He also did a parody of Hemingway in THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, although not too vicious.

I don't know if any Wellsians watched HBO's HEMINGWAY AND GELHORN on last Monday night or in subsequent showings, but if so, they are keeping awfully quiet about it. Actually, the professional verdicts ranged from "Masterpiece" to "a total mess," with the majority tending toward the latter.

Personally, I thought the film had the advantage of Phil Kaufman's direction and Walter Murch's editorial genius. [I was not bothered by their intermixing of live and documentary footage, monochrome or sepia and color stock, nearly so much as some critics.] The supporting cast was largely right on, too. In my opinion, David Strathairn as John Dos Passos and the great Molly Parker (DEADWOOD, KISSED) as second wife Pauline were especially strong. [What Welles could not have done with Miss Parker!] The principals were more problematical. When announced, the film was to star James Gandolfini and Robin Wright as Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn, but that, in the way of the Movies, was not to be -- though Gandolfini stayed aboard as a producer. To my mind, Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman were a little too "pretty" for their parts. However, they each had good scenes.

The main problem, I thought, was the script, which favored Ms. Gelhorn, starting well by telling the tale through her eyes in flashback, then sliding downhill, slowed by the plot holes. Braggart and drunk he may have been, but Hemingway was a great writer, who changed English literary prose, and was also a passionate anti-fascist, a brave man. In the film, at a crucial juncture, it is suggested that Hemingway did nothing significant during World War II except drunkenly catch huge marlins in the Caribbean and hunt for imaginary Nazi U-boats, where as actually, in a physical sense at least, in a somewhat more complicated way than legend would have it, he was in Paris late in August 1944 for the Allied Liberation of Paris. That omission turns Hemingway into an anticlimactic cypher. Clive Owen, already a bit at sea in his role, comes across in the end as being soft. The poignancy and tragedy of his end are hurried over.

By the same token, Nicole Kidman's Martha Gelhorn, except from the perspective of her later years, seldom displays the tough, accomplished writer and personality she was in life. One is left with the impression that she "didn't know what to write" until she met Hemingway. In fact, she published her first story in the New Republic in 1927, traveled to Europe in the early 1930's, and reported on the plight of poor people and minorities during the Depression. She was hailed as the first woman war correspondent, wrote a number of novels and novellas based upon her experience, and continued after she and Hemingway parted in 1945 to cover America's "wars" from Central America to Vietnam, committing suicide like Hemingway when she could no longer write, at the age of 89.

Too much of this more complex story is left out or only mentioned in passing during HEMINGWAY AND GELHORN.

Our own Malcolm Brownson, as he notes, does indeed have "a pretty short scene" playing Orson Welles. He is caught in the midst of the rushes for SPANISH EARTH having a frantic argument with Ernest Hemingway. Brownson definitely has Welles' look, but he seems older and a bit bulkier than Welles would have been at 22. Perhaps, he is at his best as he retreats rapidly from the scene, throwing over his shoulder to John Dos Passos the remark that Hemingway is crazy.

Premature but prophetic!

May Malcolm find more extensive gigs about our man Welles in later movies.

Glenn Anders

Glenn, I agree with your analysis. I enjoyed the film, but with reservations. The subject, period and, especially, the politics of HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN is not something you see addressed too often, so I am pleased the project found its way to HBO. Having just watched the previous Kaufman/Murch collaboration THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, I found a lot of similarities between the two films (not least of which was the extensive use of newsreel footage), but HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN is the livelier effort. At the very least, the film introduced me to real-life personages like Joris Ivens (the director of THE SPANISH EARTH) who had a remarkably long career in documentary filmmaking (completing his last film in 1988). I smiled with Kaufman's old pal Robert Duvall showed up and I loved his turn as a Russian general.

You're right Glenn. the Welles part is very short; in fact, we never really even see him, except from the back. I guess one question for Malcolm would be if his part was written that way, or was it originally intended to be longer. Was there any dialogue cut out?

As for the film itself, it's certainly watchable, but I found it a little too cartoonish, especially in it's portrait of Hemingway. This means the film frequently does have an enjoyable guilty pleasure quality to it, but by the time we get to the death camp at Dachau, it becomes rather tasteless in my opinion. Sorry to disagree with you Roger, but Duvall's cameo, with the Russian Roulette fight over Kidman, is where I thought the film started to go off the deep end. And I think the film as a whole is vastly inferior to THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, which I think is a great film. But I agree with you that HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN deserves credit for having the daring to try and give such unusual subject matter it's due. Like I said, it's a badly flawed film, but interesting enough to stay with it until the end.