A Farewell to Arms Blu-ray Review
One of the best Hemingway adaptations, even if Papa himself hated it.
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, December 28, 2011
Ernest Hemingway's relationship with Hollywood was begrudgingly accepting at best. He gladly took money for the rights to film his novels and short
stories, but he openly disparaged most of the results as inaccurate, over-altered, or sentimentalized. He was especially hard on his first book-to-screen
adaptation, director Frank Borzage's take on
A Farewell to Arms, written by Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H.P. Garrett. When the film shipped
out in 1932, theater owners were given the choice of two different endings--a bleak, true-to-the-novel denouement, and a soft-peddled, more
ambiguously optimistic finale. They were told to pick whichever one would suit the tastes of their local audiences, and Hemingway--as you might
imagine--wasn't pleased by this deference to the whims of bean-counting box office managers. Nor was he happy with the way the film needlessly
alters events and downplays the wartime cynicism of the novel in favor of sweeping, melodramatic romance. The book, as usual,
is better--
Hemingway's authorial complaints are certainly valid--but taken as its own entity, Borzage's
A Farewell to Arms is a wonderful early talkie, with
brooding cinematography and affecting performances by its two leads, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes.
Cooper plays Frederic Henry, an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I. As one of Hemingway's so-called Code
Heroes--and a stand-in for Hemingway himself, who based the novel on his own experience in the war--Frederic is brave and confident, a decisive
man's man and a walking model of grace under pressure. He's fond of drinking and visiting whorehouses with his pal, Major Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou)--
who calls him "baby," like a studio mogul talking to a young starlet--but the carousing Frederic becomes a one-woman man when he takes shelter with
virginal Red Cross nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes) during an air raid. It's not quite love at first sight--Frederic is embarrassingly drunk--but they
get a good, long second look at one another during an officer's party, where Catherine is Rinaldi's intended date. Frederic steals her away for some flirty
conversation in an out-of-the-way churchyard, where he learns she was formerly engaged to a soldier killed in battle, and after sufficient wooing--and
plenty of
tomorrow we may die-style talk--they make love. (Off-camera, but unambiguously.) This isn't just some wartime one night stand,
though. Frederic and Catherine pledge themselves to one another, and struggle to keep their forbidden relationship hidden, especially from the jealous
Rinaldi and Catherine's disapproving best friend, Helen (Mary Philips), who thinks Frederic is nothing but trouble.
What follows is a series of dramatic separations and reunions as Frederic and Catherine are buffeted around in the unpredictable winds of war.
Thinking he's protecting his friend's sanity, Rinaldi has Catherine transferred to a hospital in Milan, but Frederic inadvertently follows her there when
he's wounded in the leg by artillery fire. In a beautiful sequence filmed entirely from a first person perspective, Frederic is wheeled on a gurney into the
hospital, his eyes staring up at the ornate ceiling. After he's been rolled into his room, Catherine enters, rushes up to him, and practically kisses the
camera lens, her face entirely filling the frame.
It's worth noting that
A Farewell to Arms was made before the Motion Picture Association of America began enforcing the Hays Code in 1934,
which would generally restrict the depiction of "immorality" in the cinema. The film is surprisingly frank about sexual desire, and though no nudity is
shown, Frederic and Catherine's conversations are filled with ready allusions to sex. When they rent a plush hotel room in Milan, Catherine even begins
nibbling on his chin and tells him, "I wish we could do something really sinful; everything we do feels so innocent and right." Their relationship
is legitimized somewhat when a caring priest (Jack La Rue) says the Latin wedding mass over them in secret, but this seems like a mere
formality. It's also one of the many changes made to soften the edginess of Hemingway's novel, or Hollywood-ize it, adding a sweetness and hushed
romanticism that isn't really present in the book.
Still, the chest-clutching melodrama of the film is powerful and stops well short of being saccharine or weepy. As far as capital-R-Romantics go, director
Frank Borzage (
Seventh Heaven) was one of the best. As Andrew Sarris puts it in
The American Cinema, "Borzage never needed
dream worlds for his suspensions of disbelief. He plunged into the real world of poverty and oppression...to impart an aura to his characters, not merely
through soft focus and a fluid camera, but through a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity." And that sums
up
A Farewell to Arms, one of those noble war romances where love is a welcome distraction from the surrounding chaos, a source of purpose
where meaninglessness reigns.
Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes make the perfect onscreen partners, and this may partially be due to the fact that Hayes had a massive, undisclosed
crush on her co-star at the time. (She later revealed this in one of her autobiographies.) Their game-like coquetry in the first act soon morphs into
something more serious--a mutually needed love--and by the time she's in excruciating labor, hoping Frederic will show up for the birth of their child,
we're completely invested in their relationship.
The film's Oscar-winning technical merits are also impressive, winning that year's trophies for Best Sound Recording and Best Cinematography. The war
montages, in particular, are stunning, with deep expressionistic shadows contrasted with bursts of light from exploding mortar rounds and dropped
bombs. This almost painterly style would seem to be at odds with Hemingway's staunch realism, but it works extremely well to concisely express the
horror and confusion of the front.
A Farewell to Arms Blu-ray, Video Quality
Kino's Blu-ray editions of silent classics this year have been uniformly excellent, so it's great to see the company venturing into the 1930s and the
advent of talkies. As a title in in the public domain,
A Farewell to Arms has received many VHS and DVD releases, and is viewable streaming
online via the Internet Archive, Netflix,
and Hulu, but this new 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer of the film should be considered
the
definitive version for some time to come. What surprised me most is how clean the print is. There are some minor flecks and specks, and you'll notice a
few hairs stuck in the gate at the bottom of the frame, but there are no major scratches, tears, debris, staining, or warpage. Borzage was somewhat
known for romantic, softly filtered focus, so you shouldn't expect razor-edged sharpness, but the overall clarity is several notches above the other
versions of the film I've seen--and I've sampled quite a few. The tonality of cinematographer Charles Lang's image is beautifully reproduced too, with
deep blacks and crisp--but never overblown--whites. The relatively short film sits comfortably on a single-layer Blu-ray disc, and I didn't notice any overt
compression or encode issues. Another wonderful release from Kino.
