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When this version of A Farewell to Arms came out, Ernest Hemingway hated this film. They turned his novel and put too much emphasis on the romance angle. When Papa Hemingway said that he obviously did not know Hollywood well at all. If he did just knowing Frank Borzage directed this film should have told him something. Borzage did a whole slew of tender romantic stories in the Thirties like Three Comrades, The Mortal Storm, stuff like that. A Farewell to Arms is definitely in keeping with that tradition.

The one thing that Hemingway did like was the casting of Gary Cooper as the hero Fredric Henry. He and Coop became fast friends right up to when they both died in 1961. He saw in Cooper the ideal Hemingway hero and when Paramount acquired the rights to For Whom the Bells Toll, Hemingway insisted it be done with Cooper or nobody.

Cooper and Helen Hayes made a tender romantic couple in the Borzage tradition, probably more Borzage than Hemingway. But Adolph Zukor and Paramount also knew what sold movie tickets and Paramount was having a lot of financial troubles at this time. The studio nearly went under during the Depression. But Paramount's saviors turned out to be Bing Crosby, Mae West, and Cecil B. DeMille who returned to the studio he helped found.

Helen Hayes made several good films in the early thirties, this one and the one she won an Oscar for, The Sins of Madelon Claudet. But she never became a movie box office draw so she returned to the Broadway stage where she reigned as a Queen.

Adolphe Menjou replete with Italian accent plays Cooper's friend and romantic rival, Major Rinaldi. Menjou was great at playing both American and continental types. Soon he would sign a long term contract with MGM and gain his greatest roles during the sound era.

Hemingway purists might shun A Farewell to Arms, but those who love their screen romances, soggier the better will rave about this film.

The works of Ernest Hemingway have not always translated well to the cinema. The Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and David O. Selznick's version of "A Farewell to Arms", although attractively photographed, are two of the dullest and most slow-moving films ever committed to celluloid. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is slightly better, but still by no means as good as it should be, given its stellar cast. Howard Hawks's version of "To Have and Have Not" is a good film, but that is probably because its plot has very little to do with that of the novel on which it is supposedly based.

The 1932 version of "A Farewell to Arms" was the first time a film had been based on one of Hemingway's works, and there is an obvious difference between it and the 1957 remake; it is only slightly more than half the length, at 80 minutes as opposed to 152. Over the quarter-century between the dates of the two films there had been a change in the way Hemingway was seen. In 1932 he was still an up-and-coming young author; by 1957, although he was still alive and only in his late fifties, he had achieved the status of Great American Novelist, and the film that was made in that year suffers from an over-reverential attitude to his work, treating it like a solemn classical text that needed an equally solemn cinematic treatment to do it justice.

The film tells the story of the romance between Frederick, an American volunteer serving with the Italian Army as an ambulance driver, and Catherine, a nurse with the British Red Cross. Frederick deserts and crosses the border into neutral Switzerland, to be with Catherine, whom he has secretly married and who is pregnant.

It has been pointed out that the moral of the film is precisely the opposite of that of "Casablanca". In that film Rick and Ilsa give up their chance of happiness together because "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world". What matters is the war, and the Allied struggle for victory. In "A Farewell to Arms", however, the moral is that the personal happiness of Frederick and Catherine matters more than the great historical events from which they are escaping. This reversal in emphasis between the two films probably reflects a reversal in public attitudes which took place in the intervening decade between 1932 and 1942. In 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, there was a sense of disillusionment with war, even in those countries which had finished on the winning side in 1914-18; the First World War was widely seen as senseless slaughter. Ten years later, the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War had changed attitudes so that it was once again fashionable to talk about a "just war" against evil. (By 1957, during the Cold War, the pendulum had partially swung back in the opposite direction; Selznick's film might have been a flop, but there were some very good anti-war films from that period, such as Kubrick's "Paths of Glory").

Seen from a modern perspective, the film looks and sounds very dated. The sound quality is poor and the action looks jerky. These problems were, of course, common to most films from the early thirties, the very dawn of the sound picture era. (It is remarkable how quickly those problems were overcome, when one compares the likes of "A Farewell to Arms" with, say, "Gone with the Wind" from only seven years later). In some respects, however, the director Frank Borzage was able to turn the technical limitations of the period to his advantage. Large-scale realistic battle sequences would not have been possible at this time, but Borzage nevertheless wanted to give some idea of the horror of war in order to show what Frederick is fleeing from. In order to do this he resorts to a wordless montage sequence composed of brief shots of the battle, backed by some highly dramatic music. The result is a sort of cinematic equivalent of Impressionism, serving to give as vivid an impression of warfare as a more detailed picture ever could. (This sequence was probably the reason the film won the Oscar for "Best Cinematography").

