Hollywood (and America) Had A Nervous Breakdown About Sex Right About 1958

We Baby Boomers have lived through more orthodoxies on this topic than anybody in history. So, please, cut us a little slack.

Doesn’t everybody wear a dinner jacket to bed?

Last night my wife and I watched Indiscreet, a Cary Grant-Ingrid Bergman vehicle released in the year of my birth. It’s a comedy of manners, and the manners were so rococo they made my head hurt. Indiscreet isn’t a great movie (it’s remembered today mostly for a scene where a remarkably agile Grant, then in his mid-50s, dances a Scottish reel) but it’s a fascinating specimen of sexual mores on the eve of the sexual revolution. Apparently the country was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Cary Grant is a brilliant expert in hard currency (get it?) who rocks Ingrid Bergman’s world. She is a worldly and famous stage actress, despairing she’ll ever find Mr. Right, and naturally she falls for Grant at first sight. He is smitten too, in his subdued and debonair Cary Grant-ish way, but he tells her he’s married to a woman from whom he’s separated who won’t give him a divorce. After initial hesitation, they go on a date where they can’t stop talking delightedly to one another. She invites him in for a drink and the camera tracks discreetly away from the closed door by way of saying, “Grant scores.”

But next morning Grant is at his hotel and she’s at home and they have split-screen pillow talk. The viewer knows they’re really in bed together after a wild night of passion, and the pretense that they aren’t is Hollywood’s concession to the Catholic Legion of Decency or whatever other censor called the shots in 1958. Similarly, Grant “moves in” by renting the apartment below Bergman, tiptoeing up the stairs at night so the elevator operator won’t know he’s being, well, indiscreet, and even speaking in a sort of code over the phone to tell her he’s on his way up. “They’re screwing,” scriptwriter Norman Krasna and director Stanley Donen shout at us, “but we have to pretend they’re just smooching.” We see Grant and Bergman Christmas morning and he’s in his smoking jacket, which is not attire you wear when you leave your place of residence. In another scene they smooch, clothed, atop a bed, Bergman in a nightie and Grant in a dinner jacket. Wink, wink.

The story doesn’t progress for a very long while, and I started to wonder what made this a comedy (it’s not particularly funny) when really it seemed a “woman’s picture” with a lot of schmaltzy Mantovani-type piano music in the background. Finally there’s this bizarre scene where Ingrid Bergman breaks down and asks Grant can’t your wife please give you a divorce so we can marry? And then immediately Bergman apologizes, says she was out of bounds, I guess because her question challenges the presumed religious basis of Grant’s wife’s refusal to divorce, and in Hollywood in 1958 you don’t mess with people’s religious convictions. It’s not really explained. Anyway it turns out mostly to be just a plot device.

Grant, we learn in the third act, is secretly not married. He explains to Bergman’s brother in law that he never wishes to marry, and since no woman can ever believe that, indeed sees that merely as a challenge to drag her man to the altar, Grant routinely pretends he’s married to take that issue off the table. He wants to play the field forever. He is, after all, Cary Grant, beloved by women across the globe for his chiseled features, dimpled chin, and hard currency. Grant does allow, however, that he’s never loved a gal like he loves Bergman.

Bergman finds this out but doesn’t tell Grant she knows. She’s furious because Grant has lied to her and even let her humiliate herself by apologizing for asking him to get divorced. But she’s furious also because a woman who gets intimate with a single man she will never marry is a slut whereas a woman who gets intimate with a man who’s locked in a loveless marriage is … not a slut? At this point it dawned on me, “This may not be much of a comedy but the manners are pretty darned interesting.” My mind wandered to the real-world facts that Grant was bisexual and Bergman had been shunned by Hollywood for bearing a child (Isabella Rossellini) out of wedlock and that her “comeback” was only two years earlier. In Indiscreet the fictional world is struggling to catch up to the real world but not getting very far. Fortunately, the Pill will arrive two years hence to save the day.

Bergman devises a scheme to make Grant jealous, which in turn makes Grant not break down and confess that he lied, but instead say his wife granted him a divorce, so let’s get married. What an asshole! And then Bergman, after making him suffer for about five seconds, says no, let’s go on as before, which back in 1958 we’re supposed to find really shocking, whereas here in 2024 I’m thinking no, what’s shocking is Bergman not calling out Grant for lying to her, which is not okay, but which the movie seems to think is just boys being boys and we ladies know how to defeat that with our feminine wiles, don’t we? The audience is supposed to be thinking, “How naughty! Bergman prefers to have carnal knowledge with Grant out of wedlock!” And then of course the comedy resolves itself with Grant saying Nonsense, we’ll marry, and Bergman going all of course I’ll marry you, ya big lug, The End, made in Hollywood USA.

I was actually alive when this movie was made! The New York Times called it “weightless.” I call it harder to follow than late David Lynch.

And now sexual orthodoxies are complicated in an entirely different way. I can’t conceive how anybody would write a comedy of sexual manners today, and if they did I’d probably find it just as befuddling as Indiscreet. Plus it would be out of date in about six months.

Pity us Boomers, caught between the old and the new. I’ve lost count of how many orthodoxies concerning sexuality, gender, etc., have landed on my doorstep during the past couple of decades. My strategy is to agree politely with every one and hope my interlocutors don’t compare notes. The truth is I don’t know what to believe and at this late date I don’t like my odds of figuring it out. Partly this is discretion, partly it’s a liberal commitment to mutual tolerance, and partly it’s what’s often mistaken for the wisdom that comes with age, when really it’s just the embarrassed knowledge that many, many things you formerly believed have been demonstrated quite definitively to be wrong. Only a fool reaches his mid-60s with more convictions than he possessed at 30.

Perhaps the wildest fact about Indiscreet is that somebody made a TV remake in the 1980s (with Robert Wagner and Leslie Ann-Down). The 1970s and 1980s were the only period in American history when absolutely nothing was considered Indiscreet, except by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. How did Hollywood translate Indiscreet into an era that also extruded Behind the Green Door? I’m not rigorous enough an anthropologist to watch and find out.