For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) - film review

Robert Jordan is an idealistic young American who decides to lend his support and demolition expertise to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.  Instructed to blow up a strategically important bridge by his superiors, Jordan joins forces with a ragtag band of guerrillas living in the mountains.  It is here that Robert meets Maria, a young Spaniard who has been traumatised by the experience of war but who is as dedicated to the fight against Fascism as Robert is.  Despite the horrific situation they find themselves in, Robert and Maria fall deeply in love...

This valiant attempt to bring to the screen Ernest Hemingway’s third great novel was badly compromised by Paramount’s insistence on excising virtually every last trace of political content from the story.  Rumour has it that whilst the film was in preparation the studio received various visits by envoys from both Franco and the Catholic Church to request that the film be strictly non-partisan.  Whilst it is uncertain exactly what pressures were brought to bear on Paramount, it cannot be denied that the resulting film feels as though its heart has been ripped out of it.  This is a bland, plodding, sleep-inducing affair that has none of the passion and intensity of Hemingway’s powerful novel.  It is not hard to see why the writer loathed this film.

The reason why Hemingway chose Paramount out of the many Hollywood studios which were keen to adapt his novel was because he was keen to have Gary Cooper, then under contact at Paramount, to play the male lead.  Cooper had previously taken the lead in another, exemplary, Hemingway adaptation, A Farewell to Arms (1932), and appears to be perfectly suited to play the taciturn idealist Robert Jordan. 

Seeing this as a star-making opportunity, Ingrid Bergman lobbied hard for the part of Maria but was turned down, the part going to another Paramount contract player, Vera Zorina.  Having completed work on Casablanca (1943), Bergman was hired to replace Zorina when the latter proved unsuitable for the role.   Although Cooper and Bergman gave terrific performances in the film, both were very nearly eclipsed by Katina Paxinou, a renowned Greek stage actress who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her characterful portrayal of the rebel leader’s wife.

For Whom the Bell Tolls ought to have been a great piece of cinema, a magnificent recreation of one of the greatest literary works of the 20th Century.  Unfortunately, Paramount’s unwillingness to come off the fence and tell the story from Hemingway’s political perspective weakens it dramatically, and the central love story between Cooper and Bergman’s characters is not enough to sustain its whopping three hour run time.

The budgetary limitations are all too obvious in the ghastly over-use of back projection and plethora of totally unconvincing sets, which look more like a Christmas display in a big department store than an authentic recreation of the Spanish mountains.  With its near-theatrical minimalism, you can’t help feeling that Sam Wood is directing a stage play, not a film.  The colour photography can only add to the film’s tacky artificiality and almost total lack of atmosphere.

Despite the best efforts of all concerned, this film looks cheap and feels soulless, a mere shadow of the novel on which it is based.  Yet it was an extraordinary commercial success, grossing over ten million dollars on its first release in 1943.   Ingrid Bergman’s aggressively short haircut became the fashion statement of the year and provided hairdressers with plenty of work – probably not the outcome that Hemingway had anticipated when he set out to record his experiences of the Spanish Civil War for posterity.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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