The film is better acted than the 1957 remake. Helen Hayes was less glamorous than Jennifer Jones, and has an even less convincing British accent, but makes a much livelier and more convincing Catherine. Gary Cooper's Frederick is similarly far more animated than Rock Hudson's stony-faced interpretation of the role, and he receives good support from Adolphe Menjou as Frederick's comrade Major Rinaldi. The action is better paced and the film, even if it looks primitive by today's standards, nevertheless has a vigour lacking from many more polished films from more recent times. 7/10

The 1932 film version of Ernest Hemmingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS will never challenge the likes of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT--but while it fails to capture the horrors of World War I it is remarkably effective at capturing the novel's sparse and unyielding prose. A good deal of the credit goes to writers Garrett and Glaizer and director Borzage--but the real interest here is not so much in the cinematic interpretation of the Hemmingway novel as it is in the cast, which is remarkable.

Actress Helen Hayes was already among the leading lights of the New York stage when she was lured to Hollywood for a handful of films in the early 1930s--and it is easy to see what all the fuss was about. Plaintive beauty aside, unlike most stage and screen actors of the era she is completely unaffected in her performance and proves more than powerful enough to overcome the more melodramatic moments of the script. She is costarred with Gary Cooper in one of his earliest leading roles, and while the pairing is unexpected, it is also unexpectedly good: they have tremendous screen chemistry, and in spite of the film's dated approach they easily draw you into this story of an ill-fated wartime romance between a nurse and an ambulance driver.

The film is also well supplied with a solid supporting cast that includes Adolphe Menjou, Jack La Rue, and Mary Philips, and while clearly filmed on a slim budget--something most obvious in the battlefront sequences--the camera work is remarkably good. Unfortunately, all this counts for nothing unless you can find a print of the film that you can stand to watch. It is sad but true: the 1932 A FAREWELL TO ARMS seems to have fallen into public domain, and the result is a host of DVD and VHS releases that range from the merely adequate to the incredibly dire.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Frank Borzage's 1932 version of "A Farewell To Arms" has the distinction of being the first film adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway novel. It's more Hollywood than Hemingway: Long blankets of dialogue are condensed, sharp edges softened, and the romance between Lt. Henry and Catherine made into something more befitting Douglas Sirk than the unsentimental Papa. Yet a surprising amount of the novel's spirit does survive the transition.

In a story not much different than what you might have read in high school, Lt. Henry (Gary Cooper) is an American ambulance corpsman serving with the Italian Army as it fights the Austrians along the Piave, a bloody backwater campaign of World War I. Henry meets nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes) and they quickly fall in love. But the violence of war, and the interference of friends like Capt. Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), threaten to tear them apart.

The differences between book and movie are more in the matter of treatment than storyline. When Catherine and Lt. Henry first meet, they talk about her former lover, a war casualty. In the film, she says "If I had to do it all over again, I'd marry him". In the book, though, Catherine wasn't regretting sending him off to war unmarried, but without their having had sex.

Yet a minute later, her lines come directly from the book, Catherine noting her daydreams about her old lover turning up at her hospital with a saber cut, then adding: "He didn't have a saber cut, they blew him to bits." For Hollywood, violence was always easier material than sex.

Since this is a film made before the inhibiting Hays Code (Will, not Helen), Borzage and his writers are able to get away with a bit more than they would have just a couple of years later. Catherine and Henry still make love, and she gets pregnant.

There IS a lot of Hemingway here. Catherine is a still somewhat mixed-up woman who hates the rain "because I see myself dead in it". The folly of war is openly expressed. "If nobody would attack, the war would be over," one soldier muses. Lt. Henry is wounded, and embarrassed because it happened while he was eating cheese. Even some small exchanges survive, like one between Lt. Henry and a nasty nurse.

She: "Pity is wasted on you."

He: "Thank you."

