"For Whom the Bell Tolls" from 1943 is a gorgeous adaptation of Hemingway's eponymous novel, which tells the story of a foreigner (Gary Cooper) fighting in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper), an American teacher, is given the job of blowing up an important bridge behind Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. He joins a group of guerrillas, led by Pilar (Katina Paxinou).Out for himself, there is another member of the team, the drunken Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) who has to be watched lest he turn on them. Also with them is the amazingly beautiful Maria (Ingrid Bergman) whom Jordan falls in love with at first sight. It's mutual. Maria was rescued from Nationalists rapists and being protected by the guerrillas.Obviously this film was done to jump on the success of Casablanca, right down to the leading lady. There are some parts of the film that were not in the novel - war being bigger than the love of two people, etc.However, it stands on its own for the acting, the beautiful color, cinematography, and exciting scenes. There is also some great insight into the Spanish Civil War, as Jordan explains that although the Communists are on their side, but the fascist governments of Germany and Italy are supplying the Nationalists with tanks and dive- bombers. In reality those governments were testing their weapons in preparation for the coming world war. Spain is target practice.The film at nearly three hours is too long and would have been even better with some judicious cuts. And there's something else. There are two writers whose dialogue does not work when spoken - Hemingway and Fitzgerald - for different reasons. If you stick too much to either one's dialogue, it sounds silly. Cooper's speech at the end - I am you, you are me, if you go, I go too etc. - just doesn't work coming out of Gary Cooper's mouth. Maybe out of Gregory Peck's, but it just didn't fit the character Cooper established. And he and Bergman were Hemingway's ideal actors for the characters.Cooper and Bergman don't have the best roles in the film - these belong to Katina Paxinou and Akim Tamiroff, both of whom are sensational in well-developed roles.Cooper and Bergman, needless to say, make a beautiful couple. Cooper is stalwart and heroic; she is vulnerable and beautiful.Highly recommended if you have the necessary times. For me this is one of the best adaptations of Hemingway to screen that we have.

It's the Spanish Civil War. Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) is part of the beleaguered International Brigades. He is ordered to blow up an important bridge. He encounters and is aided by a group of local guerrilla fighters led by Pablo and Pilar. He is taken with fighter Maria (Ingrid Bergman) who was rescued from fascist imprisonment after her Republican mayor father was killed along with her mother.It's an old-fashion overwrought romantic war drama. There isn't much in the way of action in the first half. Ingrid Bergman is every bit of the Hollywood star. There is no denying her beauty but her character is suppose to be haunted and damaged. The acting is all big overwrought old fashion style. It is another time. Gary Cooper is the heroic Gary Cooper. Even the deaths are done in the old fashion ways. Nevertheless, the operation is compelling and there is good tension in the second half.

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.

Howard Hawks had a saying that a good movie was three great scenes and no bad ones. For this movie, I would change that to; a great movie has three noticeably excellent elements, and nothing below average. And even by that standard, this movie falls just short of being great. By the one hour mark you've begun to notice an accumulation of better-than-average conceits (A wife puts her husband in his place and confiscates his power, Ingrid Bergman in the sleeping bag, a stand out performance by Katina Paxinou, some excellent photography) but problems lay ahead.First, the good: The cinematography is above average. It occasionally offers a stunning visual (a horse bucking against a snow drift, a two-shot of Cooper peering from a rock with a strange, expressionist tree limb over his head). Occasionally some frames look like a Japanese print. And the darkness of the shoot in some places produces stunning results. They probably shot dark to disguise that a lot of the outside scenes are shot inside, but it produces a unique, inky look I've never seen anywhere else. The Technicolor process in more conventional scenes looks deeply weird. The palette is very drained: forest green, gray, beige, brown flesh. But I kept thinking "if this was shot in b&w, there's no way it could have the impact of these strange color visuals" (Heresy, I know, but then of course it turns out to have been shot in Technicolor). But only the compositions are good. The film has a real lack of camera work to contribute to moments that should be heightened; the camera just kinda sits there for the whole movie. It seems they assumed one rock looks pretty much like every other rock so why move the camera.The blowing of the bridge (you know, the exciting part of the movie) is shot pretty dull. It's just kinda off in the distance (an obvious miniature) and half of it falls over. Without a great ending, you really don't have a great movie. Gary Cooper (like Warren Beatty) relies on understatement so much that when he's asked to deliver the films emotional climax, he just can't bring it. It feels hollow and a little pathetic. Each time he tries to sell it, it just sounds more vapid. ("You're me now. I am you. We both go ...You're me too! ...We're not apart... Take care of our life ...Shes going on, with me") Ugh. He can't put that malarkey over. You just can't ask Cooper to be deep or to articulate deep convictions (See the Fountainhead, Meet John Doe). True to Hemingway's reductivist style, we know the plot is about blowing up a bridge very early, but it still takes 3 hours to get there. I can see why people go the extra mile to forgive it faults, and declare it a masterpiece. But it doesn't take a genius to see that the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans when a war is waging. The movie really failed to make me care about the affair which eats up miles of celluloid. Bergman is inappropriately "movie-star cute" while hiding out with a team of rebels defending her homeland. Pilar (Paxionu) is always more compelling than the couple.Anyone who likes the big love theme in the score can not have heard the tune "Let's Face the Music and Dance." Every time it played, I thought. 'How could they not know this melody makes people think of Fred and Ginger dancing around a swanky New York nightclub?'