Pour qui sonne le glas

These days I usually have to be in the mood to enjoy old movies like this. There's just a certain style to them that takes some getting used to every time. And that's no different here. But there's also a nostalgia factor at work, and once you get into it you can really enjoy this movie.

Terrific performances from Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman both. She's really beautiful, isn't she? And a wonderful story from none other than the great Ernest Hemingway. Once you get used to the old acting style and everything that comes with it, you can really enjoy this classic film. Recommend.

Ernest Hemingway was most particular about how is work should be portrayed on screen. He had hated the version of A Farewell to Arms that was done ten years earlier.

What he did like was Gary Cooper's portrayal of a Hemingway hero. He and Cooper got to be good friends, so he was Papa's first and only choice to be Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The novel grew out of Hemingway's experience in the Spanish Civil War that raged for almost four years. A number of generals not liking the leftist trend the new Spanish Republic was taking pulled a military coup d'etat. The whole world took sides with the Soviet Union aiding the Republic's defenders and Italy and Germany aiding the Nationalist Generals.

The USA was officially neutral, but people had their opinions. Believe it or not many supported the rebelling generals seeing them as upholding traditional Catholic Spain. But some in America organized the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of volunteers who fought for the Republic. Some in there were U.S. Communist Party members, but a whole lot were idealists. All of them had a lot of difficulty after World War II, for shall we say being to prematurely anti-Fascist.

Gary Cooper plays just such a volunteer and he's got a mission, to blow up a key bridge in the Guadarrama mountains. He makes contact with the guerrilla band of Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. Of course fighting with them is Ingrid Bergman, so we had some romantic interludes there which steamed up the screen.

This was quite a year for Ingrid, she did Casablanca as well that year and her name became synonymous with romance. She was not the first choice here. Director Sam Wood did not like his original leading lady Vera Zorina and replaced her with Bergman who he really wanted in the first place.

In fact Wood was a second choice. Paramount originally scheduled this film for Cecil B. DeMille. I'm betting there were some creative differences between DeMille and Papa Hemingway. If this had become a DeMille type film, it would have been a disaster.

Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, and Katina Paxinou all got Academy Award nominations. Only Paxinou won the Oscar for this film. A great performance, but also probably a tribute to her refugee status. She had fled her native Greece when the Nazis took over where she was a leading member of their national theater. She accepted her Oscar in memory of her late colleagues there.

The only criticism of the film came from those that thought it lingered too long on Cooper and Bergman's romance. Something by the way they were having in real life as well.

But Ernest Hemingway liked the film just fine and I think most will as well.

The film opens with a tolling bell and a quotation from John Donne's "No Man Is an Island." Then the action literally explodes on the screen with an act of sabotage by Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper), who has just struck a blow for the young Spanish Republic against the fascist Nationalists. As one of about 60,000 foreigners who have come to fight for Spain's freedom, Jordan's story plays out against a background of cataclysmic world events.

Jordan is immediately assigned the task of blowing up an important bridge behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains, near Segovia. The main story line follows him as he joins a ragtag troop of guerrillas in pursuit of his mission. The guerrillas are led by the forceful Pilar, in an Academy Award-winning portrayal by Katina Paxinou. An equally pivotal character in the band is cunning, treacherous Pablo (Akim Tamiroff), who may at any moment defect to the Nationalist side if it profits him. The guerrillas are a motley crew of pan- European characters, each with his own life story and reason for being in that place at that time.

And then there is the innocent, vulnerable, incredibly beautiful Maria (Ingrid Bergman), who was rescued from Nationalist rapists and is now protected by the guerrillas. Under Pilar's watchful eye Robert and Maria fall in love. With the signing of Ingrid Bergman to play the role of Maria, Paramount jumped on the post-"Casablanca" bandwagon. Echoes of the earlier film that were not in Hemingway's novel crop up as Robert morphs from the stalwart freedom fighter to the lover who is torn between duty and love.

