grantss Spanish Civil War, 1930s. Richard Jordan, an American, has joined up with the Republican side. He is given the tough assignment of blowing up a vitally important bridge. Things get complicated when he falls in love... Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway.OK-ish, but not great. Plot drifts, and the movie is overly long. Some decent editing and this could have been an hour shorter and much more coherent.Despite starring greats Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman (whose previous film was Casablanca), the performances are unconvincing. Cooper and Bergman don't seem to gel well. The supporting cast are woeful.I haven't read the book, but I am sure it is better than the movie.

DKosty123 This is an excellent adaptation of Ernest Heminway's novel. Paramount & the author were very happy with the film. It was nominated for Best Picture & 8 Oscars all told. Yet when the 1943 awards were handed out, this movie only received a Best Supporting Actress & that in spite of the big budget color feature this was. The busy cast of this movie is quite an accomplishment in itself. Gary Cooper & Ingrid Bergman were shooting Saratoga Trunk this year too though that movie would not be released until a couple of years later. They came to this movie at Paramount almost straight from their work at Warner Brothers. Sam Wood who directs this one also directed them in Saratoga Trunk. These 3 working together so soon should have really provided the spark. What happened is now legend.While over at Warner Brothers, before doing Saratoga Trunk, Bergman did a little assembly line black & white picture with Humphrey Bogart known as Casablanca. That little black & white film which Bergman did not particularly like, trumped this movie at the awards. Even the great writing of Ernest Hemingway could not beat the day to day writing of some lesser known assembly line writers of the other picture.It is interesting how in this color feature, Gary Cooper looks younger & better than he does in the black & white Saratoga Trunk where he looks older. Maybe he had a bad make-up man in that film? This is a mystery. Bergman looks great in every movie. Imagine though in a short span of three years, Bergman works in two Sam Wood movies, does SpellBound with Alfred Hitchcock, & yet today is most remembered for the movie she liked the least, Casablanca. The irony of this just shows how life can achieve greatness by accident. If Bergman had skipped the Bogart film, you wonder what the result of these other fine works she did would be.In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Bergman is just as fine with Cooper as she is in Saratoga Trunk, though Trunk is more of Ingrid's Gone With The Wind Performance. Sam Wood is a fine Director, who did a good variety of films. While these Cooper-Bergman films are an accomplishment, his most remembered directing effort today might just be that comedy known as A Night At The Opera. Just imagine Wood's resume without that crown jewel though this effort is outstanding. The Bell Tolls for thee,& since these people answered the bell, they have a lot of good work. Imagine Gary Cooper's career without High Noon, which is really his crown jewel. Once again, this is an excellent film, still it has not been the crown jewel of anybodies career except for Ernest Hemingway. It is the best screen play of his best novel.

