The Sun Also Rises (Darryl F. Zanuck; 20th Century-Fox) is real Hemingway almost all the way. The characters of Hemingway's first topflight novel come truly alive in this film—often in the fine individual triumphs of some actors over their own miscasting. It is the story itself —the Lost Generation expatriates running away from themselves in Paris and Spain—that sometimes stumbles, as if Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Director Henry King had decided that the best way to condense the novel on film would be literally to shoot the action and dialogue in well-chosen chunks. Half the book is better than none, but the over-all effect is jerky. Nonetheless, in its best sequences, Sun shines more brilliantly than anything of Hemingway's ever filmed before.
There is commendable candor in the film's telling of its strange love story. Hemingway fans, anticipating how the movie might mistreat the tragic circumstance of the hero's sexual impotency resulting from a battle wound, will be happy to learn that Jake Barnes (sensitively played by Tyrone Power) is informed of his deficiency in exactly that term—"impotent." Nor is there any pussyfooting about the nymphomania of the heroine, who settles for all men in lieu of Jake whom she loves; as man-crazy Lady Ashley (Brett), Ava Gardner turns in the most realistic performance of her career. The other major characters also rise to true book size. As Robert Cohn, the unwanted, brooding Jew, Mel Ferrer is especially convincing. The fascinating quintet converging on Pamplona for the fiesta is rounded out by Errol Flynn (wonderful as boozy Mike Campbell, the happy-went-lucky bankrupt) and Eddie Albert (as Bill Gorton, everybody's pal).
The period sets of the 1920s in Paris and Pamplona, through which these disoriented drifters pass, are gaudily authentic, and indoors or out, the color camera work (directed by Leo Tover) catches the blues of Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris, the gold of Goya in Spain's sunny streets. Against these backgrounds, the essence of Sun is played out. The difficult role of Brett's ultimate conquest, young Bullfighter Pedro Romero, is played with fierce intensity by handsome newcomer Robert Evans. In the movie's arena sequence, Actor Evans conveys Hemingway's paradoxical feeling of affection for what he kills ("The bulls are my best friends"), just as Brett always momentarily loves the men she ruins.
It is too bad that, in the end, Producer Zanuck and Director King do not quit when Hemingway is ahead. The film's semihappy ending is an altogether sappy ending. The book made it plain that there was no hope for Jake and Brett ever to alter or escape their anguished, futile bondage. Yet the movie has them finally agreeing to the silver-lined proposition that "there must be some answer for us —somewhere."