After Ernest Hemingway published "A Farewell to Arms" in 1929, asserting himself as one of the preeminent voices of his generation, the remainder of the artistic community sat up and took notice. It was adapted as a stage production in 1930 by Laurence Stallings; that was quickly followed in 1932 by a film that was one of that year’s best picture nominees at the Academy Awards.

This first film version, starring Gary Cooper and directed by Frank Borzage, has aged quite well through the ensuing 77 years. Hemingway was famously irate at the adaptation, which focuses in tightly on its characters to the exclusion of the broader war effort, but I find its narrow focus appropriate. It plays like an episodic soap opera on the front lines, marching forward from one scene to the next - which is actually the way I read the novel, as a series of romantic and personal episodes that have little connection to the larger battle underway.

In its own time, many critics pointed to its fractured structure as a flaw - noting that the film lacked cohesion and momentum. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste, because that’s precisely what I loved about this atypical war film. It had the courage to NOT be single-minded, as so many front lines films are, embracing instead the unstructured chaos of the war, the unfocused ways in which soldiers try to continue to lead their lives under the strangest of circumstances.

In 1957, directors Charles Vidor and John Huston created a second film version, eschewing the reserved flavor of its predecessor and adopting instead a lush and vibrant production design. Starring Rock Hudson and, in an ironic twist, the brilliant Italian director Vittorio De Sica, the ‘57 "Farewell to Arms" put an emphasis on the sweeping war and soaring hearts at the center of it all.

This was a romance with a capital R, a movie about the exotic nature of Europe and the extremes of wartime service. Everything in this version was big and brash, which of course defied Hemingway’s initial text, which is notably more casual and commonplace. Arriving in theaters only a few years after the end of the Studio System era - arriving the same year as the epic "The Bridge on the River Kwai" - this is a work that by today’s standards feels far more dated and out of line with Hemingway’s vision.

All this being said, it’s difficult to capture the essence of a book on the big screen, to take all the various personalities on the printed page - of the characters, of the author, of the prose - and convert those into visual cues. In the case of "A Farewell to Arms," which set out as a book to defy the conventions of the war story, it must have posed an even greater challenge to those early filmmakers, who had to convince their studio bosses to go against their initial instincts.

In the 1932 film, I see a more measured movie that was made between the wars, for audiences comprised of families who knew all too well the stresses and surreal nature of the front lines. But by 1957, during America’s boom years after the second World War, I see war being romanticized, slathered in a rosy gloss.

Hemingway wasn’t about gloss, he was about the realities of the moment - whether they be horrific, harrowing, joyous or humorous. What he wanted was to cut through the myths, and while the 1932 movie version did stray from the standard war film format, the 1957 version almost worked to advance the stereotypes.

This is the fifth in a 6-part series on "A Farewell to Arms."

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