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The U.S. will always like its great dancers and ritualists with good reason. But its fondness for Miss Bergman indicates, as well, an appetite for the sudden lights, edged shades and flexibilities of reality. As an actress, Miss Bergman has just one basic rule: "Never speak a line which does not make sense for the part." She is probably the best reader of lines in the business just now; and it appears to pay. Ingrid Bergman's first five U.S. pictures have brought her to an enviable position, which, for better or worse, her present role destroys for her forever. Hitherto people have liked her with the illusion of personal discovery: she has been the most widely recognized unrecognized player in the country. Everybody waited for her Maria with almost unhealthily sharpened interest.
The New Picture. The lovers and guerrillas and actions in Ernest Hemingway's novel were motivated and given their meaning by political intensities and by depths of human strength, weakness and need which Paramount has seen fit, or been forced, to remove. But the screen version of Ernest Hemingway's novel is still a story of love and violence in the Spanish Civil War. Gary Cooper is Robert Jordan, Hemingway's young Montana schoolteacher who has come to Spain to fight for democracy everywhere. Gary Cooper, over the years, has so cornered the beloved American romantic virtues of taciturnity, melancholy, tenderness, valor and masculine gauche grace that he has become, for millions, a sort of Abraham Lincoln of American sex. He plays modestly, sometimes beautifully.
As the guerrilla leader, Pablo, Hemingway's terrible symbol of a man devastated by the fear of death, Akim Tamiroff has some magnificent, all but tragic moments. As Pilar, Hemingway's salty symbol of Spain's people, Greek Actress Katina Paxinou would walk away with any less leaden show. Her hawk-fine face, wallowing walk, Goyaesque style and Noah Beery laugh assure her a rich future, if only she can find roles spacious enough. As the Soviet journalist, Karkov, Konstantin Shayne makes his characterization of a political commissar the most electrifying bit in years.
But those are the surprises. The rest of the time these actors go corky on their lines, overact operatically or sit and talk. Above all they talk. A tremendous effort has been made in this adaptation to keep Author Hemingway's characters intact. But the adaptation is too literary, too theatrical.
So is the cinema treatment of the central action of Hemingway's book. In Paramount's version Jordan's dynamiting of the strategic bridge is a genuinely exciting bit of suspense. But two dozen grade-B melodramas handle the same theme better every year.
And on the screen Ernest Hemingway's most delicate episodes, the nights that Jordan and Maria spend together in a sleeping robe, are expertly elusive. Paramount's answer to one wag's question, whether the Hays Office would let sleeping bags lie, is: Yes, but don't go near the water. The closest study cannot determine whether either or both the lovers are or are not in or out of the bag at any time.