The 1957 adaptation of A Farewell to Arms was a legendary producer's final project.
In short: David O. Selznick spent years fighting to secure the rights to Ernest Hemingway's classic novel. His 1957 epic, starring Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones, became his final film production. It was a massive, expensive undertaking marked by thousands of memos, acrimonious relationships, and a scathing reaction from the author himself.
David O. Selznick’s obsession with Hemingway’s 1929 novel was long-standing, but he initially lacked the rights, which were held by Warner Bros. He eventually secured them through a strategic trade involving the foreign rights to a remake of A Star Is Born. The production was fraught with tension from the beginning. Selznick cycled through directors, starting with John Huston, who left after disagreements over the script and preproduction pacing. Charles Vidor took over, but the relationship remained strained, with Selznick reportedly sending over 10,000 memos during the shoot.
The film, which cost more than $4 million to produce, was shot on location in Italy, including the Alps and Rome. Despite the grand scale, it faced immediate criticism. Critics like Bosley Crowther of The New York Times felt the film lacked the necessary weight of war, describing the central romance as tedious and the final tragedy as a clinical mistake rather than an inevitable irony. Others, such as Mae Tinee of the Chicago Tribune, noted that the film’s quality was inconsistent, with some scenes feeling overly coy or repetitive.
Hemingway’s own reaction was notoriously hostile, particularly regarding the casting of Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, as Catherine Barkley. He famously suggested that if the film earned a $50,000 bonus for him, Selznick should convert the money into nickels and shove them into his mouth. While the film earned $6.9 million in worldwide rentals by the end of 1958, it failed to recover Selznick’s costs. Following the project, Selznick retired from the industry entirely, leaving behind a legacy of epic ambition that struggled to translate the novel's grim, ominous tone to the screen.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: A Farewell to Arms (1957 film)
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