DOING nothing that would disturb a Fascist, the Hays Office or the State Department, and doing what is left listlessly and ineffectually, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” will ring nothing but the box-office register, and may not ring that. There is nowhere in it the slightest attempt to justify or explain why a school teacher from Montana was blowing up a bridge in Spain in 1937, with the help of Spanish guerrillas, or why the Loyalists were fighting the Rebels, what the Loyalists stood for or what their enemies stood for, what Robert Jordan stood for, or Pablo or Pilar. After this failing, it fails to project any feeling of love—and the love between Maria and Jordan is half of the movie’s physical content. Nor is there any greatness of scene: the environment of mountains and snow country seems if anything to make the thing more phlegmatic. And finally the characterization is smudged, almost inconsequential. The movie is full only of badly made-up and costumed character actors from the world over, brought together into one room without any key to their relationships, so that the inside of the main setting, a cave, is too much like a café and too little like a place that a half-dozen people have inhabited. The talk between people seems too loud, or too fast, or too florid; everything jerks slam-bang, comes and goes abruptly, without order. The most amazing fact is that the hero, Gary Cooper, is not in the picture, not a character at all, but someone standing outside the story watching it.
Yet it was a film which above all others had the chance to show feelings and ideas that are alive today. The essence of its theme is the fight against fascism, the fight “for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into.” And it not only had the chance, it was the chance: it was a picture that had been allotted millions of dollars, which shot an immense amount of material and used one of the most striking arrays of talent ever brought to a film.
I have never felt that a picture suffered more from the restraints and frustrations of movie-making in Hollywood—not only from censorship, which came from all quarters, but from the pressure of having to get a thing done before you felt right about it, of hurrying to make what had to be long, tedious and expensive. Add to this the astounding ballyhoo and the anxiety therefrom that pursued the picture, making it almost a public property, from the day Hemingway published it as a book. Censorship killed the theme. It is Spain, 1937, the civil war; but the movie takes no side, no one is called right or wrong (the word “Fascist” isn’t even mentioned), there is the ignoble impression that these people are seriously, intently, killing one another for no discernible reason at all. Authorities on decency ruined the love story. It is almost more than one can stand to see how this love is turned into talk, into undercover manipulations of scene in an attempt to say both that Jordan and Maria slept together and that they did not.
The over-all incapability—whatever its roots outside the movie—is due inside to the ineffective showing of anything, of its heart particularly. Most of it is talk, uninspired and delivered erratically, and where the event is shown it is presented in a half-hearted way, almost unwillingly. The reason for this, I think, is that the picture fails to switch the word images of the book into completely told screen images. For instance, the battle of El Sordo and his men on the mountain top is, as a part of the movie, so little explained, so badly cut, that its place in the story is unjustified; likewise, the flashback to the guerrillas’ early days is again insufficiently shown and completely useless to the film, since it not only failed to get across any great image of the first day of a revolution, but failed to explain Pablo, ostensibly its reason for being there. The situation which builds to the climax is a major one. It involves two separate events: that of Maria and Jordan making love and that of Andrés making an anxious journey to get a vital message from Jordan through enemy lines to his general—and it is done by cutting back and forth from one event to the other in the manner of “Intolerance.” But in one event there is no love-making, and in the other there is no anxiety, and in the whole there is no quickness, no sparkle in editing, to carry the thing along.
I am not sure how much of the picture’s peculiar lack of effect is the result of its technicolor. I myself find it difficult to take seriously a movie made in technicolor: profundity seems out of key with the carnival spirit of the color, which is always gay and bright, masklike, without substance. Nor am I sure how much of its stiffness and unmaneuverability is the product of technicolor. For a picture of Sam Wood’s direction, it has a strange lack of ability to move in and out of and around a scene to get everything clear and full. It either shoots the image long or close, but never in interrelation. This is apparent in the laying of the dynamite at the bridge, which is a good thing in this movie, but too meager in documentation.
The moments that are good come out sporadically in the playing. Ingrid Bergman brings luminously to life her ecstatically satisfied love, which has a soft, blossoming loveliness, making Cooper’s seem something thin, hard, almost not there. Her projection of Maria’s parting from Jordan is so magnificent it at last creates the extremity which such a foreshortened love affair as theirs demanded. Katina Paxinou as Pilar has some good moments, particularly in explaining the love life of an ugly woman and in expressing a knowledge of the new love between Maria and Jordan. Lilo Yarson, as Joaquin, is perfectly cast as a sensitive Spanish boy. Mikhail Rasumny gets in some hurried examples of a gypsy, and Konstantin Shayne as the Russian, Karkov, lights up everything before and after him with a studied, deliberate intensity of good acting. But in the main the playing is deviled by the anxiety to be like the character in the book without any of the necessary time to do it in: so that such things as Paxinou’s deep, hard laugh, Rasumny’s gleeful glances, Bergman’s ecstatic smile, are so concentrated, in such heavy doses and so precipitately, as to give the effect of desperate people trying to create something, anything, before the camera turns away. Cooper is an enigma in this movie. By cutting all that Hemingway put into his mind and replacing it with nothing, they obliterated him. And unfortunately the Cooper failing is always present: the special speech, one fancy with thought and idea, comes out of his mouth with almost hysterical unreality.
So “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a failure—perhaps Hollywood’s most exasperating refusal to fulfill any of its obligations.
July 19, 1943