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.

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”.

SYNOPSIS

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.

A Brief Summary of the Novel & the Book Review

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 is not a novel glorifying war. Instead, it is a tragic love story whose farewell is from Frederic to the woman whose arms held sanity in the crazy world of the Great War. 

                           

                                                      

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.

                      

Catherine Barkley arrives at the hospital, to which she has been transferred. Once again, she and Lieutenant Henry declare their love for each other, after which they have sex in the hospital bed. Henry and Catherine spend the summer together while he recuperates from an operation on his leg, visiting restaurants around Milan in the evening and then spending nights together. At summer's end, however, Lieutenant Henry is ordered back to the front, and Catherine tells him she is three months pregnant. On their last evening together in Milan, Henry buys a pistol, and he and Catherine take a room in a hotel.

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 remains as one of the finest works of Ernest Hemingway.