Italian neorealism and the ‘woman’s film’: Selznick, De Sica and Stazione Termini

Abstract

As a screenwriter, I don’t consider Stazione Termini a document of my neorealist career, because the Italian-American co-production watered down whatever neorealist seed there was in it (the examination of a very restricted space and time).1 The above quotation from Cesare Zavattini, theoretician of neorealism and screenwriter on Vittorio De Sica’s acclaimed films, can usefully be read alongside a memo sent by the American producer David O. Selznick to De Sica, after the filming of the latter’s Stazione Termini in 1953, a film co-produced by Selznick and starring Montgomery Clift and Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones. In the memo Selznick lamented the ‘distortion of Jennifer’s face and figure into a monstrosity because of what I regarded and still regard, as the almost irrational insistence upon giving superior consideration to photography of buildings’.2 Stazione Termini is a film that is actually two films: based on an original screenplay by Zavattini, and shot on location in Rome’s Termini station, the film was co-produced by Selznick and De Sica’s production company. It was heavily cut by Selznick and released in the USA in 1954 under the title Indiscretion of an American Wife; Italian critics generally regard it as anomalous in the context of De Sica’s career and of the Italian neorealist canon, coming as it does after neorealist classics such as Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946), Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1950) and Umberto D. (1952). As will become apparent, compromises involved in its production and distribution, and the involvement of Hollywood stars and crew, mean that some critics do not even regard it as a ‘De Sica film’. The tension indicated in the statement quoted above, between the cinematic focus on the star’s face in close-up and the material environment shot in deep focus, highlights the competing conceptions of cinema on the parts of both De Sica and Selznick, and the extraordinary emphasis Selznick placed on the close-up as a way of safeguarding the star image of Jones. At the same time, Zavattini’s observation of a neorealist idea that is betrayed or diluted in the film is significant, as it invokes the importance of the film’s spatial representation, manifest in its ‘clash’ of cinematographic practices.