Word: hemingways
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...Also Rises (Darryl F. Zanuck; 20th Century-Fox) is real Hemingway almost all the way. The characters of Hemingway's first topflight novel come truly alive in this film-often in the fine individual triumphs of some actors over their own miscasting. It is the story itself -the Lost Generation expatriates running away from themselves in Paris and Spain-that sometimes stumbles, as if Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Director Henry King had decided that the best way to condense the novel on film would be literally to shoot the action and dialogue in well-chosen chunks. Half...
...Spain's sunny streets. Against these backgrounds, the essence of Sun is played out. The difficult role of Brett's ultimate conquest, young Bullfighter Pedro Romero, is played with fierce intensity by handsome newcomer Robert Evans. In the movie's arena sequence, Actor Evans conveys Hemingway's paradoxical feeling of affection for what he kills ("The bulls are my best friends"), just as Brett always momentarily loves the men she ruins...
There is commendable candor in the film's telling of its strange love story. Hemingway fans, anticipating how the movie might mistreat the tragic circumstance of the hero's sexual impotency resulting from a battle wound, will be happy to learn that Jake Barnes (sensitively played by Tyrone Power) is informed of his deficiency in exactly that term-"impotent." Nor is there any pussyfooting about the nymphomania of the heroine, who settles for all men in lieu of Jake whom she loves; as man-crazy Lady Ashley (Brett), Ava Gardner turns in the most realistic performance...
...that, in the end, Producer Zanuck and Director King do not quit when Hemingway is ahead. The film's semihappy ending is an altogether sappy ending. The book made it plain that there was no hope for Jake and Brett ever to alter or escape their anguished, futile bondage. Yet the movie has them finally agreeing to the silver-lined proposition that "there must be some answer for us -somewhere...
...considered a man of distinction because I write books. The truth is, we don't deserve it." Cozzens regards most of his fellow writers as softies. Says he: "The Old Man and the Sea could have run in Little Folks magazine. Under the rough exterior of Hemingway, he's just a great big bleeding heart. Sinclair Lewis was a crypto-sentimentalist and a slovenly writer who managed a slight falsification of life in order to move the reader. Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob. I can't read...