For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

It was said that Ernest Hemingway wrote " For Whom The Bell Tolls " with Gary Cooper in mind to play Robert Jordan. The story itself tells of an America teacher who joins the rebel cause to fight against Government forces with the specific task of destroying a crucial bridge. Once in, he meets up with the rebels and discovers much dissension in their leadership, which is further complicated by falling in love with Maria (Ingrid Bergman). However his most difficult task is among the leaders and especially with Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) whom he doesn't really trust. Integrated within the story is a passionate love affair which transfers easily from the novel to the silver screen and becomes more memorable in the treacherous and rugged landscape of the lofty Spanish mountains. There is much conflict between characters as well as explosive forces of the two belligerent sides. Central to the conflict is the theme of the bloody Spanish Civil which explains much to the audience and which in the end creates a definite Classic between Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood leading man Gary Cooper. Although acknowledged as a bit lengthy it's still a must see movie for fans of both stars****

I'm currently studying the Spanish Civil War as told through the medium of cinema. I came across this film and with high expectations of a good story with fine acting I bought it from Amazon. How wrong can one be! If melodrama had a rating of one to ten and ten being the worst this would be nudging the ten. Apart from the fine acting of Gary Cooper, the rest of the cast were shameful. It seemed as if they were reading their lines from a board but had problems because they were semi-literate. Example: To-morr-ow we sha-ll go to the bri-dge. Oh dear! The only decent lines spoken in normal fashion were those by Katina Paxinou.Even the delightful Bergman was so far over the top she could have met herself coming back. And those gleaming teeth! The studio missed a golden opportunity. They could have inserted a sponsors speech bubble every so often."Even in war you can have shiny teeth with new 'Gleemy-Teeth'.As for the war itself. A joke surely? Scant attention was given to anything political. I correct myself: no attention was given.Finally it can't be put down to: 'the films of the time' because lots of other films made in the same period were nowhere near as appalling - especially the war films.Bottom line. Hollywood has and always will be useless at making films about other countries wars.zero out of ten.

Among the cast which, in the novel consists of one American idealist and the rest Spanish guerrillas in the Civil War of 1937, I counted two actors actually born in Spain, one Mexican, one half-Cuban, a Yugoslavian, a Swede, two Greeks, two Hungarians, one Maltese, a Siciliano, and the rest Russian. Oh, and Gary Cooper.Hollywood in the 1940s was never particular about these niceties. A foreign accent was a foreign accent. In many of the movies of the period, a British accent would serve for Axis spies.But who cares, right? This is Hemingway after all and old Ernie can overcome this kind of wanton casting. Except that Hemingway was always difficult to transpose to film. His best passages -- those pebbles in the clear stream; the frozen carcass of the leopard on Mount Kilmanjaro -- tended to be descriptive. His dialog, sometime very funny, could also be very purple, ultra violet even, and those seemed to be the particular pieces of dialog that appealed to writers and producers. Here we're stuck with Ingrid Bergman's first kiss. "Where do the noses go?" And that long, incomprehensible explanation by Gary Cooper of why Bergman must leave him and his broken leg behind to provide a rear guard for the others. "If you go, we both go. Go and we go together. But if you stay, we don't go, so we don't go together." (Something like that.) At least he doesn't say, "Forget about me. Save yourselves." And we're also spared, from the novel, the observation that when Cooper and Bergman have sex, "the earth moved." Hemingway had a fable about dealing with Hollywood. You drive up to the California border. The producers are on the other side. You throw them the manuscript and they throw you the check. Then you drive away fast.The movie is really constructed in four acts. I: Gary Cooper, the ex prof, is introduced to the dozen or so guerrilla fighters hiding out and slowly rotting in the mountains. II. Cooper romances Bergman. III. El Sordo (Joseph Calleia, the Maltese) is trapped on a mountain top and dies fighting Franco's troops and airplanes. IV. Cooper and his companeros blow a bridge and some of them are killed, including Cooper.The locations were shot in the beautiful crisp air and granite rocks and evergreens of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. The outdoor imagery is very impressive. Most of the scenes are shot in a damp, dark cave that looks studio-built. The robust and ugly Katina Paxinou livens up these scenes and it's a good thing because most of the dynamics are a little gloomy. Akim Tamiroff, in a dramatic part, is half coward, half burnt-out revolutionary. Some of his grimmer lines are, in context, almost funny, what with his echt-Russian accent. Sullen and resentful, his face painted a ghoulish green, Tamiroff swills down wine and insults people at random until people punch and slap him and threaten to kill him. His mantra is smothered in sour cream and mushrooms and cabbage soup -- "I doan prowoke." Cooper is pretty good. He's handsome and virile; he manages to activate both facial expressions, and it fits the part. And Ingrid Bergman is nicely tanned considering that she's just spent a winter in the icy mountains of Spain. Her short haircut detracts not at all from her fresh beauty. She glows with her love for Cooper. At one point the script has her become hysterical as her lover rides off to battle. "Oh, please bring him back safely. Please. I big you. I will do anything you say!", and she buries her sobbing face against the neck of an indifferent horse. I wonder if the writers deliberately tried to torpedo what virtues were found in the novel.The film, like the novel, takes sides. Well -- it HAS to. Who, in 1943, was going to give a break to Hitler and Mussolini? But the Republican side doesn't come off as exactly saintly. When they take over a town they drunkenly torture and kill anyone who was linked to the loyalists. It's a horrifying scene, a flashback narrated by Paxinou. Overall, a film with considerable impact, even today.

This was an outstanding movie by real actors not the pampered, petted media whores of today. Folks alive today will never know what it's like to actually fight for freedom with the terror of losing was so great. The opening acts of world war two in Spain were just target practice for the true NAZI and Fascist in this world throw in the Communist who were more open about their intentions of world wide dominance and you have the era from which this movie and book came. The era of men and women who knew evil and were willing to die to defeat it. Today the world faces more NAZI's in Islam, Vlaams Belang and Communism is still here like a cancer trying to return. The problems now are more folks are confused and see the forces of civilization as the enemy their views obscured by the hatred for one man who when in power worked for the good of America and when his time was up stepped down with no attempt to make himself a dictator for life yet the calls that he is the evil one who wants to rule the world. As was written in the Novel;"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for the bell tolls for thee."