On Screen

...Scott...

...Islands in the Stream is so painfully a "quality" movie that one wishes it were simply good...

...Scott's solution is to play against the grain of our preconceptions of Hemingway's public persona, instead of trying to match our image of the hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-loving sportsman...

...Hemmings, and Bloom are almost-but not quite—able to overpower the considerable barriers erected by the blunders of Schaffner, cinema-tographer Fred Koenekamp (who practically succeeds in turning the movie into a travelogue), and most of all Bart and Palevsky, who should try to find other ways of making money...

...The costliest and most foolish touch was the building of an entire fishing village on Kauai, one of the Hawaiian outer islands: Since the Pacific does not remotely resemble the Caribbean, the rock formations and the foliage continually remind us that we are elsewhere...

...As Spiegel did with Elia Kazan, they began by hiring a completely inappropriate director for the project—Franklin J. Schaffner, an Oscar winner for Patton, but probably best known for Planet of the Apes...

...Eventually it leads to his death...

...That Hemingway did not publish the long, semiautobiograph-ical Islands during the last dozen years of his life is undoubtedly a credit to what he called his "built-in shit detector," for when the novel appeared posthumously in 1970 its defects were glaringly obvious: The narrative was fragmented and repetitive, the prose was flat, the episodes and characterizations were self-serving almost to the point of self-parody...

...For instance, while Petitclerc has retained the three-part structure, the new names he has given the sections...

...Most of his important work had been completed 15 years earlier, before the grinning big-game hunter all but displaced the serious writer...

...The thin, intense young anti-hero alienated from Antonioni's comic-strip London has grown into a pudgy, relaxed character actor who resembles Richard Burton when he first started to go to seed...

...His hands and feet are chafed and bleeding, yet the youngster is philosophical: "I'm sorry that I lost him, but I'm glad he got away...

...period autos, furniture, clothing, newspapers, and even canned goods were provided...

...Admittedly, Schaffner can handle actors...

...Hemingway's notion of male comradship may have been childish, but there is nothing undignified about Hemmings' performance...

...Scott manages to project an eerie feeling of precognition whose strength almost, but not quite, obliterates our astonishment at the stupid construction of the scene...

...But the reality of the War quickly invades his Caribbean hideaway: His oldest son is killed in battle and Hudson finds himself drawn into the conflict...

...Or listen to the control exercised over the voice...

...It is a mystery why Palevsky and Bart could not have filmed in the Caribbean, or, for that matter, the Florida Keys...

...To object to it morally, however, is to object to Hemingway's personal vision, shared by the film...

...Bloom has always been an intelligent and strikingly lovely actress...

...Yet strangely, although his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel was much better, Hemingway has suffered less in the transition to the screen...

...There are other dismal examples of their handiwork —for example, a series of explosions that are supposed to represent torpedoed freighters on the horizon look more like mechanical flashes made in a penny-arcade shooting gallery...

...The cruel rite de passage embodies a crude and perversely sentimental notion of growing up...

...Ridiculously larger than life and worshipped by the other characters, he presented a problem that was precisely the opposite of what Scott was accustomed to: not how to inflate a lifeless dummy, but how to deflate an overblown caricature...

...In recent years he has tended to overpower his material, as if trying to compel our respect through the sheer physicality of his bellowing and swaggering...

...Compare, for instance, the cloying sentimentality of the love scenes in the novel with the tension Bloom brings to the movie: The undercurrents of anxiety and hostility she can convey through inflection and gesture reveal how much life superb acting can give to an inadequately written part...

...Such cheap gimmicks are particularly annoying because so much money was lavished on other aspects of the production...

...What ruins the novel is its meandering through three lengthy parts ("Bimini," "Cuba" and "At Sea"), and as many shifts in point of view...

...One can merely suspect that these new young tycoons are no less simple-minded in their profligate approach to movie making than Sam Spiegel, who produced The Last Tycoon...

...As with the recent disastrous adaptation of The Last Tycoon, the idea was to produce a big-name, big-budget, "quality" motion picture...

