The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

At first glance we don't have a winning hand with actor Rock Hudson. At second glance, however, we might be prone to reconsider many of the instances that surround that remarkable man, the tallest all time Hollywood star (1.96 cm). He had the misfortune not to receive an Oscar and die early from undiagnosed AIDS-related disease - which I personally disbelieve (where are his skin lesions?), and would retreat for a more humble malady such as stress and ill cured circulation problems. Whatever, the dully attention should be paid to that man who was consistently at the top box office in 1950s and 1960s together with Gable, Cooper, Wayne, etc; his movie "A Farewell to Arms" (1957) which I consider his best performance remained also unappreciated.The cream about all things connected with Rock Hudson is his relationship with director Douglas Sirk. American born Hudson (Winnetka, Illinois) had the strange fate to be launched into career by an émigré from Germany whom personally Goebbels had recruited for UFA studio in the 1930s. Detlef Sierck failed to become a Nazi but his son did, he was killed in WWII. Sirk fled with his Jewish wife to America and afterwards in the 1950s became an icon for underground cinema. Sirk never refrained from his German passport - maybe because of that he didn't receive Oscar in America - and in 1960s returned to Munich to teach classes at Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film. He had many students from which Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) wrote a book about him. RWF was thought to have died of AIDS, by the way.To spend my matches honestly I should admit that instigation for these lines was given by couple of films that were distributed on DVD by Criterion Collection. These movies represented the duo Sirk - Hudson and there I found a half hour interview with Sirk himself taken by BBC journalist. Very useful stuff. Beside the fact that you see the director with no masks, further I got another dagger when I saw how much resemblance there was between the titular and no less than ... the great Charles Chaplin. The reader would excuse my comparison and I will talk no more except that I quickly revised my personal copy of Chaplin's "Autobiography" - a remarkable memoir and maybe the best written by someone who gave so much to film profession.Film industry is no battlefield. Despite the fact that many actors died as heroes while making divertissement for the crowd, the latter should reproach that they were millionaires. Funny thing how money both kills and gives life. Thank you!

There are surprisingly few reviews here, and yet for me this is an epic film. My fascination started long ago with a liking of adventurous stories, and consequently also of Ernest Hemmingway (author of the book with the same title). His participation in the Spanish Civil War, his stays in Havana. I was touched by his melodramatic style, which contrasts so much with true life, that the emotions seem almost poisonous and self-destructing. I saw the film, read the book, and again saw the film a couple of times. In fact the film script closely follows the Hemmingway narrative. The second part of my fascination stems from the setting of the story, in the First World War. It is a bizarre fact, that a horrid war developed at a time, when European wars such as the French-German conflicts of the nineteenth century seemed to have become more or less civilized or at least bearable. The people were proud to serve their country, there were honor and social reward in a good fight, and they went happily to confront death at the battlefields. It is true that for the first time in history there was an impressive anti-war movement, carried by the rising socialist parties. But as soon as the showpiece started, all national differences disappeared. The trenches of the enemy were joyfully stormed while exclaiming "Hurray!" and the like. Eventually the reality dawned upon the soldiers: the hunger in the muddy trenches, and the grinding of human bodies by shrapnels and barbed wire. This horror is best portrayed in the book "Im Westen nichts Neues" by Remarque, and from it the ensuing films, that I also plan to review. Another epic drama about the same war, but located in Russia, is of course the astounding romance "Doctor Zhivago", which however on closer examination may be somewhat emotionally twisted. You don't find such melodramatic films about this other global fire, the Second World War. The mass destruction had become too obvious. "A farewell to arms" has its own share of war violence. The stage is situated in Italy, at the mountainous front with the Austro-Hungarian armies (at that time already enforced by German divisions). Rock Hudson plays Frederick Henry, an American character with the bravura that seems so typical of Hemmingway. Henry has volunteered in the Italian army as an ambulance driver. At the front he meets Catherine Barkley (Jennifer Jones), a British nurse, and a romance evolves. She had taken the job in order to join her beloved, who however was soon shot to pieces at the Somme (in France). Since then, her mind is somewhat derailed and she finds herself lost while doing the job in the field hospitals. The romance gives her a new perspective, but also provokes her fears of abandonment. After some nasty war scenes Henry is wounded and transported to a hospital in Milan. There he is once again united with Barkley, who probably on purpose has been transferred to the same place. There follow a couple of care-free months, in which she smuggles cigarettes and bottles of booze into his bedroom etc. She gets pregnant. Henry rejoins the front, and is caught in a chaotic massive retreat of the Italian forces. When he is about to be court-martialed by some idiots, he deserts. Finally he and Barkley decide to flee to the neutral Switzerland, using a row-boat in the night across the lakes. In the Swiss Alps they have a wonderful time, summer and Christmas, while awaiting the childbirth. Unfortunately bad complications arise during the delivery. Now the fear of abandonment switches sides, with Catherine just hating her predicament (what does this mean?). The child is born dead, and Barkley succumbs due to the loss of blood with Henry sobbing at her bedside. Again he is on his own, but disconsolateness has replaced the bravura. The contrast between the anonymous mass scale destruction and the private mishap can hardly be greater. While I have accrued some doubts about the quality of the dialogs, my final judgment remains positive.