But the film also strikes out for its own territory, successfully in the case of building up the role of Capt. Rinaldi. Menjou, who had been a real ambulance corps captain in World War I, creates a marvelously ambiguous figure, a cheerful cynic who befriends Henry and is put out by the romance with Catherine. "Why don't you be like me?" Rinaldi asks his "war brother". "All fire and smoke. Nothing inside."

Rinaldi's role here is a change from the original story, a gamble by Borzage and writers Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett that pays off, devising some needed tension to the central storyline and underscoring the core message of the rottenness of war. If it wasn't for war, Rinaldi might value something more than his next bottle or bedpartner, and Menjou, in a final triumphant moment, lets you know it.

Pacifism, in movies as in life, only takes one so far. The film makes a mistake near the end by more consciously making a stand as an anti-war film, with much hysteria, bells ringing, even Cooper chanting "Peace...peace". It made those points much better as sidenotes, like an opening tracking shot where a seemingly sleeping soldier is revealed to be dead, or later on when Cooper trudges through a muddy path and notices the corpse everyone's been walking on. By contrast, too much of the movie's finale is played for the cheaper seats, and doesn't stand up today.

But the film does stand up better than many later Hemingway adaptations, with its strong cast, inspired tracking shots, and a mostly successful effort by Borzage to translate Hemingway's terse prose style into film. What you get is a short but deep examination of life during wartime.

Based on the Ernest Hemingway novel and starring Gary Cooper, this has the potential to be a classic. The setting and sentiment are reasonably original, especially for their time, and the movie is reasonably gritty.

Yet, it doesn't feel like a classic. The romance seems trite and contrived. Overly schmaltzy and sometimes just plain dull.

The acting is patchy. Gary Cooper is okay, but Helen Hayes' performance is quite flat. Most entertaining performance comes from Adolphe Menjou as Rinaldi.

It was probably quite good in its time, and might well be regarded as one of the first anti-war movies, but it now feels quite dated.

A Farewell to Arms features the expected good performances from Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou. For its time, it also features impressive sets. The dialogue also does justice to its source material, the Hemingway novel of the same name. This movie must've been appreciated much more at the time of its release, given the imminence of war sentiment and Hitler's rising power in Germany. All in all, a very good, though not great film, 7/10.

A FAREWELL TO ARMS (Paramount, 1932), directed by Frank Borzage, is the first, so far, of three screen adaptations to Ernest Hemingway's classic 1930 novel. It is a tender love story set against the background of the Great War (World War I) involving two young people, Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper), an American lieutenant and ambulance driver in the Italian unit, and Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes), a war nurse, who are kept apart by Major Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), Frederic's Italian friend, who not only loves Catherine, but doesn't want him to "lose his head over a woman."

In the supporting cast are Mary Phillips (Helen Ferguson, a nurse and Catherine closest friend who objects to her continued romance with the young American); Jack LaRue (the soft-spoken Italian priest); and Blanche Frederici (the stern head nurse). Adolphe Menjou offers fine characterization of an Italian, convincing, right down to his spoken dialect.

A highly popular war drama in its day, which concentrates more on the relationship between a lieutenant and a nurse than soldiers on the battlefield, A FAREWELL TO ARMS earned itself an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture of 1932-33, but none for its acting. Director Borzage brings out the tenderness and simplicity of the young couple in love as he had done many times during his career, especially those starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell over at Fox Studios. In fact, had Hemingway sold his novel to Fox, A FAREWELL TO ARMS would definitely have been awarded to the popular Gaynor and Farrell team under Borzage's direction. Yet similarities between Gaynor and Farrell and Hayes and Cooper go by the way of their sizes. Both Gaynor and Hayes were short in appearance while Cooper and Farrell stood very tall, especially opposite their shorter leading ladies. Because of the sensitivity and care as enacted by the central characters, it goes without saying that Hayes and Cooper appear to be far better suited than Gaynor and Farrell had they been offered this assignment. At first glance, Cooper gives the impression of being an odd choice for playing Fredric Henry, considering solid actors as Fredric March or Clark Gable (on loan from MGM) might have made a go of this. For the finished product, the film conveys Cooper to be properly cast after all, ranking this as one of his most finer performances of his career.

