Film Homage: 1932’s “A Farewell to Arms” — A Perfect Movie for Valentine’s Day

Oh, to be a lead character in a Borzage movie. You might expire during the final dissolve into “The End,” but man oh man, you will have loved. And you will have been loved.

Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes in 1932's "A Farewell to Arms."

f you’re planning to sit in a dark room in front of a movie screen on Valentine’s Day, you couldn’t do better than catching Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaptation of “A Farewell to Arms.”

By Betsy Sherman

“His direction was so gentle and subtle and unobtrusive that I can’t remember that he directed us—but of course he did! He was a very romantic man, I wouldn’t say he was sentimental, but romantic, and he stirred us all into a romantic mood. That picture was a highly emotional experience for [Gary] Cooper and me. I cannot tell you what he did and what he said and how he approached the actors, I just know that he lured everything from you. He was right there, inside our minds.” – Helen Hayes on the making of A Farewell to Arms, in the book Frank Borzage by Hervé Dumont.

Oh, to be a lead character in a Borzage movie. You might expire during the final dissolve into “The End,” but man oh man, you will have loved. And you will have been loved.

So if you’re planning to sit in a dark room in front of a movie screen on Valentine’s Day, you couldn’t do better than catching Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaptation of A Farewell to Arms at Harvard Film Archive. It’s showing at 7 p.m. as part of the series “Grand Illusions—The Cinema of World War I” (Saturday’s 9 p.m. feature, Jules and Jim, is dandy if you prefer love of the triangular kind).

Accomplished and prolific during a career that spanned silent and sound cinema, the actor-turned-director Frank Borzage (pronounced bor-ZAY-gee with a hard g) made the most viscerally convincing love stories of Hollywood’s golden era. There’s an almost voyeuristic aspect to watching these movies, the actors are so deeply immersed in emotion. This stretch of romantic gems includes three silent films starring Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1927) and Lucky Star (1929); Man’s Castle (1933), starring Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young (my favorite Borzage film); History Is Made at Night (1937), starring Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer; and Three Comrades (1938), starring Margaret Sullavan and Robert Taylor. Borzage won the first ever Academy Award for Best Director for Seventh Heaven, and then won another for Bad Girl (1931).

A Farewell to Arms was adapted for the screen by Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H.P. Garrett. Ernest Hemingway reportedly hated the movie. One only has to compare the last page of the novel to the final scene of the movie. Yes, the characters’ fate is the same, but the tone couldn’t be more different between Borzage’s fevered depiction and Hemingway’s cool prose. Yet the passion with which Borzage dramatizes the convergence of two momentous events—the end of the war and the death of one of the lovers—doesn’t feel over-the-top. That passion has been earned during the previous 89 minutes of the 90-minute film.

Although the filmmakers pare away most of the book’s recounting of American volunteer ambulance driver Frederick Henry’s (Cooper) experiences on Italian battlefields in order to foreground the love story between him and nurse Catherine Barkley (Hayes), the romance is always viewed through the prism of wartime. The tension between their romance and a “normal” one is there in the banter when Frederick offers, and the more sensible Catherine concedes, that courtship must be compressed in such a time and place, and it’s best not to make or expect promises. More fundamentally, it’s there in sense that nothing is more transgressive than putting the needs of the individual, or the couple, above the needs of the troops, or the nation.

The movie begins with the image of a man lying prone in the foreground. He’s one of several corpses that an ambulance, in which Frederick is dozing in the passenger seat, drives by. There’s an irony in the horizontal position, since for the lovers played by Hayes and Cooper, it’s the position that will be most life-affirming. It’s how they end up during the night of their compressed courtship, during which Frederick takes Catherine’s virginity in a garden oasis (there’s a slight foreshadowing of menace when they seek refuge beneath the rearing hoofs of a statue). Amidst the quicksilver jumble of emotions in the aftermath of their lovemaking, the actors are shot in gentle soft-focus, with a dappling of light and shade from the foliage. Even the angles of their bodies in relation to each other has an eloquence. Later, shot in close-up in their respective beds, the rhyming position of their faces cements their relationship.

Frank Borzage directing one of the romantic interludes in "A Farewell to Arms."

Frank Borzage directing one of the romantic interludes in “A Farewell to Arms.”

The interplay of body parts reaches creative and amusing heights as the camera takes the point of view of the injured Frederick on a gurney wheeled through a Milan hospital. He sees the domed ceiling, then various people looking down on him, then his beloved nurse—whose eye takes up nearly the whole screen as she bends to kiss him. Further horizontal interplay takes place in a pensione in which the couple shacks up, and when it’s Catherine’s turn to lie in a hospital bed, and Frederick goes AWOL to be by her side.

The mismatch in types between the tall movie hunk Cooper and petite stage star Hayes makes their liaison even more touching. There’s an old quote about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that goes, roughly, “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” Here, the genders are switched. Hemingway based the story on his affair with an older nurse, and although in reality Hayes was only a year older than Cooper, she clearly seems more sophisticated, and it makes Cooper seem sweetly boyish. Hayes’ director and co-star draw from her an unexpected sensuality, especially in the delightfully intimate sequence in the pensione. And Cooper—well, Borzage sure “lured,” in Hayes’ words, something from him. The actor who would, especially in the postwar era, stiffen into a stoic icon of all-American maleness gives a performance of surprising tenderness and vulnerability.

This great film fell into undeserved oblivion after its initial showings. Like many pre-Code pictures, it was heavily censored upon its rerelease later on in the 1930s (yes, Borzage’s love scenes are adult, but the physicality is never prurient). For years, these gutted prints were nearly the only ones available. Harvard Film Archive will show a print from the UCLA Film & TV Archive, which restored the film to its original length. The restoration contains the original ending, which is true to the novel, and not the ambiguous ending that, oddly, pre-dates the Code-approved cut (and was not sanctioned by Borzage). Apparently, even during the 1932 release, Paramount Pictures offered exhibitors the chance to choose which ending movie patrons would see—and thus let theater owners usurp the power of Hemingway, Borzage, and, in effect, death itself.


Betsy Sherman has written about movies, old and new, for The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, and The Improper Bostonian, among others. She holds a degree in Archives Management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When she grows up, she wants to be Barbara Stanwyck.

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