You might think Ernest Hemingway's writing would be easily adapted for movie-making—plenty of action, terse dialogue, not a lot of psychological stream of consciousness....

But much of Hemingway's greatness is how he puts words together, his understated stylism. For example, at the beginning of his World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms, he presents the spectacle of the armies moving back and forth through the landscape and the villages, powdering the trees with their dust. The rhythms of his rolling sentences with their repetitive simple terms creates an incredibly evocative passage, setting a world-weary tone for all that is to follow in the lives of two young people caught up in the war and in the excitement of discovering each other amid all the cynicism. In a film though, you can only show pictures of armies marching, bombs exploding, and lovers embracing. Not the same thing.

Brief farewell
The novel is quite worldly, very adult for its time in its clear-eyed depiction of both war and love. It's not surprising however that films would take a more sentimental approach. The 1932 film with Gary Cooper as the ambulance driver Frederick Henry, an American in the Italian army, and Helen Hayes as the nurse Catherine Barkley, does provide some mature content, implying sex between the unmarried couple (although they are excused by an informal marriage service carried out by a sympathetic priest), resulting in a pregnancy. The couple are separated with her running off to Switzerland to have the baby and him deserting to look for her—at the risk of his life. A teary ending and that's about it.

The hour and a half of film time doesn't allow for more than a few montages of actual warfare. It cuts out the couple's entire stay in Switzerland. And it replaces the masterful, lonely finale of the novel with a corny scene of Coops bearing his lover's dead body to a sun-streaming window, crying out "Peace! Peace!" as bells peal out news of the armistice.

If we forget the novel though (usually a wise move) and just look at the film as a romantic epic of Hollywood's bad old days, this adaptation does have quite a few merits. Innovative camera work. Moody lighting. Adolphe Menjou as Rinaldi, the Italian doctor who is both a fun-loving buddy and rival to Lt. Henry. I suspect the film was shot almost entirely in studios, as films usually were in those days, but the settings are convincing. And despite their sometimes awkward difference in size—Hayes in heels doesn't come up to Coooper's shoulders—the leads are appealing: the camera loves them both.

On the other hand, the production is quite dated. This is an early talkie and it is often reminiscent of a just-past era, helmed as it is by silent-film director Frank Borzage. Exaggerated facial gestures. Slow moments when actors seem to be standing around waiting for others to finish their lines, so they can deliver theirs. The first half of the film is hollow-sounding, bereft of background music or incidental sound effects.

Worse, the script takes for granted we understand why the characters act as they do in certain scenes, when the motivations completely elude me. I'm not even sure what Lt. Henry and nurse Barkley see in each other. It's as though there's an unwritten rule that when handsome guy and dishy girl are in the same movie together, after a certain point it's understood they are deeply in love. Who'd you expect to win the gal, Adolphe Menjou?

Epic farewell
The 1957 remake of A Farewell to Arms as the war-crossed lovers seems like a good idea. Update the film technically with colour and improved sound. Give it more time, two and a half hours, to develop the characters and include more of Hemingway's story. Play it more sophisticatedly for a more knowing audience. Make the war scenes more horible.

In short, go for another Gone with the Wind—which is is what producer David O. Selznik is reputed to have done. Starting with the tagline displayed over the opening under the title: "A romantic tragedy of wartime."

But this Farewell to Arms, directed by the workmanlike Charles Vidor, raises the romance to an even greater height, again swamping with sentiment the harder side of Hemingway's story. The actors, with Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones in the lead, are up to the romantic task—despite Hudson being too 1950s-style good looking and despite Selznik's wife Jones really being too old, in her upper thirties, for the role. Famed Italian actor Vittorio De Sica takes the Rinaldi role as credibly as you would expect (and earning an Oscar nomination for it).

We get more of the original story, with a wonderfully awful depictions of the Italian retreat, the horrors of the arrest and sentencing to death of Henry and Rinaldi, and the excitement of the lovers' escape to Switzerland. Moreover, the tragic conclusion is played out in excruciating detail.

Unfortunately though, the film drags, especially in the endless love scenes and the ain't-we-got-fun montages of the lovers' romps in Italy and Switzerland between the serious scenes.

Oddly, neither this film version nor its forerunner were based directly on Hemingway's novel but rather on a stage play adapted from the book by Laurence Stallings. Oddly because they are so different. The first one captures Hemingway's style better while this one gets more of the story.

Neither comes anywhere near what Hemingway created. But why bitch about it? Perhaps filming Hemingway's story would have resulted in a drearier film that would interest no one, except a few Hemingway purists like myself.

We should probably be thankful we've never seen the 1966 television mini-series of Farewell to Arms starring George Hamilton and Venessa Redgrave.

A 1951 movie, Force of Arms, directed by Michael Curtiz and featuring William Holden as an American soldier in Italy during the Second World War, is supposed to be an uncredited update of A Farewell to Arms. Didn't see that one either. Will try not to.