★★★★
Whatever philosophies or ideas may inform Frank Borzage’s oeuvre,
Farewell to Arms has a problem: It’s hard to believe the love at the center of the film. That problem starts at the very beginning of the romance. For a director who can wrest engagement from his audience even for the most outrageous melodrama, Borzage misses the mark when the couple at the center of this film first kindle their love. They are alone, desperate and in the bleakest moment of WW I, yet Borzage fails to evoke any chemistry between Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper. They begin their love scene with both of them in a dark, existential funk, move on to somewhat cold intimate moment, and are in redeeming love at the end of the scene. It’s very unclear how meeting each other has led Frederic and Catherine to rise above the desperate pessimism of the moment, but we have to accept their intense love in order to understand the rest of the film. It’s a stretch.
This one (albeit crucial) flaw aside, the rest of
Farewell to Arms is vintage Borzage. Gestures between Frederic and Catherine have a familiar intimacy of love throughout, similar to the haircutting scene of
7th Heaven, and the wrenching finale here simultaneously reinforces the obvious antiwar message of the film while also recalling the end of
7th Heaven. In this scene, Catherine dies just as the armistice is declared, leaving Frederic to hold her body in his arms facing a bright light saying “Peace. Peace.” It’s a florid, melodramatic end to the film….and absolutely effective. I find this ending bitter and pessimistic, though Cooper’s delivery certainly allows for an interpretation that includes some sense of transcendence.
There is also a strong antiwar message in
Farewell to Arms that, to the film's credit, doesn’t rely on scenes of gratuitous mutilation and death. The real casualty of this war is the human spirit. There’s no hope for these characters; they exist, but they can’t think about the future or about loving another person because of the omnipotence of sphinxlike authority and death. The film shows this empty pessimism in both Catherine and Frederic, but as their love inspires them to grow beyond the darkness of their world, Borzage keeps the film’s focus firmly on the spiritual malaise with secondary characters like Rinaldi, Frederic’s friend who wants him to live only for the day; the priest, who is briefly inspired to try to marry the couple despite what he sees as their bleak prospects; and Helen, whose affection for Catherine and pessimism about the future leads her to vehemently oppose Catherine’s relationship with Frederic. So pervasive is the hopelessness in the film that Frederic’s and Catherine’s best friends become important parts of the problems that confront the couple rather than aids to help the couple rise above their circumstances.
The antiwar sentiment also inspires some of the best of Borzage’s cinematic work in the film. The braura sequence is Frederic’s desertion, which is a montage of vignettes of grief and destruction intercut with Expressionist canted angle shots of graveyards and crosses. It’s hard not to notice the contrast between the devastation outside the military and the comparative comfort inside, too. As we might expect, Borzage brings to bear his characteristically painterly use of lighting in interiors, too. One innovative cinematic flourish is the scene when the wounded Frederic is brought into the hospital, injecting a modicum of humor into the film as Borzage plays with the camera and POV. In this extended segment, we see things from the tightly-controlled perspective of an immobile Frederic while elements of the set, nurses’ faces, parts of Frederic’s own body and, eventually, Catherine pop into and out of the frame as Frederic encounters them. The immobility of this POV recalls the sequence in Dreyer’s
Vampyre as the undead Allen Grey must peer from the window of his tight coffin. Like
Farewell,
Vampyre is a 1932 film, suggesting that Dreyer and Borzage were at least watching some of the same things. Or talking with each other.
With so much of
Farewell to Arms so effective, it is unfortunate that the love at the center of the film gets started so unconvincingly. But that flaw aside, this Borzage work offers us a lot of cinematic beauty to enjoy.