The pace to the story is occasionally slow, with the early portions lacking in underscoring, but does get better during its second half. Other than the character study and battle scenes, the movie offers some fine bonuses in ways of effective camera technique, including the hospital scene where the injured Frederic Henry is being wheeled in the hospital from a platform table where the camera assumes the place of the character, taking focus as to what directly looking down and talking into the camera range as Frederic answers the questions. This is concluded with an extreme close up of Catherine's face with only her right eye in full focus into the camera as she kisses and talks to her wounded soldier. The camera taking the place of the character technique would be used memorably more than a decade later in the "film noir" mysteries, LADY IN THE LAKE (MGM, 1946) and DARK PASSAGE (WB, 1947). While these films have used this method to an extent to most of the story, A FAREWELL TO ARMS presents this technique briefly but effectively.

Remade twice during the 1950s, first as FORCE OF ARMS (Warner Brothers, 1950) starring William Holden and Nancy Olson, and later under its original title in 1957 for 20th Century-Fox starring Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson, the third, being the better known of the earlier two, might have surpassed the original had it not been so awkward, overlong (two and-a-half hours) and overblown. The original 1932 production, eliminating many key elements from the novel, is better acted and not long enough to cause any viewer lose interest. Because of the remakes in the 1950s, the 1932 original was taken out of circulation, with availability for viewing the original very hard to obtain, and chances of it never to be seen or heard about again. Fortunately, prints did survive, leaving chances of A FAREWELL TO ARMS to surface again. Finally, as early as 1981, the initial version to A FAREWELL TO ARMS made its long awaited rebirth, on public television, initially as part of its weekly SPROCKETS series. Ever since then, television and later public domain video prints presented the original Hemingway drama 10 minutes shorter to its original 90 minutes of screen time, along with occasional poor picture quality, and even worse, the elimination of the original opening and closing credits taken from reissue prints with newer opening title cards and the substitution of the Paramount logo with that of a 1950s Warner Brothers shield, and the elimination of the closing casting credits. When A FAREWELL TO ARMS premiered on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, February 15, 2004, as part of the cable channel's annual 31 days of Oscar, it became another long-awaited event. Aside from having it shown in its original 90 minute presentation, the Paramount logo that opens and closes the movie has been restored along with the closing cast list, as originally played in theaters back in 1932.

Has A FAREWELL TO ARMS stood the test of time? Chances are with its newly restored and clearer picture quality presentation currently available on TCM, it may stir up much more interest than the latter remakes. It also gives an incite look to the early film career of famous stage actress Helen Hayes (1900-1993) at her peak. As it stands, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, a poignant love story, which may not stir up as many tears and sobs as it once did way back when, it is, however, a worthy novel to screen offering, ranking this the first, and best, of two remakes combined. (****)

This story about a doomed love affair during the Italian campaign of WWI results to be the original and the best film version of Ernest Hemingway's novel. It deals with an American soldier, Gary Cooper, and a good English nurse, Helen Hayes, both of whom fall in love on the Italian front during WWI. He is an ambulance driver while braverly risking his life in the line of duty he is wounded and ends up in the hospital where he falls for the attending nurse who is caring him. In the midst of war the intimate pair of lovers fight to stay together and to survive the massacres around them. At the end Austria capitules and armistice is declared. Let's love tonight she said, there may be no tomorrow. Every woman who has loved will understand.

Sensitive and romantic story about a deep and thunderous love story set in the horrors of the WWI when were developing the bloody battles of Marne and Piave. However, the novelist Hemingway disavowed the ambiguous final, but the public all around the world loved the movie. Both protagonists, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes give awesome acting in one of the great love stories of all time. They are finely accompanied by a nice support cast at the time, such as : Adolphe Menjou, Jack La Rue, Mary Philips, Mary Forbes, among others.

The motion picture shot in Paramount studios was well directed by Frank Borzage and it won Oscars 1933 to Cinematography : Charles Lang Jr and Sound. Filmmaker Frank Borzage was a notorious actor and director who made a lot of decent films from Silent cinema to Sound one , such as : Street angel, Flight command, Big city , Bad fire, The mortal storm, Billy the Kid, The big fisherman, being his greatest hit : The 7th Heaven. Rating 7/10 . Better than average. Well worth watching. The picture will appeal to Gary Cooper fans.

Other version about this famous story are as follows : A farewell to arms 1957 by Charles Vidor and John Huston with Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio de Sica, Oscar Homolka. A farewell to arms 1966 by Tucker with Vanessa Redgrave and George Hamilton. In love and war 1996 by Richard Attenborough with Chris O'Donnell, Sandra Bullock , Mackenzie Astin.

