Post by teleadm on Apr 20, 2018 16:09:38 GMT
The last movie produced by David O. Selznick.
About an English (Jones) nurse and an American soldier (Hudson) on the Italian front during World War I who fall in love, amidst the horrors surrounding them.
Having read so many negative reviews about this movie, I wondered if it could be THAT bad, and I would say NO. It's not the great epic it desperatly want's to be, but it's not uninteresting and there are impressive scenery and scenes of drama buried in it, but some emotional scenes doesn't feel that interesting, only shallow. Beware! that it stretches out to 146 minutes. It's not a war movie, though there are a few war scenes.
If Selznick wanted to outdo his Gone with the Wind I think he choosed the wrong novel to do so, the title sequence is very reminding of GWTW by the way.
I can't compare it with the old 1932 version, since I've only seen that version in some crappy public domain version.
A commercial and critical flop? With the critics it was, but commercially it apparently wasn't since it made around 25M USD worldwide (by the end of 1959) compared to costing around 4,5 M USD to make, but maybe the hopes were set higher.
Plus, it only got one Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor (Vittorio De Sica).
teleadm --
The bad reviews may be mainly Hemingway's ideals of what he wanted to see in the movie.
Hemingway was a very close friend to Gary Cooper, and I think Hemingway always thought of him as the ideal male lead, as he was in the earlier 1932 version with Helen Hayes. He also thought that (at that time), Jennifer Jones was too old to play the Catherine Barkley role.
On the other hand, Vittorio De Sica was ideal for the Italian doctor, and I am glad he received an Oscar nomination for that role (played in the 1932 version by Adolphe Menjou). I agree that this movie is much more polished and extended than the earlier version.
Poor poor Selznick, so his great GWTW wasn't good enough for him?
. He wanted to outdo GWTW with a movie with Jennifer Jones in the lead?
Didn't he try that with Duel in the Sun (1946)?
Couldn't he just be happy with Gone with the Wind?
GWTW still stands as the best movie ever made, IMHO.
Hemingway had already sold the movie rights to his "A Farewell to Arms" novel, so he didn't have anything to say in any eventual remakes (if it included any eventual TV versions, I'm not sure), but Selznick payed Hemingway a certain amount of money anyway, but that was more of a publicity stunt,
Hemingway didn't say anything nice about this movie anyway.
John Huston was the original director of this version, and he might have been the best choice since he had proved that he could make movies out of what others called impossible novels, but Selznick's eternal PM's and micro-managing this production made Huston walk of this production, if he got fired or quited? well there are different stories, plus original cinematographer Oswald Morris got fired because he didn't make shots of Jennifer Jones that pleased Selznick.