73/100

A nearly complete betrayal of the novel, from what I can gather (my high-school English class predictably went with The Sun Also Rises), but Borzage's romanticism surely packs as much of a wallop as Hemingway's cynicism. Lovemaking scenes are exquisite (and surprisingly frank, even for pre-Code; he's actually allowed to express surprise that he's deflowered her); battle montages are gorgeously nightmarish; expressionistic flourishes abound, my favorite being the first-person shot of Cooper in the hospital that finds Hayes pushing her enormous eyes right up into the lens. Finale suffers from what would later be dubbed Ali MacGraw Disease, in which the woman dies of some vague malady that permits her to just lie in bed looking slightly tired until she succumbs—one convention of older movies I've never been able to just roll with, alas. No cliché can fully hamstring Borzage, though. He might be the greatest pure stylist of the early sound era.

Decent adaptation of the Hemingway novel with good cast.

There's some great moments of the direction and art nonsense and cinematography, but mostly the tone of the novel is ignored for a lackluster love story - it's okay, but there's no redeeming emotional weight to really care about the film. Hemingway would've hated it

Also Gary Cooper is crazy tall

It goes without saying that Ernest Hemingway’s novel is a lot better than this film adaptation (which was softened in order to conform with the sensibilities of the time), but this could have been a lot worse. I’ve come to learn that Frank Borzage is something of an unsung hero of the early-Hollywood era and he does a lot to make this a fairly top notch production. Gary Cooper is pretty much the ideal actor to play a Hemingway protagonist and they were able to get more material from the book into the film than they would have been able to a few years later when they started to more rigorously enforce the Hays code.

Frank Borzage sure can do some great interstitial titles, so great that I sometimes view the entire film more favorably than I might otherwise - JUST because of them. Anyway, this was a solid flick with some good acting by G-Coop and Helen Hayes. A bit short - today this film would run three plus hours - but overall quite efficiently good.

Won 2 Oscars (Best Cinematography & Best Sound, Recording) and got 2 other nominations (Best Picture & Best Art Direction). And it is a stylistic piece of work by the great director Frank Borzage. He is also someone who understand the little things that makes a good love story work. While Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes are no Farrell/Gaynor, he still knows how to direct them with their limitation in a way to make it sweet and believable. Other then that Adolphe Menjou deserves a mention for performance as the unpredictable friend giving the story a different edge other then the overly romantic parts.

This was nominated 1934 for Best Melodrama at the 1934 Academy Awards and quite surprisingly lost out to another film. Perhaps the other film was better plotted and had less inconsistencies in behaviour from scene to scene? This is a tale of an ambulance driver and nurse who fall passionately in love whilst serving in Italy in WWI. His 'best friend' (a dastardly Italian doctor) rather fancies said nurse and does his best to not let the course of true love run smoothly when they are separated by the vagaries of war and by early 20th century attitudes to those unmarried. Will they be reunited? By the time you get to the end of this 78 minutes you won't care.

73/100

A nearly complete betrayal of the novel, from what I can gather (my high-school English class predictably went with The Sun Also Rises), but Borzage's romanticism surely packs as much of a wallop as Hemingway's cynicism. Lovemaking scenes are exquisite (and surprisingly frank, even for pre-Code; he's actually allowed to express surprise that he's deflowered her); battle montages are gorgeously nightmarish; expressionistic flourishes abound, my favorite being the first-person shot of Cooper in the hospital that finds Hayes pushing her enormous eyes right up into the lens. Finale suffers from what would later be dubbed Ali MacGraw Disease, in which the woman dies of some vague malady that permits her to just lie in bed looking slightly tired until she succumbs—one convention of older movies I've never been able to just roll with, alas. No cliché can fully hamstring Borzage, though. He might be the greatest pure stylist of the early sound era.

Interesting because it has to try to address the perceived sinfulness of premarital sex without really talking too much about it. I found the relationship between the two main characters a bit hard to root for because it begins with what I took to be an implied rape.