ada the leading man is my tpye

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

JohnHowardReid Undoubtedly the major project of Sam Wood's career. This itself is a wonderful oddity that could only occur in fabled Hollywood. Sam Wood was a staunch anti-Communist who was directly responsible for the McCarthy witch hunts and here he is dedicating himself to a film in which the Communists are presented as heroes! Admittedly, the script makes some attempt to confuse these political realities by calling the Communist Loyalists "Republicans" and the opposing Fascists "Nationalists", but this subterfuge will fool no-one.Anyway, the wheeling and dealing which went into the making of the film is almost as interesting as the film itself. Briefly, Wood was forced to make The Pride of the Yankees for Goldwyn (in order to secure Cooper's services) in the middle of production. He had actually commenced Bell late in 1941, filming non-Cooper scenes in the High Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. Bell was then suspended while Wood made the Goldwyn picture, resuming production in June 1942 in the Sonora Pass district of the Sierras. The company remained on this difficult location (at an elevation of ten thousand feet) until the first week in September. Returning to Paramount studios for interior scenes, shooting was finally completed by the end of October.For all its difficulties and subsequent acclaim, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a bit of a disappointment. True, it captures a great deal of the Hemingway spirit and flavor, the locations are often breathtaking and Bergman never gave a more poignant or moving performance, but the film (even in its shortened form) is too long to sustain the interest of even the most indulgent audience. The problem of course is Dudley Nichols' screenplay. Verbose and over-talkative on the one hand, lacking in plot development and tension on the other (just about all the action excitement is saved for the climax), its characters are one-dimensional "types" and its story moves sluggishly to an absolutely foregone conclusion.Of the supporting players, only Katina Paxinou (who fully deserved her Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' award) manages to rise above the speechiness of her dialogue to clothe her character in real flesh and blood. Tamiroff (assisted by moodily shadowy photography) over-acts his villainy to such an extent one seriously questions the sanity of the other players who are taken in by his gross and clumsy attempts at deception. This further robs the script of tension.Fortunately, Cooper and Bergman do rather better. Cooper is always reliable, though his slow mannerisms tend to make a slow plot even slower and he is just a little too credulous (and too idealistic) to be always 100 per cent sympathetic. But he is 90 percent believable and his restrained performance is far more engrossing than the ripe scene-chewing indulged in by Tamiroff, Sokoloff and company.Bergman of course is absolutely perfect. The screen literally lights up whenever she is on-camera. Equally luminous as her performance in Casablanca yet totally different in scope and character, Bergman proves herself to be the cinema's foremost dramatic actress of the 1940s.In addition to Bergman's winning portrayal, the film's other assets are its most attractive music score and its wonderful photography. Wood and Menzies make such effective use of the High Sierra locations, they tend to show up obvious studio matte and model work. Menzies brilliantly planned the dramatic camera angles so that compositions and lighting frequently stir the senses.Certainly worth seeing - but don't expect a totally gripping, totally involving entertainment (except when Bergman is on screen).

Theo Robertson The Spanish Civil war is a conflict that has seared itself upon the romantic idealist . It's good versus evil of fascists on one side and idealistic freedom fighters from all across the world fighting to save a democratic socialist Republic from the jackboot of Hitler , Mussolini and Franco . Of course much of this conflict has been romanticized . It's often forgotten that Joseph Stalin was supporting the Republican cause while following his own agenda and the leftists spent more time fighting amongst themselves rather than fighting the Falangists . Regardless of this I've always viewed it as good versus evil , an opinion reinforced by a conversation I once had with a Spanish workmate who was of " Marrano Converso " linage whose grandparents were murdered by the Franco regime . I told her gloomily that's the worst thing about the 21st Century - there's no crusades to go on , no chance of jumping on a plane and changing the world . Though later when I thought about it there is a modern day equivalent and that is young people joining the military in NATO countries knowing fine well they'll be serving in Afghanistan fighting against murderous jihadists . Was it not Orwell himself who described all tyrannies being " theocracies in nature " ?Perhaps idealism gets the better of me and I have grown out of it because the opening scene of FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL has stayed with me since childhood . Two freedom fighters blow up a train , make their escape only for one of them to be wounded and he begs his comrade to shoot him . It's an impressive scene though its impact is negated having been done so many times in other films . I guess this was probably the first time I'd seen this type of scene and that's why it stayed with me . The mind of a child is very impressionable and idealistic I'm afraid that my idealism towards this film has become somewhat revisionist after seeing it again as an adult. Not a lot happens in the movie which is composed of a handful of characters sitting on two or three sets of studio exteriors spouting clichéd melodramatic dialogue along with an annoying incidental score that never seems to go away . Interesting to note that the screenplay has most of its politics exercised and there's only one scene where the idealistic manly hero Robert Jordan played by Gary Cooper at his most wooden explaining the reason why he joined the good fight This means you're a watching a film lacking in scope . When I say nothing much happens I mean this literally . Some people might appreciate the set design or cinematography but the film concentrates on the romance between Jordan and Maria and Jordan's abrasive relationship with the band of Gypsies . There's very little sense of time and place and I had to keep reminding myself that it's set in Spain in 1937. It's also a film that is very static and dated even to fans of Classic Hollywood like myself and someone would do better reading George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia than watching this Hollywood melodrama

robert-642 I'm currently studying the Spanish Civil War as told through the medium of cinema. I came across this film and with high expectations of a good story with fine acting I bought it from Amazon. How wrong can one be! If melodrama had a rating of one to ten and ten being the worst this would be nudging the ten. Apart from the fine acting of Gary Cooper, the rest of the cast were shameful. It seemed as if they were reading their lines from a board but had problems because they were semi-literate. Example: To-morr-ow we sha-ll go to the bri-dge. Oh dear! The only decent lines spoken in normal fashion were those by Katina Paxinou.Even the delightful Bergman was so far over the top she could have met herself coming back. And those gleaming teeth! The studio missed a golden opportunity. They could have inserted a sponsors speech bubble every so often."Even in war you can have shiny teeth with new 'Gleemy-Teeth'.As for the war itself. A joke surely? Scant attention was given to anything political. I correct myself: no attention was given.Finally it can't be put down to: 'the films of the time' because lots of other films made in the same period were nowhere near as appalling - especially the war films.Bottom line. Hollywood has and always will be useless at making films about other countries wars.zero out of ten.

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?'