A love story intertwined in the most fascinating event of the early 20th century. Created by Emma's Hemingway one of America's most prestigious authors.
An American Soldier is working for the Italian Army as an ambulance driver. He becomes infatuated with a local nurse and the to try to have a romantic relationship throughout the events of the first World War.
Beyond the typical problems of War, many of their seniors and friends seem to be against their relationship as well. Claiming that they barely knew one another and that you can't love somebody you only met yesterday.
All this becomes more problematic when Gary Cooper is hit by an explosion. Now he's one of the many victims of war sitting in the Intensive Care Ward where the woman he loves happens to be working.
That's about as far in the film as I got before I was bored and I'm really surprised by that. A dramatic Love Story, the first World War and a pretty solid cast of Good actors. That should be more than enough to keep one's entertainment in the film like this.
The whole thing's kind of flat and everybody reads their lines as if they're taking sentences directly out of the book.
The film also has audio problems. The talking between the actors is too quiet why'll the actions sounds of bombs and guns going off are too loud. This came as a shock to me as I always consider this audio mixing problem to be a modern issue. But here it is in the 1930s and somebody was making this mistake back then.
I almost don't feel right putting up my opinions about this movie as my disinterest towards it is so prevalent that it might create an unfair bias against the film. But at the same time I'm just so bothered that somebody took a story with so much heart and compassion and boiled it down to such an uninteresting picture.
If there's ever an example of when not to make an adaptation of a book this would definitely be at.
One of the major problems of adopting books into film is the unfortunate cutaway of dialogue you have to do to make the story fit within an hour and 30 minutes. There are so many small conversations that just never come to light in the film and that's it makes all the other scenes appear kind of disjointed.
To give the film some credit it's allowed to discuss the power of sexual seduction under the extreme stress of War with minimal censorship. A topic that won't be achieved in film for another 40 years once all the sensor codes come into effect.
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