Most critics take warmly to Frank Borzage’s adaptation, and the praise clusters around the same things: the frankness it manages in the years before the Production Code, the pairing of Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, and the intensity of the direction. Several single out the climactic hospital scene as the film’s high point, and a few point to particular shots, the subjective journey on a stretcher into the hospital among them, as evidence of a director working ahead of his time. Reviews from the first release and from the later reissues broadly agree.
The spread is narrow apart from one outlier. The Guardian is cooler, finding the collision between Hemingway’s fatalism and Borzage’s romanticism awkward as well as interesting. The New York Times, writing in 1932, is the lone negative voice, judging that the film loses the novel’s power and that the camera effects come at the expense of the story. Where reservations appear, they concern fidelity to the book rather than the craft.