Has there ever been a worthwhile Ernest Hemingway adaptation for the big screen? Meaning one that carries the terse flavour of his cool, hard prose and the macho excitement of his narratives? I'm not so sure. I always thought Graham Greene had been shabbily treated by the movies, but Hemingway must have felt as if he'd been kicked right in the broken parts over and over again.
Some fine movies came from his novels, but mostly there's no Hemingway left in them. Adaptations had a tendency to strangle his work with misplaced reverence and bloated production values, as happened with 1943's For Whom The Bell Tolls and the 1957 Selznick remake of A Farewell To Arms. This brings to mind what Hemingway told Howard Hawks about taking movie money: "Walk to the Nevada side of the California state line and have them throw the money to you. Walk away. Do not enter California."
Frank Borzage's 1932 version of A Farewell To Arms is certainly a great movie, as sublime and rapturous as anything he made, but Borzage's aesthetic values are the polar opposite of Hemingway's – shimmering and intensely romantic, all his movies feel as if they were shot in heaven – and the result, which fits snugly into the director's canon, has no place at all in the writer's. Later big-budget adaptations such as The Snows Of Kilimanjaro and The Sun Also Rises just lie there on the screen, and The Old Man And The Sea is hampered by naff optical effects and a miscast Spencer Tracy ("The sloppiest picture I ever made," said director John Sturges).
The exceptions prove my time-tested rule that the worse the book, the better the movie. Hemingway dared Howard Hawks to name his worst book, and film it. The result was To Have And Have Not, which is more Casablanca 2 than Hemingway, but a classic nonetheless. There are also two other versions of the same novel: Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950) and Don Siegel's The Gun Runners (1958). The Breaking Point is the wiriest of all the adaptations, while The Gun Runners, starring Audie Murphy, is the one Siegel movie I've never seen, but his clipped and succinct editing and storytelling are the nearest thing to Hemingway's prose style in Hollywood movies. Siegel also did a nice job remaking The Killers in 1964, a story that got the very best out of Robert Siodmak in 1946, even if both times around it was more noir than Hemingway.
Hemingway seemed like a giant just a generation ago, when his imitators – James Jones, Irwin Shaw, James Salter et al – were all still alive or young. After Graham Greene died, the movies atoned by re-filming some of his novels, often quite well. That no film-maker seems to have the slightest compulsion to do Hemingway the same favour seems very telling to me.
