Lancoor A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

grantss Spanish Civil War, 1930s. Richard Jordan, an American, has joined up with the Republican side. He is given the tough assignment of blowing up a vitally important bridge. Things get complicated when he falls in love... Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway.OK-ish, but not great. Plot drifts, and the movie is overly long. Some decent editing and this could have been an hour shorter and much more coherent.Despite starring greats Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman (whose previous film was Casablanca), the performances are unconvincing. Cooper and Bergman don't seem to gel well. The supporting cast are woeful.I haven't read the book, but I am sure it is better than the movie.

thinker1691 It was said that Ernest Hemingway wrote " For Whom The Bell Tolls " with Gary Cooper in mind to play Robert Jordan. The story itself tells of an America teacher who joins the rebel cause to fight against Government forces with the specific task of destroying a crucial bridge. Once in, he meets up with the rebels and discovers much dissension in their leadership, which is further complicated by falling in love with Maria (Ingrid Bergman). However his most difficult task is among the leaders and especially with Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) whom he doesn't really trust. Integrated within the story is a passionate love affair which transfers easily from the novel to the silver screen and becomes more memorable in the treacherous and rugged landscape of the lofty Spanish mountains. There is much conflict between characters as well as explosive forces of the two belligerent sides. Central to the conflict is the theme of the bloody Spanish Civil which explains much to the audience and which in the end creates a definite Classic between Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood leading man Gary Cooper. Although acknowledged as a bit lengthy it's still a must see movie for fans of both stars****

DKosty123 This is an excellent adaptation of Ernest Heminway's novel. Paramount & the author were very happy with the film. It was nominated for Best Picture & 8 Oscars all told. Yet when the 1943 awards were handed out, this movie only received a Best Supporting Actress & that in spite of the big budget color feature this was. The busy cast of this movie is quite an accomplishment in itself. Gary Cooper & Ingrid Bergman were shooting Saratoga Trunk this year too though that movie would not be released until a couple of years later. They came to this movie at Paramount almost straight from their work at Warner Brothers. Sam Wood who directs this one also directed them in Saratoga Trunk. These 3 working together so soon should have really provided the spark. What happened is now legend.While over at Warner Brothers, before doing Saratoga Trunk, Bergman did a little assembly line black & white picture with Humphrey Bogart known as Casablanca. That little black & white film which Bergman did not particularly like, trumped this movie at the awards. Even the great writing of Ernest Hemingway could not beat the day to day writing of some lesser known assembly line writers of the other picture.It is interesting how in this color feature, Gary Cooper looks younger & better than he does in the black & white Saratoga Trunk where he looks older. Maybe he had a bad make-up man in that film? This is a mystery. Bergman looks great in every movie. Imagine though in a short span of three years, Bergman works in two Sam Wood movies, does SpellBound with Alfred Hitchcock, & yet today is most remembered for the movie she liked the least, Casablanca. The irony of this just shows how life can achieve greatness by accident. If Bergman had skipped the Bogart film, you wonder what the result of these other fine works she did would be.In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Bergman is just as fine with Cooper as she is in Saratoga Trunk, though Trunk is more of Ingrid's Gone With The Wind Performance. Sam Wood is a fine Director, who did a good variety of films. While these Cooper-Bergman films are an accomplishment, his most remembered directing effort today might just be that comedy known as A Night At The Opera. Just imagine Wood's resume without that crown jewel though this effort is outstanding. The Bell Tolls for thee,& since these people answered the bell, they have a lot of good work. Imagine Gary Cooper's career without High Noon, which is really his crown jewel. Once again, this is an excellent film, still it has not been the crown jewel of anybodies career except for Ernest Hemingway. It is the best screen play of his best novel.

T Y Howard Hawks had a saying that a good movie was three great scenes and no bad ones. For this movie, I would change that to; a great movie has three noticeably excellent elements, and nothing below average. And even by that standard, this movie falls just short of being great. By the one hour mark you've begun to notice an accumulation of better-than-average conceits (A wife puts her husband in his place and confiscates his power, Ingrid Bergman in the sleeping bag, a stand out performance by Katina Paxinou, some excellent photography) but problems lay ahead.First, the good: The cinematography is above average. It occasionally offers a stunning visual (a horse bucking against a snow drift, a two-shot of Cooper peering from a rock with a strange, expressionist tree limb over his head). Occasionally some frames look like a Japanese print. And the darkness of the shoot in some places produces stunning results. They probably shot dark to disguise that a lot of the outside scenes are shot inside, but it produces a unique, inky look I've never seen anywhere else. The Technicolor process in more conventional scenes looks deeply weird. The palette is very drained: forest green, gray, beige, brown flesh. But I kept thinking "if this was shot in b&w, there's no way it could have the impact of these strange color visuals" (Heresy, I know, but then of course it turns out to have been shot in Technicolor). But only the compositions are good. The film has a real lack of camera work to contribute to moments that should be heightened; the camera just kinda sits there for the whole movie. It seems they assumed one rock looks pretty much like every other rock so why move the camera.The blowing of the bridge (you know, the exciting part of the movie) is shot pretty dull. It's just kinda off in the distance (an obvious miniature) and half of it falls over. Without a great ending, you really don't have a great movie. Gary Cooper (like Warren Beatty) relies on understatement so much that when he's asked to deliver the films emotional climax, he just can't bring it. It feels hollow and a little pathetic. Each time he tries to sell it, it just sounds more vapid. ("You're me now. I am you. We both go ...You're me too! ...We're not apart... Take care of our life ...Shes going on, with me") Ugh. He can't put that malarkey over. You just can't ask Cooper to be deep or to articulate deep convictions (See the Fountainhead, Meet John Doe). True to Hemingway's reductivist style, we know the plot is about blowing up a bridge very early, but it still takes 3 hours to get there. I can see why people go the extra mile to forgive it faults, and declare it a masterpiece. But it doesn't take a genius to see that the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans when a war is waging. The movie really failed to make me care about the affair which eats up miles of celluloid. Bergman is inappropriately "movie-star cute" while hiding out with a team of rebels defending her homeland. Pilar (Paxionu) is always more compelling than the couple.Anyone who likes the big love theme in the score can not have heard the tune "Let's Face the Music and Dance." Every time it played, I thought. 'How could they not know this melody makes people think of Fred and Ginger dancing around a swanky New York nightclub?'