This film tells the story of Lt Frederic Henry, an American who has enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army during the First World War. One day he and his friend Major Rinaldi date a pair of English Nurses; Fredric and Nurse Catherine Barkley get on well and quickly fall in love. He is soon returned to the action but following an injury he is hospitalised in the Milan hospital where Catherine works. Here their love deepens. When he returns to the front again they write to each other but Rinaldi ensures their letters don't get through leading to Fredric making some drastic and dangerous choices.

While this film is set in the war, and features some impressive battle scenes it is at its heart a love story. This plays out well and there is a good chemistry between Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes as Fredric and Catherine. Adolphe Menjou is solid as Rinaldi; a slightly ambiguous character who serves to bring the two protagonists together and later keep them apart. While the battle scenes may not be brutal and large scale as those in more modern films they are intense thanks to the way it focuses on Fredric and those around him. The camera work is very inventive; a highlight being the way we see Catherine from Frederic's point of view as she enters his hospital room and kisses him. Overall I'd definitely recommend this to fans of classic cinema.

This is one of those films that everybody (well, OK, MOST everybody) should appreciate. It can be either a romance or a war movie, whichever you want it to be. There are elements of both in approxiamately equal amounts, so both the war buff and the romance buff should be appeased. The acting is superb, by Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The story is set in WW I and this was filmed in 1932, so some of the dialog will seem a bit "dated", but make no mistake, this is film making at its best!

Gary Cooper the soldier. He's been in the Middle East twice with the French Foreign Legion ("Beau Sabreur" and "Morocco"), England twice ("Devil and the Deep" and "Today We Live"), and now Italy.

I'm unmoved. I keep watching these old romances and I fail to be moved. Maybe I'm just a heartless old dog. Or maybe it's Gary Cooper. Homeboy could not act. He was terrible. All he was was a pretty face--no emotion, no heart, no passion. Clark Gable, John Barrymore, William Powell--they could act. Gary Cooper was a stiff.

Gary Cooper played Lt. Henry Frederico, a soldier in the Italian Army. He roomed with an Army doctor named Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou). Rinaldi was sweet on an Army nurse named Catherine (Helen Hayes). He made the mistake of introducing Frederico to Catherine.

Never introduce your good looking friend to the girl you like. I think that's one of over two thousand cinematic rules. Should you do that you will lose her (see "Behind the Make-Up," "Other Men's Women," "The Sport Parade," and "The Lady of Scandal" just to name a few). Rinaldi introduced Frederico to Catherine and five minutes later she was giving up the goods to Frederic in a church yard.

Oh yeah, they did that in the 30's contrary to popular belief.

The two snuck around for months after that and that was the movie. All the drama was in whether or not they'd get caught together in violation of Italian Army rules. Could the army and the war keep them apart?

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Watch for some James Dean look-alike glances in this black and white movie. It also plays a lot like "The English Patient", but not as boring. The continual bombings and chaos of the fighting was very realistic, but it didn't move the plot along as well as it might have.

Helen Hayes as the love interest does a delightful job, but it's hard not to judge this picture by the technical improvements of today's cinematographers. I too have either outgrown Hemingway, or a lot of his dialogue was cut. I suggest you go back and give the book a read, and decide for yourself. I have promised to return and see the movie again, afterwards. Gary Cooper was a really great-looking, and good acting guy.....and I've never appreciated him before so much. He had a lot of stage business that made him appear quite natural.

Adolph Menjou as the fun-loving captain did an admirable job, as well.

If it starts with the Warner Brothers logo such as the version currently (2022)streaming on the BBC site that's the 'post-Hays code' edited and shorter 1938 re-issue. Avoid that one! Make sure it starts with the correct Paramount logo which is the original, uncensored version. The 'WB version' is truly terrible, seemingly edited by a trainee pork butcher - it's absolutely appalling. Scenes vital for the story to make any sense are simply cut out right in the middle of conversations - it needs to be seen to be believed!

Finally to review the actual film.... This is more Frank Borzage-Paramount romance than it is Ernest Hemingway. Die hard fans of Hemingway will hate this but fans of old style romances, especially those familiar with Borzage's rich, emotion laden tear-jerkers will love it. Although occasionally little melodramatic at times, Gary Cooper as Hemingway's laconic alter-ego is excellent. He shows just what a good actor he was by making it believable that his character, the epitome of the restrained, strong and silent type really does fall head over heels in love with Catherine.

