On Screen

...Though I have an idea that she is spiritually in tune with all the goings on, and while I am second to none in my wholehearted admiration of her physical assets, she is most definitely not- an English aristocrat of that vanishing, giddy breed first popularized in the early novels of Evelyn Waugh...

...It is typical of Hollywood that, after having ignored The Sun Also Rises for the past thirty years because the raw reality of Barnes's emasculating war wound made the subject matter too controversial, it should then plunge boldly in to castrate the entire book...

...Almost at the very end of the film, there is a scene in which Flynn, surrounded by empty beer bottles, is sitting at a cafe tabic having his siloes shined and staring out over the early-morning, post-fiesta wreckage of an empty piazza, a man dead inside but still going through the motions...

...This, of course, is a shining popular cliche, much in vogue among readers of slick magazines, and the net effect of implanting such a primitive but comfortably romantic message in a work of art is to strip it of its ultimate meaning and reduce it to the status of soap opera...

...I hope Flynn gets an Academv Award for it...

...The one notable exception mentioned above is a brilliant performance by Errol Flynn as Mike Campbell, the aging but still handsome, drunken, bankrupt Scottish nobleman whom Brett jilts in Pamplona for a teenage bullfighter...

...Of the others, only Juliette Greco, in the bit role of an exhausted French tart, infuses a bit of vitality into the proceedings...

...It is as poignant a sequence as you are ever likely to see...

...In the pink haze of such a misrepresentation of the story there is little any of the actors, with one notable exception, can do to puff life into their parts...

...Whenever Flynn is on the screen—brawling in bars, carousing with Gorton at the running of the bulls, taunting Cohn, drinking to obliterate his failures— you realize how well the movie could have captured the nihilistic mood of Hemingway's minor masterpiece...

...As Robert Cohn, the Jewish boy from Princeton whom nobody likes, Mel Ferrer does manage a couple of good moments, and Eddie Albert struggles manfully to make something out of Jake's sidekick, the writer Bill Gorton...

...Peter Viertel, who wrote the script, sticks carefully to the outline of the plot and includes great chunks of Hemingway dialogue lifted intact from those endless conversations in Parisian and Spanish bistros, sidewalk cafes and opulent hotel rooms...

...As the unfortunate Jake, Tyrone Power emanates enough gloom to almost blot out the screen...

...Nevertheless, I came away with the impression that I had been swindled, that it hadn't really been that way at all, and I found myself wondering, after all this time, whether the fault could possibly lie in Hemingway himself...

...In the novel, Jake Barnes's war-in-(licted impotence is n device Heming-wm uses to divorce his narrator front total involvement with Lady Brett Ashley, around whose destructive personality the author makes his subsidiary characters dance into life...

...But the fault, I am happy to say, is not Hemingway's...

...It becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses that, while Brett claims to want only Jake and bemoans the fact that they can never consummate their love, she would treat him under normal circumstances pretty much as she treats everybody else...

...I went back and re-read The Sun Also Rises, and, if anything, I was more impressed by it than before...

...It had been nearly ten years since I had read The Sun Also Rises, and my re-reading of A Farewell to Arms last year had considerably lowered that book from my earlier estimation of it...

...The backgrounds are also all authentic, the cast carefully selected, the direction, if uninspired, at least scrupulous in its preoccupation with the seamier details of the Lost Generation gamboling among the bottles and from bed to bed...

...It is Jake's very inaccessibly that enables Brett to profess undying love for him, and it is this same useful inaccessibility that makes it possible for Jake, the narrator, to stand slightly off to one side and keep us informed about what is going on without sacrificing his artistic detachment...

...And Ava Gardner's interpretation of Lady Brett—the only character that, very skilfully portrayed, might have saved the movie in spite of everything—is simply not right...

...Sun Also Rises/ Book and Film By William Murray The filmed version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is a fascinating example of a movie that makes every apparent effort to remain faithful to the novel on which it is based, but somehow manages to betray almost completely the spirit of the book...

...In the book, Jake's impotence is a clever technical device, but in the movie it has been made into the raison d'etre of the entire affair: Lady Brett, we are told, behaves badly because she can never never marry the man she really loves...

...It also opened my eves to what's wrong with the movie version...