Indiscretion of an American Wife is the 63-minute "producer's cut" of Vittorio De Sica's 89-minute Terminal Station, assembled specifically for the American market, for which producer David O. Selznick had total control over the film. It reflects the sensibilities of Selznick much more than De Sica in almost every detail and edit, and demonstrates how a director's work can be subverted or even completely submerged by a producer working with a totally different agenda. Terminal Station was built around a rich, neorealist tapestry, woven from little moments of life, its seeming "background" characters -- almost everyone at the Stazione Termini, the Rome railway station where virtually the entire film is set -- treated with as much care and dignity as the characters portrayed by its two presumed "stars," Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift. Selznick, working from a traditional Hollywood mentality, chose to delete virtually all of the shots referring to anyone onscreen other than Jones' Mary Hughs and Clift's Giovanni Doria. In De Sica's cut of the movie, the Stazione Termini and all of the people in it are the "stars" -- assuming that the movie has stars at all -- while Selznick treats anyone other than Jones and Clift as little more than scenery and set decorations to be brought forward only to enhance Jones' performance. Indeed, the way Selznick treats the material that De Sica shot, the director might just as well have been filming on a Hollywood soundstage. Yet, strangely enough, Selznick also stripped out all of the depth and complexity from Jones' character, principally by deleting the film's original opening minutes that depict the depth of her romantic dilemma. With the Production Code and its restrictions still largely in force, presenting an adulterous wife and mother was a dicey proposition in Hollywood in 1954, but one can't help but think that Selznick's marriage to Jones, coupled with the fact that she was his most valuable star under contract, made him too careful and even borderline (or perhaps way over the border) neurotic in dealing with her onscreen image.
In the broader context of Selznick's career, however, the changes that he made aren't entirely surprising. He had, after all, made his biggest mark in movies telling the story of the Civil War (and Reconstruction) through the eyes of the empty-headed, but emotionally tempestuous, Scarlett O'Hara. He was, for obvious reasons, even more involved with Jones and anything she touched as an actress, and saw no point in cluttering up audiences' attention with what he apparently saw as De Sica's version of "local color." As a movie, if Terminal Station didn't exist to show how De Sica got it right, Indiscretion of an American Wife wouldn't even merit serious comment, possessing less depth than good television dramas of the same period. Curiously, once Selznick was done making hash of most of De Sica's work, he was left with a 63-minute movie. As much as Columbia Pictures was glad to get Jones' and Clift's newest movie to distribute, they couldn't issue something that short to theaters; luckily, rather than simply pad it out with a couple of Three Stooges shorts, the studio raised the movie's exhibition length to 72 minutes by grafting on a nine-minute "prologue" entitled Autumn in Rome, directed and designed by William Cameron Menzies, with James Wong Howe as photographer. The highly stylized short depicted Patti Page in a New York apartment singing a pair of songs, "Autumn in Rome" and "Indiscretion" -- connected in the most peripheral way possible to the feature -- amid some highly mobile and graceful camera work. That's why the running time of Indiscretion of an American Wife sometimes to varies in different listings: It's usually shown without the prologue, although The Criterion Collection's 2003 DVD restores the music short to its place at the head of Selznick's movie, in addition to presenting De Sica's complete film.