Helen Hays is pretty good and even won an Oscar for her portrayal of the gushing Catherine who wears her heart in her sleeve. Authentic to Hemingway's style of letting the reader/viewer fill in the gaps and work out backstories themselves, we're not told why Helen Hay's' character is the way she is or why she falls instantly in love but thanks to Borzage's clever direction, her shy, love-struck nurse comes across as completely authentic. It's a very believable story.

Something else worthy of noting is the cinematography. Cameraman Charles Lang won this film's other Oscar and his work is even more impressive than Helen Hays. It's both imaginative and spectacular. His visual artistry with a hatful of tricks and gimmicks is captivating from start to finish. Bearing in mind that this was made in 1932, his camerawork is exceptional.

Gary Cooper is an ambulance driver who is in the middle of combat in World War II. Life is tenuous for everyone. He meets a nurse, played by Helen Hayes, who has just lost her fiancé to the war. They hook up and he leaves. The result of their encounter is her pregnancy. Because Cooper is friends with a carouser with whom he inhabits bars and brothels, his friend, feeling that Cooper could be harmed by this woman's situation, intercepts letters she has sent to him. So she feels he has no feelings for her. He sends letters to her, but she has been transferred to another unit hospital. So communications have broken down and this leads to great pain. The ending is quite emotional (perhaps a bit too emotional) with some real overacting from two really good actors. Hemingway, apparently, hated the movie version of his book. It's worth a look but there are better movies featuring his work.

Interest sustained throughout by art direction, Lang's photography, the battle sequence editing, and Helen Hayes' performance. Cooper is satisfactory but overall the main fault is lack of narrative drive, the story principally devoted to the romance between the two leads. The anti-war theme is present but hardly developed in any intelligent fashion, apart from Menjou's comments on capturing successive mountain ranges. Far better treatment of anti-war themes can be found in All Quiet on the Western Front.

A Farewell to Arms (1932)

An unabashed over the top war romance (by Hemingway) and two young actors at the peak of their abilities. Add some really vigorous filming (some of the actions scenes in the battle are frightening and awesome), and you can see why this is such a powerful movie.

There is a little sense of familiarity to this kind of story, and an old fashioned romantic flavor to it (the book is similar in outline but slightly cooler, more prosaic, more intense, more true). I think Helen Hayes is perfect but only from the director's point of view--she gave him what he wanted for this kind of high drama, and I love the performance. Gary Cooper never sits right for me--his facial twitches remain twitches, his woodenness you can knock on with your knuckles--but this is one of his best performances, alongside "High Noon."

The photography by Charles Lang is really one of the highlights, and in weird way there are so many wordless part of the film, it has the strength of a great silent film with sound effects. Which pushes the burden further on the visuals. Another of the great early 1930s testaments to pure filming.

Does it work in the end? Partly. But it's really sentimental, and you have to like uncomplicated emotional conflict, and resolution, complete resolution.

This is a magnificent picture, photographed sublimely by Charles Lang (who deservedly won an Oscar). Cooper and Hayes are brilliant as the World War One lovers - and the ending will bring you to tears. How wonderful to see Coop so vulnerable and so in love, and Hayes just shines from the screen like a diamond.

This film is very under-rated. The camerawork is ground-breaking and original - look for the shot when Hayes kisses Cooper as he is wheeled into his hospital room. Amazing. I really love this film.

There's World War I going and Lieutenant Frederick Henry is fighting for his life.The war becomes secondary when he meets and falls in love with nurse Catherine Barkley.Having big emotions for another person during the war is dangerous since there's the chance of losing that person.They're both afraid.He may not admit that, but they're both afraid.Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932) is based on Ernest Hemingway's novel.It won two Academy Awards from best cinematography (Charles Lang) and best sound, recording (Franklin Hansen).It would have deserved awards for acting, as well.The charismatic Gary Cooper and the admirable Helen Hayes do a fantastic job as the leading couple.Then there's also the great Adolphe Menjou as Major Rinaldi.The dialogue is brilliant.Lots of lovely words are spoken about love.I know there are many people who would say a movie from 75 years back is too old for them.I'd say that's their lost.A Farewell to Arms offers great feelings from the first meeting till the tragic ending.