HOLLYWOOD FIGHTS THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 277, 13 October 1944, Page 12

HOLLYWOOD FIGHTS THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

"For Whom The Bell Tolls"

HIS is not a review or a criticism of Paramount’s film version of Ernest Hemingway’s best-selling novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Although the film is now in New Zealand, we have not seen it and, indeed, it is unlikely that it will be released until next year. But publicity material is now available and overseas papers have also devoted a great deal of space to the film, so we give here photographs of the leading players and several scenes, together with some details of the production and aspects of the controversy that has gathered around it. ¢

UDGING by overseas reviews, the main point of debate in For Whom the Bell Tolls is whether the film is a sufficiently close copy of the book, or whether an attitude of "appeasement" toward the Franco regime in Spain and other considerations of politics and censorship have unduly coloured the production. However, it seems to. be pretty generally agreed that For Whom the Bell Tollg is very long (nearly three hours), very spectacular, and very expensive (Paramount paid Hemingway £30,000 for the screen rights and spent £750,000 on the Technicolour production). There is also unstinted praise for the acting, particularly the. performances by Ingrid Bergman as Maria, the tormented waif of the civil: war, and: by Katina Paxinou as Pilar, the. coarse,

compassionate guerrilla woman. Time says "whatever Hollywood’s Bell tolls for, Ingrid Bergman rings it"; and with reference to Katina Paxinou, C. A. Lejeune writes in the London Observer: "This. is her first film, and in it she steps, in one vast stride, to the top of her profession. This is acting on the grand scale, acting that fears neither god nor fan, acting so rare that you could count its screen professors on the fingers of one hand." The Author's Own Choice Paramount faced other difficulties besides political ones in making the picture, which took three years to finish. Probably the easiest task of all was securing the screen rights from Hemingway. Casting was a major problem. Hemingway himself stipulated that Gary Cooper should play Robert Jordan, the young American professor who. is fighting for democracy in Spain, and that

Ingrid Bergman should portray the Spanish girl. Cooper’s services were secured with some trouble, for he had commitments elsewhere, but getting Miss Bergman was much more difficult. For years she had resisted the wooing of Hollywood, refusing the most enticing parts. "Hollywood," she told reporters sent to interview her, "has a queer way of taking an individual and fitting her into the American mould. I have worked hard to develop my style, and I don’t want anything to do with bathing suits and plucked eyebrows." But at last Miss Bergman capitulated, and the film had the heroine its author wanted. It still remains to be seen if Miss Bergman can continue to retain her individuality against the pressure of Hollywood, but as a glance at our photographs shows, in For Whom the Bell Tolls she has certainly not become.a typical glamour girl. Her eyebrows are intact. Nor does she appear in a bathingsuit. It was, for one thing, much too cold for that, because most of the film was made "on location" near the snow-line of the high Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California, and some of the time electric heaters had to be used to keep even the cameras from freezing! They Went to the Mountain It had originally been intended to make almost the whole film in the studios, with manufactured settings, but war restrictions caused a limit of 5000 dollars to be placed on new construction materials used in any one picture. So it became necessary to use Nature’s sets instead-in the lofty Sierras. This made production much harder, but it has doubtless made it more realistic. Here is how Sam Wood, the director, described the job: "Working 10,000 feet high is hard, and scrambling over rocks is hard, too, but giving Academy Award performances under such circumstances is horrific, I have never experienced anything as difficult as filming under the conditions we had, We even uprooted wildflowers and greenery to prevent the harsh landscape from becoming ‘pretty’ for the Technicolour camera, and we substituted ancient, gnarled tree-trunks | instead. Due to the quartz and metallic content of the rocks, painters had to spray down the backgrounds of almost all exteriors. Not only did we go to the mountain, but we painted it, too!" (continued on next page)

HE basic theme of the story is simple. The hero, a young American professor on the Loyalist side in Spain, is assigned to make contact with a_ guerrilla bafid and with their aid blow up a bridge across @a mountain gorge which is vital to the enemy. He realises that this means death for all concerned, since it must be done in daylight. Moreover, it becomes obvious the Fascists know of the plan. But the job is done, Our top picture shows the guerrilla band waiting to launch the attack. The picture opposite is of one of the idyllic interludes between Jordan and_ the Spanish girl, Maria. At the bottom, Jordan is sniping one of the sentries on the bridge.

