Indiscreet (1958)

A couple of months back, TCM featured Scott Eyman, who had recently written a book on Cary Grant. One of the movies they featured that night was Indiscreet, which I hadn't blogged about before, so I DVRed it and finally got around to watching it to do a blog post on here.

Cary Grant is one of the stars, but the other one appears first. That's Ingrid Bergman, playing Anna Kalman. She's an actress based out of London who, needing a change in life, went down to Spain for the winter, but quickly got bored of it and returned to London. So when her sister Margaret (Phyllis Calvert) and Margaret's husband Alfred Munson (Cecil Parker) show up to borrow the apartment to change for a function in central London, they're surprised to find that the apartment is not unoccupied.

Anna was planning to spend a nice quiet night in her apartment, but the Munsons are going to some NATO banquet on international currency, and they've got the keynote speaker, Philip Adams (Cary Grant) with them. He's an American who is apparently an expert on currency stability, and Alfred and his bosses are trying to get Philip a job in Europe working for them. Philip, being played by Cary Grant, is obviously good looking, at least in the way that a 40-something woman (Bergman was in her early 40s when she made Indiscreet and Grant was 54) would like, so when Philip makes the excuse that they could use Anna to make the numbers even, she decides to go, not that she needs much convincing.

As you can guess, Philip and Anna eventually start a relationship. But there's a catch. Philip informs Anna that he has a wife in his home town of San Francisco, and that she's never going to grant him a divorce, so Philip will never be able to marry Anna. So Anna knows what she's getting herself into with her eyes wide open, and still goes for it. Philip eventually gets a position working in Paris, and gets an apartment one floor below Anna's so that when he returns every weekend, he can be right in the same building as Anna.

There's one other catch. It turns out that Philip isn't really married. In fact, he's never been married, and has no intention of getting married. The false claim of a wife is what Philip thinks is the honorable way of telling women that he has no interest in a truly serious relationship with them right from the start, rather than leading them on into thinking he might marry them only to drop them later. And in the case of Philip and Anna, it has gotten pretty serious, to the point that Anna plans to follow him to New York when work is going to send him on a temporary transfer there. By this time, Alfred and Margaret have learned the truth about Philip, and Margaret is mean enough to tell Anna.

To be honest, Indiscreet isn't really about the story that goes on, but about the acting performances of the two leads. Those are unsurprisingly quite good, and make the movie work even if the actual story feels like material that's been done before. It's an intelligent take on two older people looking for (and finding love) and the pitfalls they face. If there's one flaw, it's that the ending felt a bit rushed to me, but that's a minor flaw. Other than that, Indiscreet is eminently watchable.