Robert J. Maxwell Among the cast which, in the novel consists of one American idealist and the rest Spanish guerrillas in the Civil War of 1937, I counted two actors actually born in Spain, one Mexican, one half-Cuban, a Yugoslavian, a Swede, two Greeks, two Hungarians, one Maltese, a Siciliano, and the rest Russian. Oh, and Gary Cooper.Hollywood in the 1940s was never particular about these niceties. A foreign accent was a foreign accent. In many of the movies of the period, a British accent would serve for Axis spies.But who cares, right? This is Hemingway after all and old Ernie can overcome this kind of wanton casting. Except that Hemingway was always difficult to transpose to film. His best passages -- those pebbles in the clear stream; the frozen carcass of the leopard on Mount Kilmanjaro -- tended to be descriptive. His dialog, sometime very funny, could also be very purple, ultra violet even, and those seemed to be the particular pieces of dialog that appealed to writers and producers. Here we're stuck with Ingrid Bergman's first kiss. "Where do the noses go?" And that long, incomprehensible explanation by Gary Cooper of why Bergman must leave him and his broken leg behind to provide a rear guard for the others. "If you go, we both go. Go and we go together. But if you stay, we don't go, so we don't go together." (Something like that.) At least he doesn't say, "Forget about me. Save yourselves." And we're also spared, from the novel, the observation that when Cooper and Bergman have sex, "the earth moved." Hemingway had a fable about dealing with Hollywood. You drive up to the California border. The producers are on the other side. You throw them the manuscript and they throw you the check. Then you drive away fast.The movie is really constructed in four acts. I: Gary Cooper, the ex prof, is introduced to the dozen or so guerrilla fighters hiding out and slowly rotting in the mountains. II. Cooper romances Bergman. III. El Sordo (Joseph Calleia, the Maltese) is trapped on a mountain top and dies fighting Franco's troops and airplanes. IV. Cooper and his companeros blow a bridge and some of them are killed, including Cooper.The locations were shot in the beautiful crisp air and granite rocks and evergreens of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. The outdoor imagery is very impressive. Most of the scenes are shot in a damp, dark cave that looks studio-built. The robust and ugly Katina Paxinou livens up these scenes and it's a good thing because most of the dynamics are a little gloomy. Akim Tamiroff, in a dramatic part, is half coward, half burnt-out revolutionary. Some of his grimmer lines are, in context, almost funny, what with his echt-Russian accent. Sullen and resentful, his face painted a ghoulish green, Tamiroff swills down wine and insults people at random until people punch and slap him and threaten to kill him. His mantra is smothered in sour cream and mushrooms and cabbage soup -- "I doan prowoke." Cooper is pretty good. He's handsome and virile; he manages to activate both facial expressions, and it fits the part. And Ingrid Bergman is nicely tanned considering that she's just spent a winter in the icy mountains of Spain. Her short haircut detracts not at all from her fresh beauty. She glows with her love for Cooper. At one point the script has her become hysterical as her lover rides off to battle. "Oh, please bring him back safely. Please. I big you. I will do anything you say!", and she buries her sobbing face against the neck of an indifferent horse. I wonder if the writers deliberately tried to torpedo what virtues were found in the novel.The film, like the novel, takes sides. Well -- it HAS to. Who, in 1943, was going to give a break to Hitler and Mussolini? But the Republican side doesn't come off as exactly saintly. When they take over a town they drunkenly torture and kill anyone who was linked to the loyalists. It's a horrifying scene, a flashback narrated by Paxinou. Overall, a film with considerable impact, even today.

mlraymond This movie made a strong impression on me when I saw it on television at fourteen. Even with two major sequences cut out, it was still a powerful drama. The complete film has been made available for home viewing now, and is even more authentic to Hemingway's story, albeit with some toning down of the earthier elements that the censors wouldn't allow in 1943.The movie is well acted by all involved, with strong central performances from Gary Cooper as the American volunteer, and Ingrid Bergman as the Spanish peasant girl he falls in love with. Especially strong supporting performances are given by Akim Tamiroff as the sullen Pablo, leader of the guerrilla band, and Katina Paxinou as Pilar, the true commander of the group. Tamiroff brings a range of emotions and moods to his character, showing Pablo as variously sly, fearful, drunk, treacherous, but still retaining some of the courage and intelligence that once made him a natural leader. It is a fascinating performance, the slightly comical tone of which never obscures the dangerously unstable nature of Pablo.Katina Paxinou is not only remarkable as Pilar, she becomes the character in such a way that it's impossible to read Hemingway's novel without seeing her every time Pilar speaks. It is the performance of a lifetime, and a good part of the success of the movie depends on it. Pilar is a no nonsense person who sees things clearly and speaks bluntly, sometimes too much so for her listeners. Disillusioned with her former lover Pablo, she can still see what made him a good leader at the beginning of the war. Her speech about what it means to be an ugly woman, but knowing she is beautiful inside, is a tour de force, ending with her sly grin at Robert Jordan and Maria, telling them that when she was younger, she could have seduced Jordan away from Maria, and perhaps even now. Jordan smiles and says he believes it, as Maria blushes. This is cinematic Hemingway at its best. Her other great moment is the recounting in flashback of the killing of the Fascists in a certain town at the beginning of the war. It is one of the most vivid parts of the novel and the film does it full justice.The use of color is good and there is a realistic feeling of the rugged mountains and forests where the fighting takes place. The film is somewhat slow and may try the patience of modern viewers accustomed to faster paced action, but it rewards the viewer able to take it all in and savor each moment.Some familiarity with the history of the Spanish Civil War would be useful to the viewer, but one can appreciate the story without having read the novel. I imagine that over the years, many viewers have been inspired by this movie to read the Hemingway original. In my case, it led to not only an interest in Hemingway's works, but a lifelong fascination with the Spanish Civil War.This is a classic film that every old movie fan should see, whether a Hemingway devotee or not. It is one of the best films to come out of Hollywood during this period of film making.