L'Adieu Aux Armes (A Farewell to Arms) - Ernest Hemingway - A Movie Review & More
L’Adieu Aux
Armes (A Farewell to Arms) – Ernest Hemingway - A Movie Review & More
A Farewell to Arms is a poignant
and tragic love story, based on Ernest Hemingway’s famous Novel of the same
name. This is similar to William
Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” an immortal classic tragic love story.
In the winter of 1917, an American
Ambulance Driver Lieutenant Frederick Henry enlists in the Italian Army and is
wounded in action. He is gradually
restored to health by a beautiful young British Red Cross Nurse Catherine
Barkley. When they find themselves
falling in love, they tries to escape the horrors of the war by fleeing to Switzerland
to seek peace and happiness. In
Switzerland, fate is waiting to thwart their plans.
The gruesome war experience and
wounded in the action, the American Ambulance Driver Lieutenant Frederick
Henry is a first-person account of Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical portrayal
of the character.
A Farewell to Arms is a 1957 American DeLuxe Color Cinemascope
Drama film directed by Charles Vidor and produced by David O. Selznick (Gone
With The Wind fame).
The duration of the film is 152 minutes.
The duration of the film is 152 minutes.
This Blog
is not only a Movie review but also a Book review of my most favorite author
Ernest Hemingway’s finest novel “A Farewell to Arms”.
Frederick Henry (Rock Hudson) is an American officer serving in an ambulance unit for the Italian Army during World War I. While recovering from a wound in a British base hospital in northern Italy, he is cared for by Catherine Barkley
(Jennifer Jones), a Red
Cross nurse whom earlier
he had met, and with whom he had had a romantic encounter, near the front, and
the two engage in an affair. Frederick's
friend, the doctor, convinces the army that Frederick's knee is more severely
wounded than it actually is and the two continue their romance but never get
married.
Catherine discovers she is pregnant but after sneaking alcohol into the
hospital for Frederick, the head nurse Miss Van Campen (Mercedes McCambridge) discovers the duplicity and separates
them. She informs Frederick's superiors that he has fully recovered from his
wounds and is ready for active duty. During their separation, Catherine comes
to believe Frederick has abandoned her.
Following the Battle of Caporetto, Frederick and his close friend Major
Alessandro Rinaldi (Vittorio De Sica) assist the locals in fleeing the invading German/Austrian armies. Along
the forced march, several people die or are left behind due to exhaustion. When
the two ambulance drivers are finally able to report to a local army base, the
commandant assumes they are both deserters from the front. Rinaldi is executed
by the Italian military; enraged, Frederick knocks out the kerosene lamps and
flees, jumping into the river.
Wanted by the Italian army, Frederick evades capture and meets up with
Catherine. They flee Milan to hide out on a lake on the Italian-Swiss border (Lake Lugano or Lake Maggiore). Fearing arrest by the police,
Catherine persuades Frederick to flee to Switzerland by rowboat; after some adventures, they land successfully in Switzerland.
Claiming to be tourists trying to evade the war, the two are allowed to remain
in neutral Switzerland. Catherine's pregnancy progresses but due to the
conditions around them, the pregnancy becomes complicated and Catherine is
hospitalized. Their child is stillborn, and Catherine dies shortly afterward.
The movie ends with the shot of Frederick leaves, shocked and shattered and
head for the hotel room while it was raining.
A Farewell to the arms and
ammunitions, a gruesome horrifying war scenario, Frederick discarding his
Lieutenant title as a war hero and escaping from the war front to the arms of
his beloved.
And all the way through, this personal story is surrounded by the haunting shapes of war—its magnitude, its madness, its horrible pain and futility. In the end the pattern of the romance is manifested to be the same as that of war.
Shortly after their formal introduction, which
takes place at the beginning of the film at a lovely British base hospital in
northern Italy, the hero drives his ambulance up to the Austrian front, and
during this sequence we are treated to some great views of military movements amid
mountain scenery.
