Diagonaldi Very well executed

GazerRise Fantastic!

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Cristi_Ciopron The movie achieves evoking pity and suggesting the secret, unknown, unsuspected abyss of a life, the life of the one near you (which is the very great psychology of the eponymous novel, a young person's work about a youngster's experiences during the war), by giving an insight of Katherine's wasted and unglamorous life, and thus making her authentically mysterious, and giving a sense of the dignity and sacred mystery of a being, and this in her humbleness; the story is one of pity and remorse and sadness. With the acting, we are on the threshold of the sound cinema.Now Helen Hayes' acting is very much unlike what nowadays' audiences are accustomed to, in an entirely different key, but it's a great role, and, as I wrote, mysterious and heartrending; stylistically, it belongs to the symbolism and extroversion, the symbolical extroversion necessary for the many years of the silent cinema, a leftover of the silent age of the screen, suddenly made obsolete by the sound.Cooper is very unlike my idea of the novel's protagonist, and so is his acting, sometimes like doing a Valentino impersonation, though not always, as in the beginning of the scene where Ferguson foretells their death, when he's a gallant, nonchalant officer, perhaps also in the 1st few scenes, when he gropes a couple of nurses, but before he falls in love with her, and it has been my impression that the two lead actors didn't enjoy very much each other, as they should have for most of the movie; but Cooper was naturally righteous and dignified, very protestant, and his character should of been a bit more earthly (like Powell, perhaps?). Then, at the end, he communes with a brioche, and such things remind of the chilly religion in Ford's and other movies; here, they show a priest, and a secularized Eucharist, yet it's a very protestant movie. Menjou as the jealous, duplicitous surgeon decided to wreck his comrade's life is by turns demonic and annoying.One example of wry humor is when the scene of the 1st kiss (of Cooper and Helen H.) cuts to a bedroom scene of … Cooper and Menjou.Cooper is supposed to be less handsome than Menjou, who seems a lecherous oldster.Both Cooper and Helen Hayes play their roles according to the mainstream style of acting of the age, and he hasn't enough time for the months of their peaceful living, the life they had together needed to be given more time on screen, instead the script picks the eerie priest …; she had the right idea of unglamorous humbleness. Her role is that of a very unhappy woman, as one can gather at least from her deathbed words to him.So, Helen Hayes' role is the better one.

swissonbrownrye It's time to explode a few myths here. Like the so-called ideal marriage between the Kennedy's that was propped up by the media for years and was finally shown to have been wrought with serial infidelities by both parties, so in the world of movie land we have some sacred cows that have to be taken out to the slaughterhouse and be ground up into decent hamburger. A Farewell to Arms is one such sacred cow. Gary Cooper struts through the movie like a tall, lanky, slow-talking, goofy string bean with an amoral attitude towards women, the army and life in general. He chooses to desert his comrades - so much for Semper Fidelis - to run back to a woman he impregnated in a night of passion. Helen Hayes is the love interest, whose acting resembled nothing so much as a cut-out paper doll in a puppet show; her cardboard expression and lifeless lines were so two dimensional it was painful to watch - Olive Oil in the Popeye cartoons had more sex appeal. There was no chemistry between her and Cooper, how could there be, he was over six feet tall and she was so short he had to hold her up in order not to stoop to kiss her in one scene. IMDb can cut this next comment out if it is not permissible to talk about other review sites, but those fawning idiots over at Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a 90% rating in true Rotten Tomatoes lock step fashion, while giving a truly great movie, The Mission, with standout performances by Robert Di Nero, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn, and that won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and whose musical score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, ranked 1st on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) Classic 100 Music in the Movies, well Rotten Tomatoes only gave THAT movie a 65% rating. That's why I take Rotten Tomatoes with a pound of salt and always go to IMDb to see if any movie is any good.

