A Farewell To Arms ** (1957, Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio de Sica) – Classic Movie Review 1246

Producer David O Selznick in 1957 turns Ernest Hemingway’s complex, famous world-classic 1929 semi-autobiographical novel into a bloated Hollywood romance in this overlong, overblown and underwhelming remake of the 1932 film with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Its comparative failure prompted Selznick, who was aiming at another success like his Gone with the Wind, to leave the movies completely, producing no other films.

Rock Hudson stars as the smooth, cynical, hard-drinking Lieutenant Frederic Henry, a young American serving in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army as a driver on the Italian front during World War One.

Through a friend at the local hospital, he meets English nurse Catherine Barkley (played by Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones), whose fiance has been killed at the Somme. He meets her again on a double date with his Italian army buddy Major Alessandro Rinaldi (Vittorio de Sica) and her nurse friend Helen Ferguson (Elaine Stritch).

Hudson and Jones just don’t have enough skill or allure to bring their roles off triumphantly, and they are overshadowed by better, scene-stealing players like de Sica, Stritch, Alberto Sordi (as the priest Father Galli) and Mercedes McCambridge (as the head nurse Miss Van Campen).

Selznick’s huge, glorious production is still mighty impressive, with its spectacular Italian scenery and the best sets (by designer Alfred Junge) and costumes that money could buy. Filmed in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, it’s visually a vast improvement on the original production.

The movie is beautifully shot by cinematographers Piero Portalupi and Oswald Morris on location in the Italian Alps, Venzone in the Province of Udine in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio, and Rome. All this provides some very considerable compensation.

Ben Hecht’s screenplay provides workable dialogue and good plotting, and tries hard to make something significant out of it all, and to some extent he does. Hecht’s screenplay is based in part on the 1930 play version of the novel by Laurence Stallings. This original Broadway play version starred Glenn Anders and Elissa Landi at the National Theatre and ran only 24 performances in September and  October 1930.

The original film runs 89 minutes, around half the length of this 151-minute version. Selznick replaced original director John Huston after five months’ work with the more pliant Charles Vidor, after Huston began to tinker with the script and spend an inordinate amount of time on pre-production preparations. But their relationship seems to have been acrimonious as well.

Selznick quit movie production entirely after the film flopped. He said the film was ‘not one of the jobs of which I am most proud.’ Selznick did not recover his $4,350,000 production costs but the distribution 20th Century Fox made some money on the movie, after it earned worldwide rentals of $6,900,000.

In its sole Oscar nod, Vittorio De Sica was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Red Buttons for Sayonara.

Hemingway was dismayed by Selznick’s casting of his 38-year-old wife Jennifer Jones as Catherine, whom he had written to be a young woman.

The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.

The 1996 film In Love and War, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Sandra Bullock, depicts Hemingway’s life in Italy as an ambulance driver in the events before his writing of A Farewell to Arms.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1246

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