These views of long lines of trucks and soldiers
working their way up switchback roads and of artillery blasting away in the
snow-covered mountains are truly awesome in color and CinemaScope. Filmed in
Italy, they galvanize you briefly with a sense of the nature of war on that
Alpine front.
The romantic cameo of the lead couple that they spend long hours romancing
in a hospital, while the hero is recovering from a wound, and then they spend
long hours throwing snowballs at each other in true winter-carnival fashion at
a Swiss resort while awaiting the birth of their child is heartwarming.
The film was distributed by Twentieth
Century Fox.
The budget of the movie was 4 - 4.5 million dollars and it raked in 20 million
dollars at the Box Office worldwide.
I think there is enough room to discuss here about the novel
and review the same other than the film adaptation.
Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel, A
Farewell to Arms, is often regarded as his best artistic achievement. It was certainly his greatest commercial
success to date with 80,000 copies sold within the first four months. The money earned for the novel, though, came
too late to prevent his father Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway from committing suicide due to financial stress
and a losing battle with diabetes. The novel established Ernest Hemingway as
the literary master of a style that was characterized by brisk assertive
staccato, or crisp precise prose. The
novel also gave rise to the myth of Hemingway as the epitome of American
machismo. This owed as much to the
popularity of his novel and his friendship with Gary Cooper who played
Frederick Henry in the 1932 film version of the novel as it did to Hemingway’s
own heroism.
A Farewell to Arms begins in the
Alps around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia. Allied with
Britain, France, and Russia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany,
Italy is responsible for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting
the Germans on the war's western front, and Russia in the east. The novel's
narrator and protagonist is eventually identified as Lieutenant Frederic Henry,
an American who has volunteered for the Italian army because the United States
has not yet entered the war. Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance
drivers and was a lieutenant in the cadre.
After a wintertime leave spent
touring the country, Lieutenant Henry returns to the captured town at the front
where his unit lives. One evening his roommate, a surgeon and lieutenant in the
Italian army named Rinaldi, introduces Henry to two British nurses: Catherine
Barkley and her friend Helen Ferguson. Catherine and Henry talk of the war and
of her fiancé, killed in combat the year before; clearly she has been
traumatized by the experience. On his second visit to the British hospital,
they kiss. When Henry again visits Catherine, she tells him that she loves him
and asks whether he loves her. He responds that he does.
One night, Lieutenant Henry and
his fellow ambulance-drivers settle into a dugout across the river from the
enemy troops. While the drivers are eating, the Austrian bombardment wounds
Henry in the leg and kills one of the other drivers. Henry is transported by
train to an American hospital in Milan.
Soon after Lieutenant Henry's
return to the front, the Austrians (now joined by German troops) bombard the
Italian army and eventually break through the lines near the town of Caporetto.
Henry and the other ambulance drivers retreat with the rest of the Italian
forces in a long, slow-moving column of troops and vehicles. They pick up two
Italian engineer-sergeants. Finally, the ambulances pull off the main road.
When one of the vehicles becomes stuck in the mud, the two sergeants refuse to
assist in the effort to dislodge it and disobey Lieutenant Henry's order to
remain with the group. He fires at them, wounding one; another ambulance driver
then uses Henry's pistol to finish the job. Henry and the three drivers abandon
the ambulances and set out on foot for the Tagliamento River, across which lies
safety.
Soon they spot German soldiers in
the distance. One driver is shot to death by fellow Italians firing in error.
Another driver flees, to surrender to the Germans. Finally safe from the enemy,
Lieutenant Henry observes that Italian army officers like himself are being
shot by the military police for deserting their troops. He also fears being
mistaken for a German spy. And so he dives into the Tagliamento River,
deserting the Italian army, and swims ashore downstream. Henry crosses part of
the Venetian plain on foot, then boards a moving train, hiding among guns
stored beneath a tarpaulin.
