BEFORE: The Hemingway chain rolls on, just one more after tonight's film. Linking from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", Gregory Peck was also in "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" with Jennifer Jones (last seen in "The Towering Inferno").
AFTER: I'm jumping back in time a little bit tonight, from 1950's Africa to World War I Italy. Let's see, check the Hemingway bio - yep, he was an ambulance driver in Northern Italy in 1918, and he was wounded in action, just like the main character in tonight's story. And Ernie fell in love with a Red Cross nurse - however in real life after Hemingway moved back to the U.S., she got engaged to an Italian officer. According to his biographer, this affected Hemingway so deeply, in all future relationships he made sure to leave his wife or girlfriend before she could leave him.
But in the book they (Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley) stay together during his recovery, and then Frederick gets mistaken for a traiter and deserts the Italian army - he finds Catherine and they escape to neutral Switzerland and they pose as tourists while she prepares to deliver their child, but complications with the pregnancy ensue.
One has to wonder if Hemingway's imagination ran wild here, and if Frederick was a stand-in for himself, if he was wishing ill will on his ex-girlfriend by proxy. Of course, I'm not surprised that another Hemingway novel seems to borrow from his own life - they say you need to "Write what you know". That's great advice, provided that your life is interesting enough to write about - so first you have to get out and LIVE and DO something interesting before you start writing.
This is where Hemingway excelled. I'm not going to say it was easy being an ambulance driver during World War I, I'm sure the opposite is true. But it sure helped make him an authority when it came time to write a novel about it. This is at least somewhat inspirational for me as I set out to write about being a young film school student in the late 1980's.
Also starring Rock Hudson (last seen in "Giant"), Vittorio De Sica, Elaine Stritch (last seen in "September"), Mercedes McCambridge (last seen in "Touch of Evil"), Oskar Homolka (last seen in "Sabotage").
RATING: 3 out of 10 sugar cubes
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