Gary Cooper A Farewell To Arms Gary Cooper 2001 New DVD Top-quality

Frederick Henry (Gary Cooper) is an American serving as an ambulance driver in World War I; when his friend Captain Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou) introduces him to the beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes), he immediately falls for her. The pair share a brief idyllic interlude together, but the jealous Rinaldi does his best to come between them. Directed by Frank Borzage, and based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, which was itself based on Hemingway’s true-life affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky.
The 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms owes as much to the shimmering house style of Paramount Pictures as it does the novelby Ernest Hemingway. If Hemingway purists can get past the romanticising of the book, however, this film offers its own glossy appeal. On the Italian front in World War I an American ambulance driver (Gary Cooper) falls in love with a nurse (Helen Hayes). Cooper was a Hemingway friend in real life, and later played the hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; his boyish simplicity is just right for director Frank Borzage’s heartfelt approach. The Oscar-winning cinematography of ace cameraman Charles Lang is the kind of lush black and white that can capture the glow from a cigarette as it plays across Cooper’s darkened face–a breathtaking touch. The jaded battle scenes show the influence of the hit film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, especially in a gripping montage depicting Cooper’s progress alone through the war zone. Hemingway would have none of it, of course; he once disdainfully wrote that “in the first picture version Lt. Henry deserted because he didn’t get any mail and then the whole Italian Army went along, it seems, to keep him company”. This is first and foremost a love story, however, and as such it succeeds beautifully, right through to the remarkably intense ending.