Sam Wood’s Hemingway is handsome, respectful and nearly three hours long. Katina Paxinou’s Pilar is the reason to sit through it; the love scenes between Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman are the reason sitting through it is work.
Sam Wood’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel runs 170 minutes, and what happens in them can be put in a sentence. An American with a rucksack of dynamite, Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper), is sent into the Spanish mountains to blow a bridge, and spends three days in a cave with the guerrillas who are supposed to help him. Hemingway made those three days feel like a whole life. Dudley Nichols’s screenplay makes them feel like three days, with a fourth thrown in.
What is good here is good from the start, and most of it is Katina Paxinou. Her Pilar runs the band while Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) drinks and sulks, and Paxinou plays her big, coarse and unafraid, a woman who announces that she was born ugly and dares anyone to argue. Early on she reads Jordan’s palm, sees something, and closes her hand on it without a word. We were more disturbed by that than by anything the film later does with a rifle. Tamiroff is her match, sly and frightened, a man who has stopped believing in the war and knows exactly how that looks to the others. Whenever the two of them are quarrelling by the fire, the film is alive.
Cooper does what Cooper does. He says little, looks tired and handles a rifle as if he grew up with it, and that suits Jordan up to a point. The point is the love story. Ingrid Bergman plays Maria with her hair cropped short and a plainness the rest of the film could use; the scene in which she asks where the noses go when two people kiss is the one everybody remembers, and she earns it. But Nichols gives the lovers speech after speech about what they are to each other, Wood lays them in the heather with the light going gold, and Victor Young’s strings come up under every one. We were bored by the third of these scenes, and by the fifth we were irritated, because we could see the picture stopping to admire itself.
Ray Rennahan shoots the mountains in Technicolor and they look like a poster for a holiday in Spain, which is to say handsome and not at all like a place where people are being killed. William Cameron Menzies’s cave is broad, dry and well lit, and nobody in it ever looks cold or hungry. This is a war with the mud left out. John F. Link Sr. and Sherman Todd cut cleanly when there is something to cut, and a night reconnaissance and a fight on a bare hilltop in the second half show what the film might have been had it trusted movement over talk. Both are over quickly. The talk is not.
Nichols keeps the politics to a murmur. The men in the cave are fighting Fascists, and the word is used, but what the Republic was and why an American would cross an ocean for it is left to Cooper’s face to explain, and Cooper’s face was never much of a talker. Hemingway’s book is about a man weighing a cause he has begun to doubt against a woman he has just met. The film is about a man who would like to get back to his girl. That is a smaller story, and it is told at greater length.
The publicity of the day promised something thunderous, tender and touching. It manages tender, in Bergman, and thunderous at intervals, and Paxinou supplies the touching more or less on her own. Most critics have split down the middle over it, and we think the split is the honest response to a big, careful, expensive picture that runs an hour longer than its story needs.
See it for Pilar and Pablo, and for the hilltop. At home the mountains shrink and the speeches do not, so keep something to hand, and note that the film reaches a natural pause about halfway; take it.