...VIcott, too, underplays his role, which is a considerable relief...

...A great deal of the movie's grandiose design must be attributed to him...

...Undeterred, Hollywood has now adapted what can safely be called Hemingway's worst novel...

...Scott does marvels even though Hudson's best scene in the novel-his attempt to build up the courage to let his wife know their son has been killed—has been changed, for no apparent reason...

...Given some of his ludicrously written parts—like the surgeon in The Hospital—perhaps self-consciously playing the ham was the only way he could avoid playing the fool...

...The real surprise is Hemmings, especially if you best remember him in Blow-Up...

...And this despite the fact that Fitzgerald's portraits of a lost generation have lately been finding a new audience, while Hemingway's preoccupations —the individual's trial by physical ordeal, the overcoming of nihilism through the ceremonies of professionalism and the rituals of manhood —are completely out of synch with the current cultural climate...

...material that could have been treated in a short story is stretched out over 450 pages...

...What diminishes it somewhat is a purely technical shortcoming: The image of the boy in the foreground is obviously superimposed over stock footage of the marlin...

...The Boys," "The Woman" and "The Sea"—helpfully stress that the story is primarily about real people, not some metaphorical relationship to the ocean...

...it is their acting that keeps Islands in the Stream afloat...

...The novel concerns the self-imposed isolation of Thomas Hudson, an artist—like Hemingway himself in the 1930s—twice-divorced and separated from his sons...

...a replica of Hemingway's own boat was lovingly reconstructed...

...In the process he has taken considerable liberties, including grafting on a completely new ending, lifted from the movie of To Have and Have Not, but the film is faithful to the spirit of the book...

...Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is briefly reunited with his boys and then with his first wife, whom he has never stopped loving...

...he even gets convincing performances from 14-year-old Wixted and nine-year-old Brad Savage (who plays Hudson's youngest son...

...Fortunately, the principals are all fine...

...True, the part of the rummy Eddy is a plum-as much the same role was for Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not in 1945—but Hemmings cleverly underplays it (as Brennan did not), expressing a genuine poignancy in his scenes with Scott...

...This is familiar enough stuff for Hemingway—much the same ground is covered in The Old Man and the Sea and To Have and Have Not...

...Rafts heavily laden with elaborate equipment were outfitted for filming at sea...

...in her rather too plain makeup she manages to establish a quiet credibility during her brief encounter with Scott...

...Where Robert De Niro struggled alone in The Last Tycoon, George C. Scott is assisted by Claire Bloom (as his ex-wife) and David Hemmings (as his faithful mate, Eddy...

...Thomas Hudson must have been an interesting challenge...

...there is not a hint of the bluster Scott has been forced to call upon in the past...

...Screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc, a long-time friend of the author, has wisely trimmed most of the fat from the bloated manuscript...

...In fact, that is pretty much the case with the entire movie...

...Notice the oddly mincing gait that conveys a sense of physical bulk more effectively—and more subtly—than any arm-waving or swaggering...

...But he was saddled by Bart and Palevsky with Gilbert Roland, who mugs his way through an insubstantial cameo, and Susan Tyrrell, who seems to be making a career—and not very ably, either—of impersonating drunken whores...

...This cinematic failing is attributable to the producers, Peter Bart, a former vice president for production at Paramount (the studio responsible for The Last Tycoon), and Max Palevsky, one of the founders of Rolling Stone...

...Usually competent, if somewhat pedestrian, Schaffner reveals a new talent in Islands in the Stream —a penchant for startling irrelevan-cies, among them an overexposed fantasy sequence that clutters the end of the film...

...The sequence, probably the best-written part of the book, retains much of its original power on the screen...

...In one very well-directed sequence, David (Michael-James Wixted), the middle son of Hudson (George C. Scott), battles a giant marlin for six hours-just to let Pop know he can take it"-only to lose the fish as he is about to haul it in...

...In the movie, it is she who must tell him, and he somehow guesses the awful truth before she says a word...

...To be sure, fidelity raises its own kinds of problems...