FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

JohnnyLee1 Hayes and Cooper are splendid and film is best when they are alone on screen. Their scenes are romantic and even daring. When Hayes questions Cooper about his past "lovers" it is done with wit and maturity. SPOILER ALERT Unfortunately we know that Catherine's "sin" cannot go unpunished. Everyone seems to conspire against the lovers. And Catherine's character is too passive to be an admirable heroine. The whole movie is very well set up from the beginning but the ending is too long delayed for modern audiences. Why isn't Frederick allowed to visit his dying "wife"? And Wagner playing as Catherine dies is way over the top!

romanorum1 The opening narrative: "Disaster as well as victory is written for every nation on the record of the World War, but high on the rolls of glory two names are inscribed – the Marne and the Piave." Of course, the Marne refers to the Western front, and the Piave refers to the Italian, wherein lies this movie's focus. "A Farewell to Arms" is based upon the semi-autobiographical novel of Ernest Hemingway's experiences when he served as an ambulance driver for the Italians who fought the Austrians and Hungarians in World War I. In the opening sequence we see a dead soldier draped with the Alpine background. Then we observe several Italian ambulances moving along the winding mountains away from the battlefield. Our hero Lt. ("Tenente" in Italian) Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper) casually reports to Headquarters just as young and attractive English nurse Molly is being rebuked and dismissed for getting pregnant. She had fallen in love with a soldier; "Disgracing the uniform we all wear," proclaims the head nurse. Regulations are regulations.Lt. Henry is good friends with Major Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), who is also a surgeon. The two men drink and visit brothels together. Rinaldi happens to like English Nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes), but early on, after she is introduced to Henry, she and the young lieutenant are greatly attracted to each other. They become lovers right away and just before Henry has to return to the front. Meanwhile Rinaldi uses his influence to have Barkley transferred to Milan. Just before the shelling begins on the battlefront, we see the Italian soldiers eating their rations of bread, cheese, and pasta . . . and even wine. While the men are eating an Austrian shell scores a direct hit, wounding Henry in the right knee and foot. Henry is removed to the military hospital in Milan where Barkley is stationed. Their love affair resumes, but because the Italian Chaplain (Jack La Rue) knows that they are not married, he conducts a proxy marriage (not in the book, however). Later the hospital head nurse, after catching Henry with his hidden liquor bottles under the mattress, reports him to authorities who deem him healthy enough to revisit the front. While Henry is thus away, Rinaldi, who has censorship authority, censures the letters of both Barkley and Henry because he feels that it is wrong for the lieutenant to "lose his head over a woman." The soldier and the nurse lose contact.Meanwhile a great Austrian and German offensive has succeeded in breaking through the Italian defensive line at Caporetto (October 1917), and the Italians are in retreat. They are constantly blasted with bombs and raked with aerial machine gun fire. Displeased with the Italian high command (perhaps not without reason), Frederic Henry deserts the army. His main goal is to link up with Catherine somehow. He meets up with Catherine's best friend, Nurse Helen Ferguson (Mary Philips) and is genuinely surprised when she unenthusiastically tells him that Catherine is pregnant. But Frederic still does not know where she is located. And the Italian police (carabinieri) are still searching for him. Events are fast-forwarded because a newspaper headline reads, "Italian Armies Successful in Great Piave Offensive." (This event occurred in June 1918.)Eventually Henry meets up with Major Rinaldi, who relents and shows compassion when Henry tells him that Catherine is with child. He gives Henry Catherine's location (Brissago, Switzerland) and cash to help him. Time is fast-forwarded to November 1918, as a newspaper headline now reads, "L'Austria Capitola" ("Austria Capitulates"). Now the scene inter-cuts with Catherine's most difficult childbirth event in the Swiss hospital. Her baby boy is stillborn, and her health is failing. Soaked with rain Frederic arrives in the hospital in time to share some words with Catherine. Their last moments are tender ones. He lifts her dead body as doves fly and the church bells ring, proclaiming that the Armistice has ended the Great War. "Peace," Frederic utters.Hemingway's novel actually ends during the middle of 1918, at the height of the great German offensives on the Western front. And in the novel Frederic Henry dejectedly leaves the Swiss hospital and walks out into the rain. All in all, the movie is a very successful tearjerker, and is better than the 1957 version, although the latter's cinematography is at a high level, and even though Cooper is over a foot taller than the diminutive Hayes. Director Frank Borzage, who began filming in 1913, was the first person in Hollywood history to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (Seventh Heaven, 1929). He won again in 1931 for "Bad Girl." Borzage's version of "A Farewell to Arms" belongs among the top 15 or 20 movies of 1932 even though his adaptation is loose. His well-known trademark was in identifying the feelings of young lovers in the face of intense trial, as in wartime. His montages here, like the retreat from Caporetto and Henry's twenty mile-trek to Switzerland through storms, are both expertly done. Charles Lang won the Academy Award for Cinematography. The acting is fine all the way around although Hayes sometimes overacts. Both Adolphe Menjou and Jack La Rue, who have French surnames, do very well acting as Italians. Menjou as Rinaldi is the worldly one; La Rue as the priest prays for the end of suffering and war's end. Gary Cooper was destined to win the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: Sergeant York (1940) and High Noon (1952).(PS: I also reviewed the 1957 version of "A Farewell to Arms" for IMDb on 2 April 2014.)

