adventure, he's the teacher not ready for the end of the affair, their last hour together is documented in real time. It ebbs and flows, Jones' brush with a proletarian pregnant Madonna convinces her to head back home, then Clift leaps past a charging locomotive and the two are caught in an empty railway compartment, "it seems we're criminals." (The mood at the commissioner's office shifts from sordid melodrama to excruciating comedy when none other than the President turns up outside the window.) Romantic passion and domestic duty, intercontinental misunderstandings on both sides of the screen. "Scusi signora, dov'è American Express?" De Sica is aware of Brief Encounter, furthermore he's aware of Jones in Madame Bovary and of the Ale and Quail Club in The Palm Beach Story. Cesare Zavattini story, dialogue contributions from Truman Capote and Ben Hecht—which one wrote that "a woman is like another heart inside a man, he knows when that heart stops"? Around the pained couple is the swarm of Italian life, a classroom of deaf children and a middle-aged Don Juan;s misfired flirtations, a marital hurrah for the maid from Umberto D. and a note of I Bambini ci guardano in the heroine's nephew (Richard Beymer). David O. Selznick butchered it for U.S. release, still the pathos of two anxious stars hunched over a restaurant table and pouring over their mutual fragility can't be dimmed. With Gino Cervi, Paolo Stoppa, and Maria Pia Casilio. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |