The Sun Also Rises

NEVER GETTING PAPA RIGHT

The debate continues: Has Hemingway ever been successfully captured on film? Devotees are divided: approval for The Killers; some for The Macomber Affair and the free-based To Have and Have Not; a minor chorus defending The Old Man and the Sea; an indifference to all the others, including television’s various stabs until HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn. The acknowledged difficulty—Hemingway’s sacrosanct craft—is so thoroughly American that when transplanted to Paris, Madrid, Pamplona and Italy, we’re reminded of Papa’s comments about the movie of The Sun Also Rises—“Darryl Zanuck’s splashy Cooks’ Tour of the lost generation.” Considerably more is the matter: the fundamentally unsuccessful adaptation of Hemingway to screen lies not only in his celebrated Gregg gab, leaving those substance gaps between the short sentences and shorter utterances, but also in the macho of his books as piled-on bravado—the impotent men, drunks, braggarts and romantic losers sound the same because they are the same. The Nobel prize winner’s highest and lowest estimations of the opposite sex don’t fare much better: if they’re good they mostly die, if they’re social leeches they become boozing whores. In The Sun Also Rises the characters quickly get annoying in their redundant prattling about fate and fatalism. Hemingway’s admitted intention is to refute Gertrude Stein’s lament of “une génération perdue” because he didn’t find in Paris a “tight band of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for Mommy to lead them out of the dada wilderness.” Of course he didn’t—those expatriates as wanderlusters were fleeing from motherland shackles. But what he is fleeing from is the Valley of Injured Nutsacks. The meaning of the journey the movie takes is 50s nebulous, with Papa the critic zeroing in on its single virtue. Quipping “any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy,” we concede not only does he thumbnail the Zanuck dud, the sonnavabitch also gives Flynn one of the greatest of face-slapping compliments. The dysfunctional Jake Barnes—rendered by the usual neutrality of Tyrone Power—is supposed to be Hemingway, who in fact suffered a scrotum injury during his stint supporting the Italian army in W.W.I, but once Flynn arrives boozed and querulous he’s gleefully Papa incarnate. In cone-shaped bra likely hazardous to her lovers’s chests, Ava Gardner’s Brett Ashley, modeled on Lady Duff Twysden, comes a few years after her Maria Vargas in The Barefoot Contessa, in which she too ends up with a sexual dysfunctionary. Having previously won applause for The Killers and the male fantasy The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in which Gregory Peck’s decency overrides bad boy Hemingway, Ava was accepted by the author as the quintessential Papa heroine not for what she played on screen but for being in real life his dream wench, the lushed-up dame who spit-fired defiance, the kind he wasn’t always equipped to satisfy. (The real Lady Brett was also a lush, dying in Taxco at the age of 43 from TB, with Hemingway falsely postscripting her lovers were pallbearers.) Though nearly every man in the picture wants to bed Ava, she’s wisely spared any love scenes with smarmy Robert Evans as the toreador. Mexico’s Morelia subbed for Pamplona because of delays due to frequent cast changes and when the cast finally gathered for filming in February, 1957, the home of the run of the bulls was months away from blossoming into its usual summer greenery. Sending photographer Charles Clarke to film crowds and bulls in Pamplona in summer of 1956, Zanuck gambled we’d be otherwise engaged to distinguish the Spaniards from Mexicans, sufficient evidence to indict him for contempt because it’s impossible not to. Thank my roving eyes for spotting at Barnes & Noble Lesley M. M. Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, an animated account of Hemingway’s writing of—and who were the real victims being savaged in—The Sun Also Rises. Blume supplies more entertaining insight than either the novel or movie.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com