1932 Directed by Frank Borzage
A tale of the World War I love affair, begun in Italy, between American ambulance driver Lt. Frederic Henry and British nurse Catherine Barkley. Eventually separated by Frederic's transfer, tremendous challenges and difficult decisions face each as the war rages on.
Adiós a las armas, 무기여 잘 있거라, Silahlara Veda, 戦場よさらば, Een afscheid voor eeuwig
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.
Now that's what I call romanticism. Frank Borzage is a curious character to enter this stage in my life, as my own romanticism blooms. He truly puts one's beliefs (in the greatness of humanity, in the beauty of life, in the presence of a spiritual Otherness) to the test. His romantic (the oft-peddled Borzagian adjective, to the point of becoming a trite soundbite) impulses are so extreme, they truly scare me.
In softening the sharp-angled edginess of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Frank Borzage has crafted an entirely different beast of a morality tale. The aim is squarely at odds with Hemingway's realism. From the opening Jacques Demy-ian camera glide across a Price is Right "Cliff Hangers" mountainscape, down to…
helen hayes back off my 6’3 mans with your short ass!! loving gary cooper is a tall people only event!!
My tearful name for cardio day at the gym.
Funny that many critics consider this to be the best film adaptation of a Hemingway novel, but Hemingway himself spent 30 years talking about how much he didn't like it. I can't comment on whether or not this Frank Borzage film is an accurate adaptation of the classic novel, because I've never read it, but as a standalone film it's perfectly fine for the period. Many contemporary and modern viewers seem to have taken issue with the lost power in the original text and the melodramatic tone that the film takes for a film that confronts the brutality of a terrible war. The script certainly doesn't try to directly embrace the…
I don’t think I’m telling any tales out of school when I mention that this isn’t exactly a faithful adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel. All things considered, the broad strokes of the story aren’t all that dissimilar, (at least as far as I remember) but Frank Borzage’s direction alters the tone of the piece considerably.
Hemingway’s terse prose is replaced by Borzage’s delicately sensual images. The author’s deliberate objectivity gives way to the auteur’s dreamy melodrama. And while the book’s infamous downer of an ending remains reasonably intact, the crushing pessimism is transformed into something altogether more romantic and ethereal.
It’s the earthy sensuality that makes Borzage’s film an essential part of Hollywood’s pre-code canon. A visit to a…
there's a lot of commonality between sternberg and borzage: the post-murnau obsession with shadowy tableaus, the cavernous urban environments delicately explored, the idealized poise of the dispossessed & distraught. but sternberg was a fatalist; the love in his films is an illusion that his decadent cynics indulge themselves in, because the alternative is a resignation with death, whereas borzage is genuinely possessed by the redemptive power of cinematic romance. sternberg is a trickster-stoic, and love is but one of his moods; borzage is an honest christian, albeit a playful one.
Often, in the case of unfaithful, or bad, adaptations of canonical novels, the movie poster will read, say, “Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,” (as the 1957 botch does). I suspect this is done to dupe moviegoers or to imply the author’s culpability.
This adaptation could have been called “Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms,” because Borzage adopts Hemingway’s plot and characters, and molds them into his own.
Rarely are two artists, so diametrically opposed as Hemingway and Borzage, brought together. Minimalism vs Lyricism. Escapism vs cynicism. The implicit vs the explicit. Hemingway’s sparsely furnished realism vs Borzage’s plump, upholstered romanticism.
While “faithful” to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,” “Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms” could not be more…
2nd Frank Borzage (after I've Always Loved You)
Another in a line of 'Ethan reads the book so now he watches the film', this is a largely faithful but quite inert adaptation of the Hemingway classic, bar the final six or so minutes, which turbocharge the melodrama to extremes. The plot, concerning a love affair between an ambulance driver and an English nurse in WW1 Italy, is no great shakes, but what's interesting about the book is how simple and direct the prose is. Translating it to the screen is a tricky task, and Borzage's stylings, heavily influenced by Murnau (who'd been the head director at Fox when Borzage worked there) is almost too ornamental in places for the tale.…