A lengthy film of about 160 minutes, FWTBT takes time to explore the relationships between characters, even the lesser lights. We find out who is strong and weak, who is in favor of the war and who is not, and get a glimpse into how each one might react when the chips are down. A particularly meaningful interchange is when Robert explains to the guerrillas that although the Communists are on their side (under orders from the Soviet Cominterm), the fascist governments of Germany and Italy are supplying the Nationalists with Panzer tanks and Stuka dive-bombers. In reality those governments were testing their armament in preparation for the coming world war.

SPOILER: The end of the film is a whirlwind series of scenes in which Robert almost single- handedly demolishes the bridge as the Nationalist army approaches. Then fate takes a hand. To escape, the guerrillas must ride across an open area through a hail of enemy machine-gun and light artillery fire. Everyone makes it across but Robert, bringing up the rear, who is blown from his horse by an exploding shell. Too wounded to ride, Robert must be left behind with a machine-gun to slow the advance of the Nationalists.

With courage and great pain Robert delivers his "hill of beans" and "where I'm going you can't follow" speeches to Maria. He promises that they will be together in spirit but stops short of saying, "We'll always have Guadarrama."

Maria is thrown onto the back of a horse and the band gallops away, her screams fading into the distance. Fighting nausea and unconsciousness, Robert sets up the machine-gun and fires directly into the camera (mirrored at the end of "Bataan" with Robert Taylor). Smoke and cordite fill the screen, and the scene dissolves to the giant bell tolling a warning to mankind.

In 1943 Hemingway and the everyone in the film knew to their sorrow that the Nationalists had won the Civil War in 1939 and that Spain now lived under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. They could not know that, ironically, with Franco's death in 1975 Spain named King Juan Carlos I sovereign of the democratic constitutional monarchy that rules the Kingdom of Spain today.

Hollywood doesn't seem able to put Hemingway's works on the screen. This is a romanticized version of guerillas fighting in the mountains during the Spanish Civil War. It is supposed to be a "classic" but there are too many weaknesses to give it that status. There is no real tension. Bergman (gorgeously photographed) and Cooper fall in love instantly and we are never in any doubt about that. They are surrounded by some of the talkiest guerilla fighters hiding out in a murky cave (where much of the technicolor action takes place), each with thick accents that don't seem to match their characters. Katina Paxinou certainly does a stunning job as Pilar--and Akim Tamiroff is more than adequate--but the film becomes weary after the first hour and gets bogged down in too much talk before it finally zeros in on its main action sequence involving the blowup of a bridge. Again, Hollywood fails to inject a Hemingway story with enough human interest and fails to make us care enough about these characters. Transition to the screen just doesn't work when it comes to Hemingway whose writing style is best confined to the novels he wrote. The only bright note is Victor Young's pseudo-Spanish score which gives the picture its only lift. Not the film it was hyped to be at the time, depending on its status as a best-seller by Hemingway for a built-in audience. Satisfaction not guaranteed unless you are a huge fan of Bergman and Cooper.

This is a fine film, very popular in its day for depicting the desperate fight for freedom that even civilians engaged in by choice, at a time when democracy was in fact truly threatened and there was a very real possibility it would disappear from the earth. Because of the bravery of so many men and women of that time, the freedom that many today take for granted was assured. But it is by no means permanent.

The film is relatively heavy but certainly many modern films about current events are equally heavy. One is either involved or not but I found it a great story of a small group of people who have survived a great deal of pain in life and who have little to lose. The film presents the characters very well, allowing us to like and understand them. It was shot in Technicolor on realistic locations and beautifully designed by William Cameron Menzies. The music by Victor Young is outstanding.

In case anyone may not know, Ingrid Bergman was the choice of Ernest Hemingway. In fact, he went out of his way to see to it that the ballet dancer and actress Vera Zorina, who was originally cast and who had begun shooting the film, was replaced by Bergman. Hemingway also wanted Gary Cooper and no one else to play Robert Jordan. How can these actors be 'miscast' when the author who created the characters felt they were perfect for the roles?