OldAle1 DVD rental. Though I'd only previously seen one or two Borzage films, and those long ago, I decided that he was going to be my next big discovery. Oh woe is me to find out that only this of his dozens of films is widely available on DVD, and the VHS are not easy to find unless you want to buy them all off of eBay. Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about this one, thanks largely to the very very poor sound mix on the DVD (most of the dialog between the two principals is very low, the rest rather loud, so I had to keep raising & lowering the volume which really distracted me). Also, it really wasn't that involving despite good to stellar work the cast: Gary Cooper as American Lt Henry, an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI, who falls instantly and madly in love with nurse Catharine Barkley (Helen Hayes) despite the insistent warnings from cynical friend Major Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou, the very definition of the cynic). The early parts carry a fairly light tone despite the background of the war; when the lovers are parted Cooper makes a perilous trek to Switzerland, through hell itself it seems in the film's finest apocalyptic war-to-end-wars moments, courtesy of Charles Lang's cinematography, the real star of the show. It's beautiful, well-acted, but it just didn't move me the way it was trying to. I've never really "gotten" the appeal of Hemingway, from whose novel this is adapted, so perhaps that's part of the problem.

swannyman A Farewell to Arms, originally a novel by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic movie from 1932. The story follows the love between Lieutenant Fredric Henry and Catherine Barkley in Italy during WWI. The story is told from the view point of the Lieutenant. The love between Fredric and Catherine all starts when Fredric comes to Milan to visit an Italian friend Rinaldi, when Fredric and Catherine spend a night together. She is deeply hurt by this, thinking that Fredric is just using her, but he calmly tells her that it meant something to him and that he would be back. He did come back, but it was with a big injury, which allows him and Catherine to really get close to each other. Rinaldi doesn't like it, as he liked Catherine first, and tries to get Fredric to come and drink with him constantly. Later, when Fredric is healthy again, he gets sent back to the front lines, and Catherine leaves for Switzerland without telling Fredric first. She writes to Fredric constantly, even telling him that she is pregnant and can't wait to see him. He writes to Milan, where he thinks she is, and somehow all of his letters get sent back. Catherine's letters get censored by Rinaldi, saying that he doesn't want his friend to lose his head over a girl, little knowing how serious they actually were. Eventually Fredric can't take it anymore and goes back to Milan to find his love, who isn't there. Rinaldi tries to make him forget about her and is roughly refused. Rinaldi then realizes his mistake and tells Fredric where she is and helps him get there, as Fredric is now a traitor for going AWOL during the middle of the war. Catherine stills expects letters to come to her from Fredric, and is greatly surprised to find that there are letters for her, but they are all her letters that have been sent back. She faints to the floor and is sent to the hospital. Fredric arrives soon after that, but can't see her until the morning. He is told that the war is over, but he doesn't even begin to care, as his love is dying in the hospital. He gets to see her in the morning only to be there when she dies, and the story ends. One of the glaring things about this story is the main character, Fredric. He is not in tune with the people or events around him, but that is almost always the case with Hemingway. He is always out for only himself and doesn't really care who he hurts as long as he can get what he wants. As a case, he is introduced to Catherine by Rinaldi because Rinaldi is in love with her and wants her. That night, Rinaldi is left out by Fredric moving in and taking advantage of Rinaldi going to get Catherine and him drinks. Rinaldi is hurt, but Fredric makes it seem like he is the one being intruded on. This is a constant theme through the movie, most evident when Fredric goes AWOL during the middle of a battle, leaving all of his comrades there to work it out for themselves. Another theme of this movie is the camera angles. I love the camera work and how there is only one shot that is not from eye-level or above, and it is solely for impact. The shot is the scene where Fredric comes in from getting injured. The camera is a Point of View shot, from Fredric's eyes, unmoving, staring straight up. It becomes a more powerful scene because of it; it makes us be more in tune with Fredric and his injury. I also liked the lighting of the movie. Most of the lighting is natural, or at least it is made to look that way. Most of the lighting on the people's faces was blurry, like actually looking through a lens. It is most apparent when doing close ups on Catherine, it makes her look more innocent and makes her stand out more because the close ups are what you remember seeing of her, and you pay more attention to her. There is also no shot like that of any other character, again making you pay more attention to her than everyone else. This film, I think, doesn't use the mise-en-scene to its fullest. All of the cuts, except one, are just straight cuts with no delay or fading in and out. The one scene that does use a different cut is at the end when Fredric is traveling after he goes AWOL. It fades in and out of shots of Fredric and shots of the war and nature, all blurry. This gives a great effect on the passage of time and the sorrow that is all around, especially on Fredric. I think that they could have done more with the passage of time in the cuts, not the time in the narrative, but the time in the cut itself. Slower cuts might have made it a little more powerful, especially in times where the viewer is sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for more information.