A Farewell to Arms (1932)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

I can't speak to this film's worth as an adaptation of the Hemingway novel, as I've never read it, but it's an excellent film. Borzage lost little of his talent when he moved to sound. This is a rare film from the era where the camera moves almost constantly, and there are many clever filmmaking conceits throughout (most notably the long POV sequence after Gary Cooper is first paralyzed). Cooper stars as an American fighting for Italy in WWI. He falls for nurse Helen Hayes, though they are not allowed to marry. That can't keep them apart, though, and when he goes back to fight she goes off to Switzerland - secretly pregnant. The two have vowed to write each other, but a conspiracy keeps their correspondences from reaching each other. This is pure melodrama, and by the end it turns into an unabashed weepy, but it's beautiful throughout, quite romantic and downright sexy at times. Both Cooper and Hayes are fantastic. Adolph Menjou as Cooper's best friend and Mary Philips as Hayes' do well in the major supporting roles.

The movie achieves evoking pity and suggesting the secret, unknown, unsuspected abyss of a life, the life of the one near you (which is the very great psychology of the eponymous novel, a young person's work about a youngster's experiences during the war), by giving an insight of Katherine's wasted and unglamorous life, and thus making her authentically mysterious, and giving a sense of the dignity and sacred mystery of a being, and this in her humbleness; the story is one of pity and remorse and sadness. With the acting, we are on the threshold of the sound cinema.Now Helen Hayes' acting is very much unlike what nowadays' audiences are accustomed to, in an entirely different key, but it's a great role, and, as I wrote, mysterious and heartrending; stylistically, it belongs to the symbolism and extroversion, the symbolical extroversion necessary for the many years of the silent cinema, a leftover of the silent age of the screen, suddenly made obsolete by the sound.Cooper is very unlike my idea of the novel's protagonist, and so is his acting, sometimes like doing a Valentino impersonation, though not always, as in the beginning of the scene where Ferguson foretells their death, when he's a gallant, nonchalant officer, perhaps also in the 1st few scenes, when he gropes a couple of nurses, but before he falls in love with her, and it has been my impression that the two lead actors didn't enjoy very much each other, as they should have for most of the movie; but Cooper was naturally righteous and dignified, very protestant, and his character should of been a bit more earthly (like Powell, perhaps?). Then, at the end, he communes with a brioche, and such things remind of the chilly religion in Ford's and other movies; here, they show a priest, and a secularized Eucharist, yet it's a very protestant movie. Menjou as the jealous, duplicitous surgeon decided to wreck his comrade's life is by turns demonic and annoying.One example of wry humor is when the scene of the 1st kiss (of Cooper and Helen H.) cuts to a bedroom scene of … Cooper and Menjou.Cooper is supposed to be less handsome than Menjou, who seems a lecherous oldster.Both Cooper and Helen Hayes play their roles according to the mainstream style of acting of the age, and he hasn't enough time for the months of their peaceful living, the life they had together needed to be given more time on screen, instead the script picks the eerie priest …; she had the right idea of unglamorous humbleness. Her role is that of a very unhappy woman, as one can gather at least from her deathbed words to him.So, Helen Hayes' role is the better one.

It's time to explode a few myths here. Like the so-called ideal marriage between the Kennedy's that was propped up by the media for years and was finally shown to have been wrought with serial infidelities by both parties, so in the world of movie land we have some sacred cows that have to be taken out to the slaughterhouse and be ground up into decent hamburger. A Farewell to Arms is one such sacred cow. Gary Cooper struts through the movie like a tall, lanky, slow-talking, goofy string bean with an amoral attitude towards women, the army and life in general. He chooses to desert his comrades - so much for Semper Fidelis - to run back to a woman he impregnated in a night of passion. Helen Hayes is the love interest, whose acting resembled nothing so much as a cut-out paper doll in a puppet show; her cardboard expression and lifeless lines were so two dimensional it was painful to watch - Olive Oil in the Popeye cartoons had more sex appeal. There was no chemistry between her and Cooper, how could there be, he was over six feet tall and she was so short he had to hold her up in order not to stoop to kiss her in one scene. IMDb can cut this next comment out if it is not permissible to talk about other review sites, but those fawning idiots over at Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a 90% rating in true Rotten Tomatoes lock step fashion, while giving a truly great movie, The Mission, with standout performances by Robert Di Nero, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn, and that won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and whose musical score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, ranked 1st on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) Classic 100 Music in the Movies, well Rotten Tomatoes only gave THAT movie a 65% rating. That's why I take Rotten Tomatoes with a pound of salt and always go to IMDb to see if any movie is any good.

Im a massive fan of these type of films! I found it here: http://www.videoarchive.talktalk.net I wasn't able to find this on DVD but was able to watch it online in excellent quality, well worth it. Old black and white ones are a favourite with my dad who is just fed up with the current rubbish that they have on TV these days - most of which are repeats. So this is easy to navigate and is a firm favourite - quite an achievement for someone of his age who is a complete technophobe. I bought him a laptop and told him it was a TV - I am hoping he doesn't find out its a computer he has been using all this time There are some others on the site too. http://www.videoarchive.talktalk.net