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Purely Joyful Movie!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Blistering performances.

American Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper) is serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during WWI. He is taken with English nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes). His best friend Italian doctor Major Rinaldi is also taken with her. Her fiancée had died at the Sommes. Frederic and Catherine begin a romance in the midst of war.Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes are doing their romantic best. This adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway classic is skewed more towards romanticism. As for the epic retreat, the movie tries to capture it but only as sound stage special effects and montages. Same goes for the crossing. The action adventure intensity isn't there. While the actors are superior, the adaptation lacks tension. This version takes the first crack at the book and hits a solid single.

Based on Ernest Hemingway's semi-autobiographical 1929 novel of the same name, this seemed like the perfect film to watch after the Hemingway biopic "In Love and War" (1996) but it is not a very good one. I read the relevant novel seven or eight years ago so my memories of it are admittedly not terribly fresh but this is not a great adaptation. The film is slowly paced, disjointed and often boring in spite of its short running time. The ending is far too melodramatic for my liking. The script largely trades the novel's cynicism and fatalism for sentimentality and romanticism. Hemingway hated the film but, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have had a problem with these changes if they had been handled well. Sadly, they weren't as the script is not exactly strong.That said, there is an underlying sense of fatalism when it comes to the treatment of the First World War and the manner in which it impacted on its participants. The scenes dealing with the war are considerably better executed than the romantic ones. The film is interesting in its depiction of premarital sex, particularly since it would have been toned down considerably if it had been made after the Hays Code came into effect in 1934. Hemingway would have probably hated it even more if, say, it had been made in 1937. The novel's language was toned down as well but that was hardly surprising given that Hemingway used several words that would not be commonly heard in films until decades after his death.Gary Cooper became a better actor as he got older but he is not a great leading man in this instance. His performance as Lt. Frederic Henry is very variable. In contrast, Helen Hayes is excellent as his beloved Catherine Barkley, a war weary and somewhat emotionally damaged English nurse. I've never seen her in anything young before so that was interesting. However, she and Cooper have next to no chemistry so their romance is tepid at best, which is obviously never a good thing in a romantic film! The film also features strong performances from Adolphe Menjou as Henry's unreliable "war brother" Captain Rinaldi, Mary Phillips as Catherine's best friend and fellow nurse Helen Ferguson and Jack La Rue as an Italian priest who has difficulty comprehending the scale of death and destruction that the war has caused. Cooper later became close friends with Hemingway and chose him to star in the film adaptation of his 1940 novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls".Overall, this is not a very good film when it comes to the romantic elements but much better when it comes to its more limited war elements.

A very curious coincidence. Watching, in luminous black and white cinematography, Adolphe Menjou in army uniform walk around the rooms of some fairly palatial château requisitioned by the military in WW1, instantly recalled an all but identical scene shot some 25 years later (same actor, same war, same costume, b&w photography, setting, character, adjacent country). It seemed far too close to be just a coincidence - did director Stanley Kubrick make a deliberate connection in his 1957 film "Paths of Glory"?But what an extraordinary difference in tone however between the two films? A Farewell to Arms is surely exclusively a traditional woman's picture, classy soap in fact. Shirtless young star Cooper - eye-candy personified - has an untroubled war, fussed over by a minor army of female nurses, and, presumably pre-Hays code, quite explicitly takes the virginity of a young nurse he has not long met; and, central drama in the film, nature takes its course. Tragedy when it comes is played out in comfort, the best medical attention, where the loved ones are together and able to say their full good byes in dignity and privacy.In contrast the grittiness of WW1 drama "Paths of Glory", the blistering attack on officer ambition at the cost of the common soldier, the cynicism - unsurprisingly too strong to be shown where it was set: France - had few equals in its tone of moral indignation. Its central character, played by Kirk Douglas, held to the flames of forced moral choice. IMDb gives it thoroughly deserved 8.5, this film just 6.6. Hovering in judgement too over A Farewell to Arms is the authentic story of front-line WW1 nurses "Testament of Youth" where duty and sacrifice was the iron rule, not fluffiness.So how did this silly soap-fest come to be made just 15 years after the events depicted? Europe was scarred by WW1, France by its immense loss of fighting men and suffering of civilians caught in the fighting. Hollywood in 1932, it seems, just sought bums on seats. History was safely in its graves and could be left to turn as it wished. Was Paths of Glory Kubrick atoning for Farewell to Arms? I strongly suspect it was."what does this war mean to me? What does anything mean to me? I must find her"

