Frank Borzage’s Hemingway Romance

Ernest Hemingway was furious with the treatment of his novel A Farewell to Arms in the 1932 film version directed and produced by Frank Borzage for Paramount. Hemingway did become close friends with the movie’s star, Gary Cooper, but they were supposed to have never discussed the film.

For years it was impossible to judge what the dispute was about because, strangely for an award-winning film, the rights expired and all that was available for viewing was a cut-down dupe print. Recently the film has been restored and released on Blu-ray. It seems that before embarking on his 1957 remake David O. Selznick secured for research a mint print of the earlier work as well as a negative. Hemingway did not like the later film either, as he thought Jennifer Jones was too old to play the heroine.

Was all this the usual writer’s distaste for film-makers’ meddling or was there more to it? Certainly the Selznick version, in spite of some fine acting by Jones and Vittorio de Sica and an excellent script by Ben Hecht, never overcomes the fatal miscasting of Rock Hudson and Charles Vidor’s stilted direction. But in 1932 Borzage was at his peak. The script is a reasonably faithful adaptation. It includes much of Hemingway’s original dialogue and the acting, although perhaps a little dated now, is excellent.

So what was the problem? It seems to me that it all had to do with style: cinematic style and literary style. At the time the book was regarded as a landmark in contemporary fiction. The late Australian novelist James Aldridge, whose splendid war novel Signed with Their Honour (1943) is clearly influenced by A Farewell to Arms, told me Hemingway was the only authentic voice writers like himself had from the Great War. But Borzage was equally distinguished, even if he was not the innovator Hemingway was. The rich expressionist style of Borzage’s late silent films such as 7th Heaven and Street Angel was shaped by the great German director F.W. Murnau when they worked together at the Fox Studios in the late 1920s. Borzage’s deeply emotional melodramas are very moving. Janet Gaynor, one of his favourite stars, described him as “directing with his heart”. Certainly that is the impression conveyed by the director’s appearance in Jeanne Eagles (1957) where he plays a silent director speaking to his actors quietly through a small megaphone while musicians play in the background.

Borzage was also at times more than a little sentimental, at least by modern standards. But throughout his career, however trite the dialogue, he was able to evoke performances of great sincerity and truth from performers as diverse as George Brent, Kay Francis, Margaret Sullavan, Spencer Tracy, Loretta Young and Victor Mature. His oeuvre is uneven. Like Hemingway he drank to excess, and films like Flirtation Walk (1934) and His Butler’s Sister (1943) were probably made strictly for the money. But even in his later years anyone tempted to write Borzage off has to explain away a masterpiece like Moonrise (1948). He would have been considered the best choice in 1932 to direct a romantic melodrama. But as far as Hemingway was concerned it was the wrong kind of romantic melodrama.

A Farewell to Arms, the novel, seems the archetypal doomed romance. Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army in the Great War, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse; soon after he is wounded. There is a passionate love affair while he is recuperating at the hospital where she is a nurse. On returning to duty he is caught up in the retreat from Caporetto, one of the most humiliating defeats in Italian military history. Arrested by battle police, who are shooting officers and men at random, Henry deserts, reunites with Catherine, who is by now three months pregnant, and escapes to Switzerland. They have a few months of happiness before she dies in childbirth.

The book was based on a real romance the eighteen-year-old Hemingway had with his wartime nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. She did not die, but instead jilted her younger lover. Moreover, Hemingway earned his medals. His alter ego in the book gets his awards through his friend Rinaldi’s intervention even though he was wounded while eating cheese after bringing food to his men. The young Ernest had indeed just brought food to his men when a shell exploded near him, but he stayed to help with the other wounded before allowing his own injuries to be treated. The brilliant passages describing Henry’s experiences in the retreat are made up; and Hemingway certainly did not desert although, as the book demonstrates, he was contemptuous of the Italian Army and its indiscriminate shooting of brave soldiers. Clearly he darkened some of his own experiences for the novel as well as incorporating real tragic incidents with which he was not involved. All this was expressed in the famous Hemingway style: declarative sentences conveying the look and feel of each experience, dialogue evoking a rich subtext in the reader’s imagination, the concise photographic descriptions that, like Conrad, “above all make you see”; all expressing a bleakly tragic vision.

Frank Borzage, on the other hand, was a romantic. Not only do the lovers in his melodramas usually fall overwhelmingly for each other; in his most famous films their love has a spiritual quality that can transcend space, time, even death. This was not unusual for cinema in the 1920s or 1930s, but in films like 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Man’s Castle Borzage expressed these themes with intensity and conviction that avoided the theatricality found sometimes in even Clarence Brown’s Garbo films. In A Farewell to Arms Borzage and his writers, Benjamin Glazer (who worked on 7th Heaven) and Oliver H.P. Garrett, undercut the despair of the original while using Hemingway’s basic plot and much of the novel’s dialogue.

The film is directed in a fluid style with skilfully staged travelling shots that achieve the flexibility of Borzage’s late silent films. These can be safely attributed to the director. The cinematographer, Charles Lang, was noted for his moving camera effects, but Borzage had regularly employed spectacular travelling shots in his Fox films in the late 1920s. Late in the film Borzage intensifies the emotion of Catherine and Frederic’s parting before he goes to the front by having the camera move with her as she secretly follows him as he boards the train.

In the book some tautly written dialogue portrays them making love at their first meeting. It is well written but rather distasteful. Borzage gives the encounter romanticism by getting Lang to shoot the sequence in soft focus and evoking from Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes a sincerity that eradicates the “nurse’s night off” aspect Catherine tells Frederic she despises. In the novel the lovers contemplate some kind of informal ceremony to represent their union. Borrowing an idea from 7th Heaven, Borzage and his writers create a sequence where the priest, played beautifully by Jack La Rue, visiting Frederic in hospital, sees Catherine there and, realising the depth of his friends’ emotions, on impulse quietly speaks the wedding service. The sequence is covered simply in mid-shots of the priest intercut with two-shots of the lovers as they come to realise what he is doing.

What infuriated Hemingway was the resolution. Instead of the lovers’ matter-of-fact acceptance in the book of Catherine’s pregnancy, in typical 1930s style she conceals her condition from him and goes to Switzerland. Her mail is intercepted by Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou) who doesn’t want him to lose his head over a woman. Henry deserts, discovers where Catherine is, and after a dramatic thirty-five-mile row across the lake to Switzerland arrives to comfort her in her last moments as she dies in childbirth.

The desertion is never a moral issue. Like so much of the poetry and fiction of the 1930s the film is emphatically anti-war.

Much admired at the time was the montage showing the night retreat in the rain—a veiled allusion to the retreat from Caporetto. Shot in expressionist style, it combines symbolic images of wounded in agony and hills covered with wooden crosses with scenes of a defeated army being shelled and bombed.

Borzage avoids the despair of Hemingway’s resolution. There were rumours at the time that an alternative happy ending was shot, but no such footage seems to exist. The evidence of the restoration is that Borzage filmed a sequence showing love transcending death. It is stylised, but for me at least it is very effective. But I have to admit I am a sentimentalist.

This restoration is long overdue. For the film historian it shows how the medium regained the visual glories of the silent era. Of course, the movie is over eighty years old and viewers need to allow for the conventions of the time. But Gary Cooper’s ability to embody his character’s emotions and the subtle understatement of Helen Hayes’s performance have not dated, and there is much to enjoy in Frank Borzage’s mastery of early sound film.