TomSunhaus This film has, at the beginning several instances of behavior that many films utilize that make me wonder if the behavior was intended by the author, director, or actor. A natural plot point was exhibited when the ambulances were going uphill & someone in back pleaded for the truck to stop because a wounded soldier was 'bleeding to death'. The ambulance could not stop because it was on a grade and stopping was impossible. This would show the cruelty of war. However, when the ambulance reaches the hospital the lieutenant in charge of the ambulance flirts with nurses before arranging for off-loading patients at the hospital. Gary Cooper, as Lieutenant Henry, does his cute-character bit while wounded soldiers are dying in the ambulances.Did the author intend for the lieutenant to behave with such cruelty? The lieutenant will later desert out of love for his wife. Maybe his whole manner is of a self-involved dandy. But the author has characters mentioning the cruelty of war all the time. But if these people are cruel also, how can they complain.The character doctor Rinaldi says something along the lines that Christians should not mind being killed, presumably because they go on to their 'reward' of heaven. Did the author write this? Did the author intend the flippant way that the doctor says it? The director shoots a shot of an uncaring lieutenant immediately after the ambulance attendant complains that a soldier is bleeding to death. Was this the intention of the author, the director (or editor) making a statement of their own. Maybe this was a decision by Gary Cooper.The nurse and lieutenant may complain about the cruelty of war, but their whole affair was the result of them volunteering to be there. Then they proceed to abandon there posts repeatedly.To me any case to be made for the importance of humanity is undermined by everybody in the 'play' lacking it. The doctor friend of Henry keeps calling Henry his baby & then proceeds to destroy his life by pushing him to alcoholism. Each character seems to say 'I'm human and it is important to be human' & then proceeds to do something cruel. Presumably, the war only ended because of exhaustion and not because of intelligent human thought.I guess what confuses me is the way the characters (or actors) work very hard, which tends to make me sympathetic to them, but when their behavior is cruel a dissonance is created.

Bill Slocum Frank Borzage's 1932 version of "A Farewell To Arms" has the distinction of being the first film adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway novel. It's more Hollywood than Hemingway: Long blankets of dialogue are condensed, sharp edges softened, and the romance between Lt. Henry and Catherine made into something more befitting Douglas Sirk than the unsentimental Papa. Yet a surprising amount of the novel's spirit does survive the transition.In a story not much different than what you might have read in high school, Lt. Henry (Gary Cooper) is an American ambulance corpsman serving with the Italian Army as it fights the Austrians along the Piave, a bloody backwater campaign of World War I. Henry meets nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes) and they quickly fall in love. But the violence of war, and the interference of friends like Capt. Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), threaten to tear them apart.The differences between book and movie are more in the matter of treatment than storyline. When Catherine and Lt. Henry first meet, they talk about her former lover, a war casualty. In the film, she says "If I had to do it all over again, I'd marry him". In the book, though, Catherine wasn't regretting sending him off to war unmarried, but without their having had sex.Yet a minute later, her lines come directly from the book, Catherine noting her daydreams about her old lover turning up at her hospital with a saber cut, then adding: "He didn't have a saber cut, they blew him to bits." For Hollywood, violence was always easier material than sex.Since this is a film made before the inhibiting Hays Code (Will, not Helen), Borzage and his writers are able to get away with a bit more than they would have just a couple of years later. Catherine and Henry still make love, and she gets pregnant.There IS a lot of Hemingway here. Catherine is a still somewhat mixed-up woman who hates the rain "because I see myself dead in it". The folly of war is openly expressed. "If nobody would attack, the war would be over," one soldier muses. Lt. Henry is wounded, and embarrassed because it happened while he was eating cheese. Even some small exchanges survive, like one between Lt. Henry and a nasty nurse.She: "Pity is wasted on you."He: "Thank you."But the film also strikes out for its own territory, successfully in the case of building up the role of Capt. Rinaldi. Menjou, who had been a real ambulance corps captain in World War I, creates a marvelously ambiguous figure, a cheerful cynic who befriends Henry and is put out by the romance with Catherine. "Why don't you be like me?" Rinaldi asks his "war brother". "All fire and smoke. Nothing inside."Rinaldi's role here is a change from the original story, a gamble by Borzage and writers Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett that pays off, devising some needed tension to the central storyline and underscoring the core message of the rottenness of war. If it wasn't for war, Rinaldi might value something more than his next bottle or bedpartner, and Menjou, in a final triumphant moment, lets you know it.Pacifism, in movies as in life, only takes one so far. The film makes a mistake near the end by more consciously making a stand as an anti-war film, with much hysteria, bells ringing, even Cooper chanting "Peace...peace". It made those points much better as sidenotes, like an opening tracking shot where a seemingly sleeping soldier is revealed to be dead, or later on when Cooper trudges through a muddy path and notices the corpse everyone's been walking on. By contrast, too much of the movie's finale is played for the cheaper seats, and doesn't stand up today.But the film does stand up better than many later Hemingway adaptations, with its strong cast, inspired tracking shots, and a mostly successful effort by Borzage to translate Hemingway's terse prose style into film. What you get is a short but deep examination of life during wartime.