Perhaps I should state at the outset that I have not read Ernest Hemingway's third novel, the 1929 classic "A Farewell to Arms," and thus can only comment on the 1932 filmization that I recently watched on DVD. Hemingway, as the story goes, actively disliked the picture, and with its relatively brief running time of 78 minutes, it's easy to imagine that a good part of the author's original was given the Hollywood glossover. (The 1957 remake, generally regarded as the inferior of the two, is yet almost twice as long!) A somewhat dated, slightly creaky affair, the film is of interest today mainly for the excellent performances turned in by its three leads and for the Oscar-winning photography of Charles Lang (his only Academy Award, despite a more-than-impressive filmography).In the picture, we meet an American ambulance driver named Frederic Henry (played by Gary Cooper), who is serving on the Italian front during WW1. A doctor friend of his, an Italian named Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), introduces him to a British nurse, Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes, riding high after her recent Oscar win for 1931's little-seen "The Sin of Madelon Claudet," and who largely forsook Hollywood after 1935, to become "The First Lady of the American Theater"). The two instantly fall in lust (American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's inspiration for the Hayes character, who he'd met while injured in Italy, had rebuffed the author's amorous advances), and after Henry is wounded at the front, Catherine tends to his wounds in hospital, becoming, uh, knocked up in the process. Forced to leave her nursing group as a result, Catherine hides out in Switzerland to have her baby, alone, leading to the mother of all tear-jerking conclusions....Released in December '32, shortly before the stifling Production Code came into being, "A Farewell to Arms" is, surprisingly, sexually frank. Catherine and Henry, scant minutes after being introduced in a hotel garden, are busily engaged in the ol' "horizontal tarantella," their randiness attributed to "the war" more than their own natural inclinations. Still, Henry tells his newfound galpal "I love you" immediately afterwards, and, as events subsequently demonstrate, he means it. Cooper and Hayes do have a certain chemistry here, although they make an odd-looking couple, with Cooper towering over his girl by a good head and a half. Much of the dialogue that they utter is of the florid, purple-prose variety, and Hayes seems to occasionally overact a tad. Also (and please don't think me a superficial pigdog here), lookswise, Hayes was far from the comeliest actress on the lot, although Rinaldi refers to Catherine as the prettiest nurse in the area. Given her plain-Jane decent looks, this instant lustful infatuation on Henry's part becomes a bit incredible; a sweeter-faced actress of the period, say Claudette Colbert, might have been a better casting choice. Cooper, with his shy smile and diffident delivery, is always ingratiating, however, and Adolphe manages to convince as an Italian doctor. (Like many folks, I have a feeling, I've long thought that Menjou was French, whereas he was actually born in Pittsburgh, U.S.A.!) Director Frank Borzage, who would go on to work with Cooper in the 1936 Marlene Dietrich vehicle "Desire," does a thoroughly admirable job here, while Charles Lang certainly did earn his Oscar, especially by dint of two powerful scenes: the POV shots from Henry's moving hospital gurney, and the montage sequence of Henry's trek to find Catherine in Brissago, Switzerland. In all, a perfectly respectable film, and one that I might have appreciated a little more, had I not seen the WW1 classics "Grand Illusion" (1937) and "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)--two infinitely superior pictures--at NYC's Film Forum just a few weeks earlier. Still, those immortal classics are more antiwar films, whereas "A Farewell to Arms" is a romantic drama with a WW1 backdrop. The film concludes most ambiguously, with Henry proclaiming "Peace, peace" as doves fly high and the Great War ends. But whether he is praying for world peace, or peace and surcease from his tragic memories, or peace for the pitiful woman in his arms, is anybody's guess....