Movie Rec for Monday: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

[dangermousie]

I seem to have embarked on the classic movie kick.

Latest movie I am goggling over? One of my all-time favorites, For Whom the Bell Tolls, a grim-romantic story set during the Spanish Civil War and starring Gary Cooper (apparently personally approved by Ernest Hemingway whose book this is an adaptation of) and Ingrid Bergman.

FWTBT actually is the only faithful/good adaptation of a Hemingway novel I have ever seen. (There is no doubt 'To have and have not' is a brilliant movie, but a faithful adaptation it is not).

The story revolves around Robert (Cooper), an American fighting with the Republican guerillas in Spain and charged with blowing up a critically important bridge. To do so, he must meet up with a particular guerilla unit, and it is there he meets Maria (Bergman), a young woman fighter, psychically if not physically scarred by her brutalization at the hands of the enemy soldiers...

The story manages to be all sorts of things at once: a love story (and a complex one at that), of course, but also a story about idealism, and cowardice, and price of rebellion. And Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman sparkle on screen together and basically make me swoon and break my heart. The scene where Maria finally tells Robert, in detail, what happened to her the night her town was taken is horrifying and I always want to look away. (Of course, his fierce response to her seeing herself as filthy and unworthy, 'No one has touched you. No one' always kills me in a very different way).

Anyway, go rent it and watch. It's awesome.

Shippy MV:

Comments

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I do want to see this again sometime. (Although I was never quite sure why they cast Swedish Ingrid Bergman as a Spanish girl, but ... *waves hand* she was great anyway.)

[dangermousie.livejournal.com]

I think back then anyone foreign was equal anyone else foreign. As long as you had an accent, that was enough. I mean, the other rebels were played by Katina Paxinou (Greek) and Akim Tamiroff (Russian). And that seems to be the norm at least through the 50s...

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, absolutely! I just was always a little amused by Maria's extreme blondeness!

(And it's not as weird as Ava Gardner playing an English aristocrat in "The Sun Also Rises.")