A Farewell to Arms

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

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 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.

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.