A Farewell to Arms

A lot of people are being terribly unfair to this production of A Farewell To Arms. Not that it's a great film, it misses that by a good distance, but that even films that are the best adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's work fall far short for Hemingway purists. And David O. Selznick was far from a Hemingway purist.

No Selznick when it came to the career of his wife Jennifer Jones lost all kinds of sense of balance. Another reviewer was quite right, Jean Simmons, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor all would have made acceptable Catherine Barkleys.

One thing also to remember that we're not even starting out with pure Hemingway to begin with. Both this version and the 1932 version that starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes are not just based on the novel, they are based on a play that was adapted from the novel by Laurence Stallings who wrote What Price Glory. The play ran for 30 performances in 1930 and starred Glenn Anders and Elissa Landi on Broadway. I suspect the Depression had a lot to do with the closing as it did many shows that year.

Originally John Huston was slated to direct and he had directed Jones in both We Were Strangers and Beat The Devil with little or no interference from Selznick. But Selznick fired Huston and replaced him with Charles Vidor because allegedly too much attention was paid to Rock Hudson and not enough to Jennifer.

That's ironic as all get out because the novel itself is as all Hemingway works is male chauvinistic in the extreme. If he wanted to showcase Jennifer, any Hemingway just ain't the vehicle. He should have used one of the Bronte sisters.

Since the novel is male oriented Rock Hudson makes a fine Fredric Henry, the idealistic man who volunteers on the Italian front as an ambulance driver to experience war so he can write about it when it's over. On that Italian front it didn't look like it was ever going to be over.

That's another problem with this work, how do you sell it to the movie going public, as a romance or an anti-war tract? If you're Adolph Zukor for Paramount or David O. Selznick probably romance is the aspect that does sell.

The third major character in the film is that of the Italian army doctor Major Rinaldi played here by Vittorio DeSica. This version is more faithful to the book and presents Rinaldi as a three dimensional character.

In the 1932 version Adolphe Menjou was Rinaldi and Menjou did fine with the part as your typical suave continental type. Here Rinaldi's outspokenness about the futility of the Italian campaign leads to tragedy. It also led to an Oscar nomination for Vittorio DeSica as Best Supporting Actor. It was the only recognition A Farewell To Arms got from the Academy and DeSica lost to Red Buttons for Sayonara.

Whether Huston or Vidor did them, the battle scenes and the scenes of retreat are shattering and moving. Given the unique problems of Hemingway and Selznick, we're lucky the film came out as good as it did.

Recently read the book...disappointed by the movie as it departed from the story in several key areas. The scenery was pretty.

Rock Hudson wasn't bad but it was painfully obvious that Jennifer Jones was a lot older than him. It was absurd she was supposed to be English when she sounded just as American as Hudson and Elaine Stritch. The film is spectacular but too overblown for a trifling romantic story.

Obviously, a great deal of time and money was lavished on this project. Producer Selznick intended it to be a vindication of a career that peaked with "Gone With The Wind" in 1939, and then began a long, slow, almost painful decline. By the mid fifties he had become something of a "has-been" in Hollywood. The result? Pretty much a miss. The book is probably unfilmable, of course, but the screenplay still leaves much to be desired. Rock Hudson is far too shallow to make a go at the over-the-top emotionalism this story needs. The usually wonderful Jennifer Jones, for whom this project was conceived, somehow doesn't seem to exhibit the idealism and resolve the part needs, and that she demonstrated with such seemingly effortlessness in many other films. The direction is stilted and sometimes downright awkward, more the fault of producer Selznick, I would bet, who had a reputation for micro-managing his films, than famed director Charles Vidor.

Simply put, I'm never convinced, not even for a moment, that what is happening is real and not just another movie. Too bad.

When I was around 17, I came in from a cold winter's day and became engrossed in a film that was running on the TV. The film? A farewell to arms. I could only have seen the last quarter of the film but the final scene reduced me to tears and it's something I never forgot. Consequently, some 10 years later I managed to track it down on video and was a little disappointed.

What is now obvious to me is that 1) the part I saw had little input from Jennifer Jones; 2) the emotion conveyed by Rock Hudson was deeply touching; 3) the setting was also memorable; 4) it was far too long. When viewing the film in its entirety, it is obviously badly in need of the touch of a good editor, although I was somewhat surprised to recently read that it is actually 2 hours and 32 minutes in length. What is particularly disappointing is that Jennifer Jones was clearly miscast, and yes - we all know why.

However, I have seen this actress in other productions - for example 'Gone to Earth', in which she was simply splendid; but her role in this film was most definitely not the kind of part she excelled in.

This could potentially have been Rock Hudson's finest hour, but as with other epic productions of the time e.g. Cleopatra, the best bits most probably ended up on the cutting room floor; however, that said, I can only think of a handful of films that have imprinted themselves on me like this one.

I would be interested in seeing a re-edited version of this with special features.

7 for at least one standout scene; a superb performance by Rock Hudson and its ability to touch someone.