Said De Mille: ‘It’s dangerous at this time to make fun of the war.’ Dangerous or not, the idea excited me.”Ĭhaplin still had reservations about the finished film and came close to suppressing the whole venture.
“Then the thought came to me: why not a comedy about the war? I told several friends of my intention, but they shook their heads. “I was worried about getting an idea for my second picture,” wrote Charlie Chaplin in his autobiography. Watch A Farewell to Arms online on BFI Player.Here are 10 more classics set during the dark years of World War I. We’ve since released A Farewell to Arms on Blu-ray and it’s also available to watch on BFI Player. There may not, ultimately, be all that much of Hemingway which finally remains, but it’s one of the finest films made about the generation that was lost to the war. Borzage sculpts images and layers sequences with staggering virtuosity (aided by Charles Lang’s exquisite photography), building to a transcendent climax of which even Carl Dreyer would have been proud. Gary Cooper (here at his best) is the American soldier drawn – first by lust, then by fate – to nurse Helen Hayes, a newly bereaved widow sucked into another doomed romance she has little power to resist. Though lesser known, the earlier film has a significant edge, Borzage choosing to jettison the spare muscularity of Hemingway’s prose in favour of his own swooningly romantic brand of sensual expressionism.Įach of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK. This was the first adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s great novel, some 25 years before Charles Vidor’s more famous version with Rock Hudson.
#The silent patient movie where to watch archive
On the eve of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4 August, with German forces occupying neutral Belgium, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey is said to have remarked: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Four years later, the First World War had claimed almost 17 million lives.įrom 2014 to 2018, the BFI marked the centenary of World War I with a massive programmes of key films, archive TV, rereleases and archival discoveries, including the re-release of Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932). It was on 28 July 1914 – a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked a diplomatic crisis across Europe – that the opening shots of ‘the war to end all wars’ were fired, as Austria-Hungary prepared to invade Serbia.
0 kommentar(er)
