For Whom the Bell Tolls **** (1943, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, Arturo de Cordova, Katina Paxinou) – Classic Movie Review 4807

Gary Cooper is ideally cast as Robert Jordan, Ernest Hemingway’s American soldier fighting in Spain in the 1930s, in producer-director Sam Wood’s lavish 1943 Hollywood golden years epic of the Spanish Civil War. However, Ingrid Bergman is a rather less perfect fit, though gainfully employed, valiantly her fighting slight miscasting as Maria, the Spanish peasant with whom he enjoys a brief encounter.

Katina Paxinou won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Nevertheless, Bergman and Cooper were both Oscar nominated for their notable performances, among the best of the year. As the Spanish revolutionary Pilar, Greek actress Katina Paxinou won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (and a Golden Globe) for her superb performance in her first film role. However, it was the movie’s sole Academy Award win and the film missed out on a host of other nominations – eight others, including Best Picture.

Alas, the tone of Dudley Nichols’s screenplay is reverential rather than exciting and adventurous and Wood’s filming technique is disappointingly old fashioned and static.

However, Hemingway’s great novel’s mix of love story and adventure is still potently realised through the wash of glowing Technicolor in Ray Rennahan’s Oscar nominated cinematography and Victor Young’s appealing Oscar nominated music score, and in the Paramount studio’s handsome production, designed by William Cameron Menzies and Hans Dreier, who was Oscar nominated for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, along with Haldane Douglas and Bertram C Granger.

Nowadays, the Cooper-Bergman star partnership casts a dazzling allure, and there is much to admire in one of those great support casts that were essential texture to old Hollywood film-making.

It  co-stars Oscar nominated Akim Tamiroff as Pablo, Arturo de Cordova as Agustín, Vladimir Sokoloff as Anselmo, Mikhail Rasumny as Rafael, Victor Varconi as Primitivo, and Joseph Calleia as El Sordo.

Also in the cast are Alexander Granach, Fortunio Bonanova, Eric Feldary, Lilo Yarson, Aida Kuznetzoff, Leonid Snegoff, Leo Bulgakov, Duncan Renaldo, Frank Puglia, Pedro de Cordoba, Michael Visaroff, Martin Garralaga, Jean De Val, John Mylong, Feodor Chaliapin Jr, Yakima Canutt, Wade Botelier, Yvonne De Carlo and Konstantin Shayne.

The cut re-release version runs at 134 minutes but the film is now restored to its original length of 170 minutes.

Paramount Pictures was not shy about selling it: ‘All the power and passion of Hemingway’s immortal lovers who clung together in the darkness before a thunderous dawn.’ It was a more romantic era, of course, and perhaps a more gullible one.

Cooper also stars in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4807

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