A FAREWELL TO ARMS
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
It's maddening to one's sense of fairness to read back cover promotion like this: A FAREWELL TO ARMS is "the best American novel to emerge out of World War I...an unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his love for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lt. Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature...his description of the German attack on Caporetto bears comparison to Stendhal's depiction of the retreat from Waterloo. Richer in language, more subtle in expression, and emotionally astute, (the novel) also symbolizes Hemingway's farewell to an attitude, a time, and a literary method. Published when Hemingway was just thirty, it confirmed his stature as the greatest single influence on the American short story and novel." After that, what's left but the Nobel prize? If the cult around Hemingway is culturally ingrained, it's also a bit much. Undeniably he has a gift for the laconic -- his shorthand prose and dialogue achieve his stories' limited purposes better than just about any other stylist. For example, when at her end Catherine says, "It's just a dirty trick," you'll be tempted to pooh-pooh the fatalism and jeer at the melodramatic setup, but at the same time you'll find yourself applauding Papa's 1929 audacity. (It's the kind of "paying for your sins of happiness" one could expect Carol Burnett's skit writers to make into classic camp.) And irrefutable is that his viral technique of punchy economy has infected generations of writers who follow him -- there's an endless contagion of wanna-be boxers. Your immune system warns of them in just about every kind of entertainment writing -- high classers, pulp fiction, pop trash, science fiction, horror stuff. You hear them in movies, on TV dramas and sitcoms and soaps, on talk-radio. Even news has become bastardized Hemingway: the day's stories are compacted into pugil stick tutorials and pithy reproaches. (Theatre more or less escaped, only to become technoholic.) Hemingway's brooding impatience, arrogance and intense lack of subtly represent who we think we are; even if some of us aren't as appreciative of his art as others hold we should be -- Camille Paglia thinks it's scandalous that some resist worshipping him as "the inventor of the lingua franca of American journalism" -- what he gives us as imagery of himself is so powerful that, like we do with Mailer, we absorb the bravura myth disproportionate to what's real. They may be monsters, but they're our monsters as literary royalty. What Hemingway doesn't produce as writer is in-depth character and expository detail: unlike Mailer, he doesn't have the tolerance to do much other than broadstroking, he can't be bothered with biography or, in FAREWELL, with much history. The book, which took thirteen months to write and resulted in Italy designating the author persona non grata during the 30s, is a blend of some of his nonfiction pieces and a whole lot of personal and travel experiences that eclipse the catastrophe of the war; it's simply bogus praise that he can be compared to Stendhal (or John Reed, the real architect of American-style news reporting) when what he's really doing is editorially dramatizing a travelogue. The more you get into Hemingway, the harder it is to adapt him to the screen, which is the weirdest of ironies because you'd think that the way he writes -- his chatter is film noir before it was ever coined -- would be a breeze to reenact. But it's Aldous Huxley who found the cloak of insufficiency inherent in the argot: "What Hemingway had to say was in the white spaces between the lines." Ben Hecht, who gets the screenplay credit for the `57 A FAREWELL TO ARMS screamed at producer David O. Selznick, "That sonofabitch writes in water!" In his "An Open Book," John Huston writes that "Hemingway's stories don't dramatize readily. Scenes seem to a beginning, a middle and an end when in fact they don't." Charles Vidor directed the picture, but Huston was first choice; after receiving a sixteen page single-spaced typewritten memo from Selznick -- a condensed version of the drivel is published in "Memo from David O. Selznick" -- he wisely opted out. He also exposes what you tend to feel while watching the movie: Selznick's "love for Jennifer Jones was very real and touching but in it lay the seeds of the failures that marked the last years of his life. Everything he did was for Jennifer. His life centered upon her, to the detriment of his good judgment. He never did anything worth a damn after he married her." The movie's been turned into one of those Wednesday matinee hard ticket weepies -- with Jones suffering for the martini'd blue hairs in the audience. Already seventeen years older than her character Catherine, a VAD more Scot than English, Jones is more than a little embarrassing to watch; deluded by Selznick's and the production's inflation, she thinks she can do the "I've-slapped-you-now-you-pump-me" routine. But there's one facet about which we come to believe: that not only is Catherine in her own words "a little gone off," so is Jones. In what performance isn't she titling towards Bonkersville? (Could anyone call her certifiably sane in SONG OF BERNADETTE, DUEL IN THE SUN, LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT?) Despite her "condition," which includes a fear of rain, she can't say no to Rock. But who'd fault her weakness? In his dark and shiny nonregulation-cut hair, Hudson's not too bad; king of the amiable glamour boys who knew that the way to movie star success was regularly stopping by Villa Hag, he's the epitome of 50s heartthrob. Unmistakably an American strapper, with a super-rare drop-dead friendliness, flashing a "take me, I'm yours" smile, he's nothing if not a CinemaScope glossy. He's not Hemingway as Hemingway writes about himself in the novel, but he's quite possibly what Hemingway might have hoped for himself at his most physically ideal. During the 50s and early 60s, who didn't want to be Rock or be Rocked? (What a John Waters moment it must have been when the studios discovered that Hudson was getting more fan male than fan mail.) Vittorio De Sica and the other Italian actors often sound looped and Mario Nascimbene's score gets a little too funereal with the organ. Oswald Morris did some photography but was eventually fired by Selznick. I'd love to know if he did the opening tourist panoramas; they'd make great additions to MS Scenes.
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