A Farewell to Arms (1957 film)
The screenplay by Ben Hecht, based in part on a 1930 play by Laurence Stallings, was the second feature-film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 semiautobiographical novel of the same name.While recovering from a wound in a British base hospital in northern Italy, he is treated by nurse Catherine Barkley, and they engage in an affair.Rinaldi's defeatist comments land him before a drumhead court-martial, falsely accused as a German infiltrator, and he is executed by firing squad.[6] The film was shot on location in the Italian Alps, Venzone in the Province of Udine in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio and Rome.[3] In a contemporary review in The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther lamented that the film lacked "that all-important awareness of the inescapable presence and pressure of war" and wrote: "Mr. Selznick's picture is a tedious account of a love affair between two persons who are strangely insistent upon keeping it informal—except, as they carefully explain, in the eyes of God.Throughout, the ominous note of doom is missing, so that the sudden terminal tragedy, when it occurs, seems more a sheer mistake in obstetrics than an inevitable irony in these people's lives.I think the film could have been cut to advantage, some of the love scenes seemed coy and prolonged and the repetitious Hemingway dialogue a drag on the plot.[6] Vittorio De Sica was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Red Buttons for Sayonara.