If you need a Hollywood-style film of a Hemingway novel, you couldn't do much better than 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the novel, it's exiting, tense, cynical, romantic and touching by turns. Perhaps somewhat more on the romantic side, but that's part of the Hollywoodization that one would expect from a film of that period.

Of course another part of that process is the importing of big-name stars into the film however inappropriate they might for the roles. Gary Cooper in his forties is more than a decade too old to be the hero climbing around mountain bridges with dynamite and hopping into the sack (a bedroll in the snow actually) with a nineteen-year-old girl. And although Ingrid Bergman as the girl is closer to the right age in her mid-twenties, it's hard to accept the blonde Swedish beauty with the perfect teeth as the Spanish villager of the novel.

But Cooper does have down pat the minimalist acting style and the man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do stoicism of a Hemingway hero. And Bergman at her most boyishly appealing with her shorn locks (a result of the ravishing she is supposed to have undergone by the fascist soldiers) can make you forget what character she's supposed to be playing and focus on the tragic love story of these two screen stars.

Besides, it's the secondary characters who really shine in this film. They're led by the Greek actress Katina Paxinou as a towering Pilar, the real head of the guerilla fighters that the American Robert Jordan (Cooper) hooks up with. The titular head of the band, the corrupted Pablo, is played by the accomplished Russian-born actor Akim Tamiroff. Tamiroff and Paxinou joined Cooper and Bergman as Oscar nominees for their acting in For Whom the Bell Tolls, though only Paxinou won. The cast also features about a dozen other great character actors—from Russia, Hungary, Mexico, Malta and even one from Spain—sporting diverse accents as Spanish peasants but providing great entertainment as they joke and feud with each other. For an action flick, it's quite a talkative movie. Several of the scenes taking place in the band's cave come across as theatre pieces.

I've noticed quite a few viewers seem confused about the politics of the war the characters are involved in and have had a hard time telling the two sides apart. I read someone on a Web site wondering aloud if the side we cheer for in the movie are Al-Qaeda-style terrorists. This may seem strange to anyone old enough to have lived through the Spanish Civil War or to anyone who has studied that period even slightly. But the film doesn't help by playing down the politics and there's that speech put in Jordan's mouth (in the film, not the book) to the effect that the Nazis and the Communists are fighting each other in Spain and the poor Spanish people are caught in the crossfire. In reality, the civil war of 1936-39 was a precursor to the Second World War. Pablo and Pilar's band are part of the Republican side fighting for Spanish democracy against the "Loyalist" side of the Falangist dictator Franco. Franco brought his buddies Hitler and Mussolini in on his side to put down the republic, and democratic people from around the world, including from Canada, Britain and the United States (and including authors Hemingway, George Orwell and future Canadian author Hugh Garner, among others), flocked to Spain to support the republican cause. Many of them were left-wingers of various stripes and the Soviet Union also provided assistance. For this reason, the film is very careful to make it clear that Jordan/Cooper is not a red sympathizer and they accordingly distort what the war was about.

It's also been complained that the film compresses the book. Well, duh. The book would make a twenty-hour film if it weren't severely compressed. Yes, it's too bad that Jordan's final voice-over monologue was cut from several pages in the book to a few lines focussing mainly on the romance in the film. If I were writing a screenplay today I'd put more of it back in, and take out some of the sillier comedic touches and sentimental moments. Of course, I'd also make the dialogue less corny. But this is the twenty-first century. That was Hollywood 1943. And for Hollywood 1943 the movie was pretty hard hitting.