| "For Whom The Bell Tolls" (continued from previous page) The cast of Fort Whom the Bell Tolls is almost as cosmopolitan as the International Brigade or as the Spanish Civil War itself. The nationalities within it include Russian (Akim Tamiroff and Viadimir: Sokoloff), Greek (Katina Paxinou), Swedish (Ingrid Bergman), Polish (Alexander Granach), Spanish (Fortunio Bonanova), Maltese (Josef Calleia), Mexican (Arturo de Cordova) and Hungarian (Victor Varconi). Gary Cooper, of course, is very much Ameri-can-a man who, as Time puts it, has "over the years so cornered the beloved American romantic virtues of taciturnity, melancholy, tenderness, valour and masculine gauche grace that he has become for millions a sort of Abraham Lincoln of American sex." Because Cooper possesses this romantic screen aura, the film inevitably pays much attention to the brief, passionate love affair between Robert Jordan and Maria. Much too much attention, some overseas critics contend. Hemingway's original story did not neglect it either, of course; on the contrary, the love scenes in the book ate among the most fervid in contemporary writing. Naturally, censorship would never permit such realism on the screen. According to Time, the Hays Office has "let sleepingbags lie," but "the closest study cannot determine whether either or both the lovets are or are not in or out of the bag at any time." But chief controversy over the picture whefever it has been shown has been less concerned with the nature of the romantic passages than with the question whether the producers have allowed love-making to push political ideas too far into the background, and instead of filming For Whom the Bell Tolls from Hemingway’s angle of partisan support for the Spanish Loyalists and bitter indictment of the Fascists, have filmed it from the Hollywood angle of "boy meets girk in Spanish Civil War." "Not For Or Against Anybody" Paramount's exectitives, one writer says, have preserved an "almost divine political detachment"’-a view apparently supported by the executives themselves, for their chairman, Adolph Zukor, is reported to have said, "It is a great picture, without political significance. We are not for or against anybody." Paramount’s president, Barney Balaban, added, "We don’t think it will make any trouble." As one might expect, this "playing safe" attitude has provoked a good many critics. When Sam Wood, the director, described his film as "a great love story against a brutal background which would be the same love st if, the characters were on the other side," C. A, Lejeune cuttingly commented, "It would indeed. It would be the same love story if they were Hottentots or ancient Romans, or co-eds. . . . It always has been that same darn love story." Comparing the film with the book, Picture Post declared that the whole point about the story is thét it should make its readers-or if you will, its filmgoers — feel at one with the Spanish people in their struggle against a regitne imposed upon them by Moors, Germans and Italians. This theme, it is pointed (continued from previous page)

(continued from previous page) out, is implicit in the words of John Donne, from which the story takes its title: "No* man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie, as well as if a Mannor of thy Friends or of Thine Owne were; any man’s Death Diminishes Me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the Bell tolls; it tolls for Thee."’ "In other words, when the Spanish Republic died, the bell tolled for Britain as well as for Spain; when an American died fighting for the Spanish Repub-lic-as the hero does in this story-part of me as an Englishman bled to death into the Spanish earth" (continues this writer in Picture Post). "If they leave out this sense of kinship between the Spanish people who fought against Fascism then, and the American and Russian and Chinese and British and all the peoples who fight against Fascism to-day, then they have not made a film of Hemingway’s novel." As against all this, there is the realistic viewpoint of Dudley Nichols, who wrote the screenplay. While frankly admitting that the artistic laws that control film-making (not to mention censorship) are quite different from those which govern the technique of the novel, he contends that he "strove above all to keep faith with the spirit of the original work and even to retain its exact shape and complexity of detail in so far as was possible. . . . Unavoidably there have been divergences. But these have been kept to a minimum, and where they do occur they are the result of compulsions which were not to be evaded." Well, we shall see what we shall see. It often helps a film if it is controversial enough to provoke the more intellectual section of the public; and at the same time the average film fan (and through him the box-office) is.not likely to be seriously worried if there is more love than ideology.in For Whom the

Bell Tolls.

G.

M.