Undescribable Perfection

Touches You

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

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.

Any book, novel, movie, narrative, consists of a protagonist, opposition and a desire line that drives it forward. Along the way, there will be a climax and a revelation that changes the main character in unexpected ways. The stakes should be high for the main character, and their challenge significant. Here we have no plot whatsoever for about 1.5 hours and then a tepid "fight" of three men for one woman. There is no tension, and no real struggle forward. Some wonderful acting by Errol Flynn and Eddie Albert. Prolonged scenes of bullfights might have been novel in the 1950's but are plodding and dull additions to a dud of a film. The rotten tomatoes review of 37% is generous.

Hemingway's great novel "The Sun Also Rises" has three layers to it. On the surface it is about the lives, adventures and falling out of a group of American and British expatriates in France and Spain after World War 1. At a second level there is a subtext running throughout the book about the search for meaning and authenticity in the aftermath of that horrendous war. And thirdly on a literary level there is the revolutionary style of Hemingway's spare prose where so often less is so much more. This film adaptation unfortunately only addresses the surface level – it is arguable whether any film adaptation could embrace all three. How does it rate on its limited scope? Only Errol Flynn as "Mike Campbell" captures the essence of the book character : bankrupt, dissolute, pathetic but still somehow endearing. His model in real life was dead within a decade. Tyrone Power as the protagonist "Jake Barnes" is stolid but unmemorable. Ava Gardner should be ideal as the reckless liberated 20's female "Brett Ashley" but the film fails to provide sufficient back story to explain her promiscuous dissolution and Gardner does not really convince in the role. Eddie Albert fails to project sufficiently the good-natured ebullience and intelligence of Jake's friend "Bill Gorton". Finally Mel Ferrer is merely adequate as "Robert Cohn" who triggers much of the falling out of the group in Spain. Overall this is a disappointing attempt to film what is probably an unfilmable novel. See it to watch Errol Flynn in one of his finest roles.

The actors seem right for these roles, as if they were born to play them. As a result, each character vividly comes to life on screen. Ava Gardner is at her sexiest; Tyrone Power displays his perennial boyish charm; Mel Ferrer infuses his part with the perfect amount of creepiness; Eddie Albert provides some nice comic relief; and Errol Flynn steals the show as an incorrigible drunk (a real stretch for him?). But more important than these characterizations is how the film captures the spirit of Hemingway's writing. It depicts the wanderlust, the excitement and the philosophy of an interesting group of expatriates and their interwoven destinies. When they all go off in separate directions near the end of the picture, the viewer can't help but feel melancholy that their time together is over.

There's no other way to describe this other than a major disappointment. On paper it was a great opportunity to finally do right by Hemingway - something that still eludes filmmakers - his first real novel (he had published The Torrents Of Spring, a parody, earlier), an immediate best seller chock full of interesting characters and set against a backdrop of Paris and Pamplona (all Hemingway's novels were set outside the USA, Italy twice, Spain twice, Havana, Paris, the Gulf Stream)all one had to do was acquire the rights, commission a screenplay and assemble the right cast. Aye, there's the rub; where Hemingway's characters were lost youths who had been fighting a war less than a decade before the events described in the novel Fox in their wisdom assembled an over-the-hill gang all, with the exception of Mel Ferrer, possessing fine acting chops but badly in need of a touch of jeunnesse. As drop-dead gorgeous actresses go Ava Gardner turned out consistently fine performances and does so here but only Errol Flynn rings completely true as Mike Campbell and even he is clearly too old for the part. Robert Evans demonstrates why he soon gave up acting - though surely it was vice versa - and is so bad he makes Mel Ferrer look good. Altogether a sad treatment of a landmark, albeit now dated, novel.