|
LINGUA EMPTYA Maddening to one’s sense of equilibrium to read back-cover promotion like this: A Farewell to Arms is “the best American novel to emerge out of World War I...an unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his love for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway’s frank portrayal of the love between Lt. Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature...his description of the German attack on Caporetto bears comparison to Stendhal’s depiction of the retreat from Waterloo. Richer in language, more subtle in expression, and emotionally astute, (the novel) symbolizes Hemingway’s farewell to an attitude, a time, and a literary method. Published when Hemingway was just thirty, it confirmed his stature as the greatest single influence on the American short story and novel.” What’s left but the Nobel Prize? If the Hemingway cult is a bit much, it’s understood for his gift for the concise—his shorthand prose and dialogue achieve his stories’ purposes with a preciseness defying academic pedantry. The punchy economic technique has infected generations of writers—our immune systems warn of the virus in just about every kind of entertainment writing: high classers, pulp, pop trash, science fiction, horror stuff, in movies and TV dramas, sitcoms and soaps. Even news and talk radio have bastardized him: the day’s stories are compacted into pugil stick tutorials and bold reproaches. His impatience, arrogance and intense lack of subtly also represent who American men tend to envision themselves as and while some of us aren’t as appreciative of his prowess as others hold we should be—Camille Paglia thinks it’s scandalous there’s persistent resistance to worshipping him as “the inventor of the lingua franca of American journalism”—what he gives us as imagery of himself is so powerful, as it is with Norman Mailer, we absorb the bravura myths disproportionate to reality. (If they’re monsters, and they are, they’re our literary royalty, though Papa would likely regard the joint adoration as treason, having once said of Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead: “The whole book’s just diarrhea of the typewriter.”) Farewell is a blend of his nonfiction—reportage, personal, medical and travel experiences—with doomed romance simplifying catastrophe; Joan Didion, practician of his famed laconicism, reminds us he wrote a loaded shocker: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” As popular as he was and remains—helped along by dramatically reducing the fear of reading—some very fine writers saw the cloak of insufficiency in his argot. Aldous Huxley found “what Hemingway had to say was in the white spaces between the lines,” and one prime example of this is when Jennifer Jones’s Catherine says “It’s just a dirty trick” before she kicks the bucket after a caesarean section. Earlier, Rock Hudson’s Henry recites similar fatalism while smashing tiny cubes of something (sugar? cream?) before rushing back to her hospital bed. Readers and viewers are tempted to jeer at the summations but at the same time applaud Papa’s 1929 five-word audacity that turns “paying for their sins of happiness” into Carol Burnett camp, with the reward being a kick in the ass. Aside from Huxley, D.H. Lawrence wrote Hemingway “keeps on making flights, but he has no illusion about landing anywhere. He knows it will be nowhere every time.” Ben Hecht empathized in frustration, screaming at producer David O. Selznick about the hopelessness of adapting Farewell into a workable 1957 screenplay—“That sonofabitch writes in water!” In his An Open Book, John Huston, who was Farewell’s first director before opting out, exposes an equally difficult obstacle: Selznick’s “love for Jennifer Jones was very real and touching but in it lay the seeds of the failures that marked the last years of his life. Everything he did was for Jennifer...to the detriment of his good judgment. He never did anything worth a damn after he married her.” The novel’s been turned into one of those Wednesday matinée hard ticket weepies with Jennifer suffering for the Martini’d blue hairs in the audience. Already seventeen years older than her character, Jennifer is more than a little embarrassing to watch; deluded by Selznick and the production’s inflation, she thinks she can do the boozy hospital bed love scenes. One facet we come to believe: not only is Catherine in her own words “a little gone off,” so is Jennifer. In what performance isn’t she slouching toward Bonkersville? Could anyone call her certifiably sane in Song of Bernadette, Duel in the Sun, Madame Bovery and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit? Farewell does have its compensations. In dark shiny hair, Rock is King of the Amiable 50s Glamour Boys, an American strapper; flashing an “I’m yours” smile, he’s nothing if not a CinemaScope glossy. (Original cinematographer Oswald Morris was fired by Selznick for giving more attention to Rock than his wife.) Not Hemingway as he writes about himself, Rock’s quite close to the author at his most physically ideal: roll over image below. Elaine Stitch is enjoyable as Rock’s enabler and Mercedes McCambridge in her third of four consecutive bids to be the dyke movie goers love to hate the most. Vittorio De Sica wants to be of consequence, facing victimhood in the narrative of the chaos of WWI, but hampered by lackluster direction of rushed war action scenes robbing his character of purpose. Despite some of the Italian wintry mountain pans of the troops and weaponry being impressively scaled, Selznick, and not the stand-in director Charles Vidor, couldn’t stop with cheap insertions of GWTW bits beyond the horizontal scroll of the title, such as duplicating crowded marchings, wagons moving through fires and Jennifer and Rock dodging the dangers of enemy capture. Production design is credited to Alfred Junge; its commendable set decoration done by newcomers Veniero Colasanti and John Moore who’d go on to do the designs of El Cid, 55 Days at Peking and, shooting their maxiest wads, The Fall of the Roman Empire. After watching 35 minutes of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway complained to writer A.E. Hotchner, “You know, Hotch, you write a book like that, that you’re fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it’s like pissing in your father’s beer.” In Showman, biographer David Thomson reports this scene: when Hemingway spotted Selznick in Pamplona, he blew a fuse: “I’m going to kill him! Son of a bitch! He ruined my book!” Rock won the Harvard Lampoon’s Worst Actor of the Year; having lost Worst Actress to Kim Novak, Jennifer did win the distaff honor the previous year for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Very limited unsuccessful run as a roadshow. Oscar nomination: best supporting actor (De Sica). ROLL OVER IMAGE (Scrolling on screen from right to left, the title is 2 uneven color images combined.)
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER (Revised 5/2025) All Rights Reserved. |
