A Farewell to Arms (1932)

Hayes and Cooper are splendid and film is best when they are alone on screen. Their scenes are romantic and even daring. When Hayes questions Cooper about his past "lovers" it is done with wit and maturity. SPOILER ALERT Unfortunately we know that Catherine's "sin" cannot go unpunished. Everyone seems to conspire against the lovers. And Catherine's character is too passive to be an admirable heroine. The whole movie is very well set up from the beginning but the ending is too long delayed for modern audiences. Why isn't Frederick allowed to visit his dying "wife"? And Wagner playing as Catherine dies is way over the top!

Gary Cooper is an ambulance driver who is in the middle of combat in World War II. Life is tenuous for everyone. He meets a nurse, played by Helen Hayes, who has just lost her fiancé to the war. They hook up and he leaves. The result of their encounter is her pregnancy. Because Cooper is friends with a carouser with whom he inhabits bars and brothels, his friend, feeling that Cooper could be harmed by this woman's situation, intercepts letters she has sent to him. So she feels he has no feelings for her. He sends letters to her, but she has been transferred to another unit hospital. So communications have broken down and this leads to great pain. The ending is quite emotional (perhaps a bit too emotional) with some real overacting from two really good actors. Hemingway, apparently, hated the movie version of his book. It's worth a look but there are better movies featuring his work.

It's time to explode a few myths here. Like the so-called ideal marriage between the Kennedy's that was propped up by the media for years and was finally shown to have been wrought with serial infidelities by both parties, so in the world of movie land we have some sacred cows that have to be taken out to the slaughterhouse and be ground up into decent hamburger. A Farewell to Arms is one such sacred cow. Gary Cooper struts through the movie like a tall, lanky, slow-talking, goofy string bean with an amoral attitude towards women, the army and life in general. He chooses to desert his comrades - so much for Semper Fidelis - to run back to a woman he impregnated in a night of passion. Helen Hayes is the love interest, whose acting resembled nothing so much as a cut-out paper doll in a puppet show; her cardboard expression and lifeless lines were so two dimensional it was painful to watch - Olive Oil in the Popeye cartoons had more sex appeal. There was no chemistry between her and Cooper, how could there be, he was over six feet tall and she was so short he had to hold her up in order not to stoop to kiss her in one scene. IMDb can cut this next comment out if it is not permissible to talk about other review sites, but those fawning idiots over at Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a 90% rating in true Rotten Tomatoes lock step fashion, while giving a truly great movie, The Mission, with standout performances by Robert Di Nero, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn, and that won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and whose musical score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, ranked 1st on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) Classic 100 Music in the Movies, well Rotten Tomatoes only gave THAT movie a 65% rating. That's why I take Rotten Tomatoes with a pound of salt and always go to IMDb to see if any movie is any good.

There's World War I going and Lieutenant Frederick Henry is fighting for his life.The war becomes secondary when he meets and falls in love with nurse Catherine Barkley.Having big emotions for another person during the war is dangerous since there's the chance of losing that person.They're both afraid.He may not admit that, but they're both afraid.Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932) is based on Ernest Hemingway's novel.It won two Academy Awards from best cinematography (Charles Lang) and best sound, recording (Franklin Hansen).It would have deserved awards for acting, as well.The charismatic Gary Cooper and the admirable Helen Hayes do a fantastic job as the leading couple.Then there's also the great Adolphe Menjou as Major Rinaldi.The dialogue is brilliant.Lots of lovely words are spoken about love.I know there are many people who would say a movie from 75 years back is too old for them.I'd say that's their lost.A Farewell to Arms offers great feelings from the first meeting till the tragic ending.