I managed to avoid reading Hemingway in college. From what I could tell, along with his reductivist verbiage, he offered reductivist story lines. This film-transfiguration of AF2A into a simplistic, hoary, belabored narrative, does not disabuse me of my suspicions: A guy who barely sees action on the European battlefield (Hudson) falls in with a nurse (Jones), and they conspire to spend time together. Hemingway's big contribution to narrative was the romantic travelogue? Who knows what these two lovers have in common? They're so utterly generic. The movie never even brings up the utter irresponsibility it takes to abandon the front in favor of a lovers' adventure. The two have a season on the Alps, straight out of a J. Crew catalog. A number of better scenes are undermined by corny, conventional melodrama elsewhere. The movie keeps piling on tiny, improbable, unspecific details that fight the epic treatment. The cavernous hospital that Miss Barkley works in is virtually empty, so that no secondary plot line can possibly distract from the flimsy main story. Complicated, it is not. The camera work is better than average, with some amazing location photography. Director Charles Vidor (or maybe Huston?) does striking things in the first hour with an on-location, wide-screen camera... there are no second unit cop-outs. Vidor shows massive, panoramic tableaux, pans over a line of hundreds of soldiers trooping through the mountains; and then with a 90 degree swivel of his camera catches up with Hudson's ambulance barreling down on him. Hudson looks great. He's a better actor than he gets credit for, but with unshaped material like this, he can become very mechanical. Mercedes McCambridge plays a one-dimensional shrew. Jennifer Jones is puffy and miscast in the lackluster female lead. The movie is best when she's off screen. The love scenes are about as affecting as a coffee commercial.

A lot of people are being terribly unfair to this production of A Farewell To Arms. Not that it's a great film, it misses that by a good distance, but that even films that are the best adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's work fall far short for Hemingway purists. And David O. Selznick was far from a Hemingway purist.No Selznick when it came to the career of his wife Jennifer Jones lost all kinds of sense of balance. Another reviewer was quite right, Jean Simmons, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor all would have made acceptable Catherine Barkleys.One thing also to remember that we're not even starting out with pure Hemingway to begin with. Both this version and the 1932 version that starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes are not just based on the novel, they are based on a play that was adapted from the novel by Laurence Stallings who wrote What Price Glory. The play ran for 30 performances in 1930 and starred Glenn Anders and Elissa Landi on Broadway. I suspect the Depression had a lot to do with the closing as it did many shows that year.Originally John Huston was slated to direct and he had directed Jones in both We Were Strangers and Beat The Devil with little or no interference from Selznick. But Selznick fired Huston and replaced him with Charles Vidor because allegedly too much attention was paid to Rock Hudson and not enough to Jennifer.That's ironic as all get out because the novel itself is as all Hemingway works is male chauvinistic in the extreme. If he wanted to showcase Jennifer, any Hemingway just ain't the vehicle. He should have used one of the Bronte sisters.Since the novel is male oriented Rock Hudson makes a fine Fredric Henry, the idealistic man who volunteers on the Italian front as an ambulance driver to experience war so he can write about it when it's over. On that Italian front it didn't look like it was ever going to be over. That's another problem with this work, how do you sell it to the movie going public, as a romance or an anti-war tract? If you're Adolph Zukor for Paramount or David O. Selznick probably romance is the aspect that does sell. The third major character in the film is that of the Italian army doctor Major Rinaldi played here by Vittorio DeSica. This version is more faithful to the book and presents Rinaldi as a three dimensional character.In the 1932 version Adolphe Menjou was Rinaldi and Menjou did fine with the part as your typical suave continental type. Here Rinaldi's outspokenness about the futility of the Italian campaign leads to tragedy. It also led to an Oscar nomination for Vittorio DeSica as Best Supporting Actor. It was the only recognition A Farewell To Arms got from the Academy and DeSica lost to Red Buttons for Sayonara.Whether Huston or Vidor did them, the battle scenes and the scenes of retreat are shattering and moving. Given the unique problems of Hemingway and Selznick, we're lucky the film came out as good as it did.