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Indiscreet

Indiscreet

List Price: $14.98
Your Price: $13.48
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: disappointed by DVD quality
Review: The movie is a must see for any Bergman/Grant fan. I received this DVD as a gift but was sorely disappointed at the quality of the film not the content. The picture quality was poor and distracting. What a shame this wonderful movie was treated this way. I would recommend finding a good vhs copy, if you wish to purchase this movie.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Warning - watch out for this one!
Review: This is a great film. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman really click and it's a shame they only made two films together. However, I can't recommend buying this particular VHS release of Indiscreet. Hello! - it's recorded in the EP (SLP) mode and also letterboxed and a lot of quality is lost - very blurry. Strange that the other films in the Cary Grant Collection released by Republic are recorded in standard SP, digitally remastered and all that. This one is strictly for the bargain bin at K-Mart.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Warning - watch out for this one!
Review: This is a great film. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman really click and it's a shame they only made two films together. However, I can't recommend buying this particular VHS release of Indiscreet. Hello! - it's recorded in the EP (SLP) mode and also letterboxed and a lot of quality is lost - very blurry. Strange that the other films in the Cary Grant Collection released by Republic are recorded in standard SP, digitally remastered and all that. This one is strictly for the bargain bin at K-Mart.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Outstanding Romantic Comedy
Review: This is a great romantic comedy and couldn't have been better cast. Bergman and Grant are excellent as two star crossed lovers. The plot is made even more interesting by the fact that Bergman went through this type of predicament in real life. The photography is also top notch. It was done by the late Freddie Young--just before he photographed Lawrence of Arabia. Dialouge and supporting cast is also excellent--everybody who is a fan of bergman/grant should watch this classy film.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My Favorite Movie
Review: This is by far the favorite movie of myself and my husband. The movie is charming and witty, just at the peak of Hollywood's glamour. We've seen this movie again and again, and yet we still pick up little things that we've never noticed before that are very funny.

My favorite characters are Margaret and Albert. They are two of the best character actors I've ever seen and steal most of the scenes they are in.

The plot is an interesting twist on the theme of dating over the age of 30. I highly recommend this movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A delicious homage to two great actors, and acting.
Review: What could have been inconsequential, pseudo-sophisticated, theatrical tosh is turned into something more valuable by the terrific acting of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and the clever direction of Stanley Donen. 'Indiscreet' succeeds because Donen doesn't try to open up an unwieldly play for the screen, but rather exploits its thematic potential, as he did in his great masterpieces 'Singin' in the rain' and 'Funny Face'.

When we first see Bergman, she is framed through proscenium arches, making her entrance like an actress. She turns out to be an actress. The problem in her life is men who pretend to be one thing and turn out to be either shabby or dull; in other words, poor actors. The attraction of Grant is that he seems so genuine - he admits his failings, he confesses about his wife, he expresses himself in the only way he knows, by spending money.

We might tend to agree with Bergman's sister that he is too perfect. He is a monstrous heel - or a great actor - who enjoys the detached privileges of bachelor life and who has no intention of getting married, and so sidesteps the question by pretending he is.

What had already been a masterclass in the art of screen acting becomes even more so now. Bergman is terrific: convincingly weary, even mousy, as she returns to her lonely apartment after another romatntic failure, she becomes radiantly transformed by love. Her reaction to betrayal is equally masterly, so that as an actress playing an actress, she gets to run the gamut of histrionic emotions.

Cary Grant is something else. To begin with, there is something distant in his performance, as if he is more of an ideal that a person, someone who always says the right things, or horrible things in the right way. Some of the film's best comedy comes from its deadpan euphemism - it is a 'sophisticated' romance about adulterous sex that never mentions it; everything is revealed on the faces of the actors who seem to be in on the joke with sharper audience members. Otherwise, you might be watching a film about tea. Grant's sexual frustration early on, turning his charm into something nasty, is brilliant. But when Grant is exposed as 'acting', everything changes. Perhaps he is now aware of being watched; his performance becomes broader, more physical, more engaged.

In a Terence Rattigan film, all the sumptuous decor would be an intellectually deadening signifier of class - here, all the (mostly Cubist) paintings on Bergman's walls point to the fragmentation or distortion of her identity through constant role-playing, and her attempt to assert it once and for all. As a film about London, 'Indiscreet' is a nocturnal counterpart to 'The Sandwich Man', a gorgeous, almost surreal tribute to a city, where lovers are spied on by lumbering limousines, in a capital as delicately stylised as a stage set.


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