A new 5 DVD set reveals the bull-like goring Papa Hemingway's novels and short stories got from Tinsel Town
Each was given extremely short shrift.
Faulkner fared better than most, but none of the films he adapted were based on his own novels, which proved too oblique and experimental for formula-happy Hollywood. Fitzgerald ended up with but a handful of cinematic translations, each sorry in a completely different way: two versions of The Great Gatsby, one a veritable mess with Alan Ladd, the other, with the equally limited Robert Redford, glossy but staid, and a latter-day The Last Tycoon for Elia Kazan-lovers only.
Hemingway, of all the generation of early twentieth century American writers, should have been the one, the Hollywood treasure trove, given his curt dialogue, affinity for the outdoors and love of action. But a newly issued DVD set, The Ernest Hemingway Collection, reaffirms what we lovers of Classic Film have known for ages: that the margins of his work were just as badly scribbled by the men behind the big studios as those of his literary brothers in arms.
The set, comprising five movies, is dolled up to resemble a vintage leather bound volume of the author's collected works - in the hopes, one suspects, of duping innocent book lovers unaware of the sorry history of Hollywood Hemingway.
Most of the films - The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms , The Snows of Kilimanjaro (though two slightly more interesting entries, Under My Skin and Hemingway's Adventures As A Young Man, are included) - were glossy, big budget affairs, conceived to conform to the conventions of the day: wide-screen formats, international locales and the mistaken notion of length as a sign of importance (something Hollywood still hasn't gotten over.) They were also produced in the era in which Hemingway was fast becoming a staple of high school English courses; hence, in fear of accusations of corrupting young minds, most of his adult content, from sex and violence to notions of godlessness, were emphatically excised.
The effect of sitting through this collection is akin to attending a festival devoted to 1950s studio filmmaking, minus the productions of importance - like On The Waterfront and Rebel Without A Cause - that would usher in a more realistic, if fractured, age.
This is not to say that Hemingway didn't have the odd cinematic triumph - he did, though usually by left-of-center means: the film noire adaptation of his short story The Killers, for instance, which Hemingway rightfully considered the only adaptation of his works he would award two ears and a tail to - though cases could be made, if you ask me, for To Have And To Have Not (despite the fact that it resembles the book in title only), and the underrated Islands In The Stream, with George C. Scott perfectly cast as a crusty character clearly copied after Papa.
"I loved the book," people would say back in the Book-Of-The Month-Club era in which most these films were produced, "but I hated the movie."
Some things, unlike the films that comprise this collection, never go out of fashion.
