Dismissed by critics as “pure melodrama,” the film nonetheless managed to gross twenty-five million dollars in theaters with “a profit close to seven million. Selznick’s 1957 remake did not fare quite so well the critical consensus at the time was that the film was a self-indulgent disappointment, plagued by Selznick’s infamous “micromanagement” and serving merely as a vehicle to promote his wife, Jennifer Jones, who starred in the role of Catherine Barkley (Barlowe 37). The film won the Oscar for best cinematography and “was remembered as an outstanding achievement” (134). David Pierce observes that Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms was a “huge hit” and, as a result, “was put forward by Paramount as one of its two nominees for the Academy Award as Best Picture” (134). William Horrigan notes that Borzage was a successful and prolific filmmaker, “winning the first Academy Award in 1927” and making “nearly 100 films, sixty-four of them before A Farewell to Arms” (297). Selznick and starring Rock Hudson-have suffered in the decades since their release yet, they succeeded in different respects in their own time.

The reputations of both film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929)-the 1932 film directed by Frank Borzage and starring Gary Cooper and the 1957 remake produced by David O. × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University Love and Death in Hollywood:ĭesertion and Redemption in Film Adaptations of A Farewell to Arms Geoffrey A.

A farewell to arms 1929 edition