Frank Borzage takes Hemingway’s spare novel about an American ambulance driver and an English nurse and turns it into a swoon of dissolves and choirs. It should not work and mostly does, thanks to Gary Cooper, Charles Lang’s camera and a last reel we will not describe.
Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms in short flat sentences about a war that meant nothing and a love that did not save anyone. Frank Borzage, directing and producing for Paramount with Adolph Zukor, read the same book and saw a romance in which love saves everything, including the two people it happens to. The screenplay, by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Benjamin Glazer, keeps Hemingway’s people and most of his events and changes the temperature entirely. We think the result is a good film and a strange adaptation, and we would rather have it than a faithful dull one.
The film’s best idea arrives early. Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper), the American lieutenant driving ambulances for the Italians, is hit by a shell and carried into a hospital in Milan, and Borzage puts the camera on the stretcher, looking straight up. Ceilings slide past, then painted frescoes, then the faces of orderlies and nurses leaning in, and finally Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes) bending down to kiss him. Charles Lang lights all of it from above so the faces come out of darkness one at a time. We realised, when it was over, that we had been holding still along with him.
Cooper is the reason the whole thing stays upright. He plays Frederic shy, half-mumbling, a big man who does not know where to put his hands, and he undersells every line. The film around him oversells nearly everything, so the two cancel out and something like a real person emerges. Hayes, a stage actress, is pitched to the back row in the first scenes and it takes a while to adjust. In the hospital, whispering across a pillow, she is fine, and better than fine when she stops performing grief and simply looks tired.
Adolphe Menjou has the most fun as Rinaldi, the surgeon friend who grins while saying the true thing, and whose part in the second half we will leave alone. Mary Philips, as Helen Ferguson, gets the job of seeing the trouble coming and being ignored, and does it without fuss. Jack La Rue’s priest is gentler than we expected, and the scene in which he does his one important piece of business in the ward is played quietly, without a swell, which makes it the most affecting moment in the first hour.
Made before the Production Code was enforced in 1934, the film is franker than the ones that followed about what these two get up to in a hospital bed and about what nurses were and were not permitted to want. Travis Banton dresses Hayes in whites that fill the frame and then, in one or two scenes, in nothing much at all under a sheet. Otho Lovering and George Nichols Jr. cut a combat montage late on that is faster and harder than anything else in the picture, marching feet and wheels and mud and shellfire jammed together, and it is over almost before you have registered it. That is the war’s total allowance. Hemingway would have wanted more of it.
Seven men are credited with the music and it sounds like it. The score barely stops, rises at every kiss, and reaches for Wagner at the end. The middle stretch, letters and waiting and rain on windows, sags under it. At 89 minutes the second half of the novel is squeezed hard, and anyone who knows the book will feel events go past like stations from an express.
Then the last reel, which we will not describe. It moved us more than we thought it would, and we sat for a minute afterwards suspecting we had been got at by a choir and a dissolve. We decided we did not mind. Borzage believed this stuff, and belief, filmed with this much care, is difficult to argue with while it is happening.
Paramount sold it with the line “Every woman who has loved will understand.” We would widen the invitation.