Frederic (no longer Lieutenant)
Henry arrives in Milan, incognito. Catherine Barkley and Helen Ferguson are
absent from the hospital, having gone on holiday to the Italian resort town of
Stresa. So Henry travels via train to Stresa, where he finds Catherine and
Helen. Discovering late one night that Henry will be arrested as a deserter in
the morning, Henry and Catherine quickly prepare to escape into neutral
Switzerland. Through the stormy night, they travel in a small, open boat across
Lake Maggiore. The following day they are arrested and briefly detained by
Swiss officials, after which they are released.
Frederic Henry and Catherine
Barkley move into a chalet on a mountain above Montreaux and spend an idyllic
winter there. At winter's end, they leave the mountains for a hotel in
Lausanne. Finally, Henry takes Catherine to the hospital, where her baby is
stillborn. Then, as a result of multiple hemorrhages, Catherine dies as well. The movie ends with the shot of Frederick leaves, shocked and shattered and
head for the Hotel room while it was raining.
And yet, A Farewell to Arms is at
the same time a tender love story — one of the most tender and affecting ever
written. It has been compared to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and
the reference is an apt one. Both stories concern young lovers antagonized by
their societies. (In Shakespeare's play, the Montague-Capulet blood feud is the
problem; in Hemingway's novel, the Great War is to blame.) Both stories seem to
vibrate with a sickening sense of doom that only increases as the stories near
their respective conclusions. And both end in heartbreaking tragedy. If not one
of the greatest love stories ever told, A Farewell to Arms is certainly among
the greatest of the twentieth century.
Actually, it is the very
combination of love and war that makes this book so potent and memorable.
Regarding the woman he loves, the hero of Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell
Tolls tells himself "You had better love her very hard, and make up in
intensity what the relation will lack in duration and continuity." Frederic
Henry of A Farewell to Arms could say the same thing of his affair with
Catherine Barkley. Because they meet in a time and place in which every day
could be their last together, Frederic and Catherine must wring every drop of
intimacy and passion from their relationship. (Notice how soon Catherine begins
to speak of love, and how soon — especially considering the conservative mores
of the time in which the book is set — they sleep together.) The result is an
affair — and a story — almost unbearable in its intensity.
A Farewell to Arms is certainly
one of Hemingway's finest novels. In fact, some critics have called it his
best. Though not as inventive — as extreme, really — in subject and style as
The Sun Also Rises (published three years earlier), this book actually benefits
from its comparatively conventional approach to storytelling; it seems more
sincere, more heartfelt. (Of course, The Sun Also Rises is about World War I,
too. It merely focuses on the war's tragic aftermath.)
And like William Faulkner's Light
in August, A Farewell to Arms proves that its author was not merely a Modern
master. He could also produce a big book in the grand tradition of the
nineteenth century novel. In retrospect, it is no surprise that A Farewell to
Arms is the book that made Ernest Hemingway famous.
A Farewell to Arms feels less propagandistic than Hemingway's other Great War story, For Whom the Bell Tolls — which relies partly on flashback for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism that marred the author's later work. A Farewell to Arms is vastly superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The Torrents of Spring and the Nobel Prize winner “The Old Man and the Sea”. In fact, the only other volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with A Farewell to Arms is the writer's debut story collection, In Our Time. That book's postwar tales, "Soldier's Home" and "Big Two-Hearted River," can almost be read as sequels to A Farewell to Arms, or at least to the events that inspired the novel.
A Farewell to Arms feels less propagandistic than Hemingway's other Great War story, For Whom the Bell Tolls — which relies partly on flashback for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism that marred the author's later work. A Farewell to Arms is vastly superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The Torrents of Spring and the Nobel Prize winner “The Old Man and the Sea”. In fact, the only other volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with A Farewell to Arms is the writer's debut story collection, In Our Time. That book's postwar tales, "Soldier's Home" and "Big Two-Hearted River," can almost be read as sequels to A Farewell to Arms, or at least to the events that inspired the novel.
A Farewell to Arms remains as one
of the finest works of Ernest Hemingway.
posted by Unknown @ 11:45
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