A Farewell to Arms [DVD] [1932]

This first (and by far the best) film version of Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms stars Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Cooper plays Lt. Frederick Henry, a World War I officer who falls in love with English Red Cross nurse Catherine Barkley (Hayes)-after first mistaking her for a woman of ill repute. Henry's friend, Major Rinaldi, is envious of the romance, and pulls strings to have Catherine transferred to Milan. When Henry is wounded in battle, he ends up in the very hospital where Catherine works. They resume the affair, which reaches an ecstatic peak just before Henry is returned to the front. The now-pregnant Catherine remains in Switzerland, sending letters by the bushelfull to Henry. But the jealous Rinaldi sees to it that Henry never receives those letters, leading Catherine to conclude sorrowfully that Henry has forgotten her. As the Armistice approaches, Henry makes his way to Switzerland, hoping to find Catherine. He reaches the hospital where she has delivered a stillborn child. Catherine, too, is near death, but lingers long enough for a tender reunion with Henry. Ernest Hemingway disowned this film version of Farewell to Arms, complaining that Hollywood had ruined his work by imposing a happy ending. Actually, Paramount had filmed two versions of the final scene, one in which Catherine survives. Most current prints carry a very ambivalent climax: we're never certain if Catherine is alive or dead as Henry lifts her to the window to witness the celebration of the Armistice. These prints have been struck from the 1938 reissue of "Arms", which was heavily edited to conform to the newly stringent Hollywood censorship policies. Because the film rights to the Hemingway novel were sold to Warner Bros. in 1950 (the year that studio filmed a semi-remake, Force of Arms), current prints carry Warners' reshot titles, rather than the Paramount originals. The film was withdrawn altogether on the occasion of David O. Selznick's bloated 1957 remake; though all prints were supposed to have been destroyed at this juncture, the original Farewell to Arms happily resurfaced on the public-domain market in the mid-1970s.