Stream On: Ernest Hemingway vs. Darryl F. Zanuck—‘The Sun Also Rises’
“We were part of that spectacular lost generation of young people who continued to live as though they were about to die.” Okay, sure.
Even though I’m a fan of terse, forceful writing, like Dashiell Hammett’s, I had never read any Hemingway until a friend lent me The Sun Also Rises, which I loved. Of course, I had to see afterwards if a movie had ever been made, and I found Darryl F. Zanuck’s strange take.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍿38% /Trailer /1957 /NR
”One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. … The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where he arose. …”
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. It’s a roman à clef: the characters are based on people in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on true events, particularly his life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for a festival in Pamplona.
Hemingway had a spare style, similar to Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective stories (Hammett had been writing since 1922), and I thought, hypothetically, that John Huston, who filmed the best version of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, would have been perfect to direct The Sun Also Rises. Alas, producer Darryl F. Zanuck hired Henry King (Jesse James) to direct and Peter Viertel to adapt the thirty-year-old novel for the screen.
An all-star cast was assembled: Tyrone Power (Jesse James, The Return of Frank James) was to play Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator and Hemingway’s alter-ego; Ava Gardner was Lady Brett Ashley, with whom at least three of the characters were in love; Mel Ferrer was Robert Cohn, too young to have fought in the war, and whom nobody liked; Eddie Albert (Green Acres, Attack!) was Bill Gorton; and Errol Flynn was the alcoholic Mike Campbell (which began a series of dipsomaniac roles for Flynn, conveniently) who is actually engaged to Brett.
The film begins with a strange, flat reading of the above passage from Ecclesiastes, from where Hemingway took the title, over a very colorfully saturated vista of the Left Bank of Paris on the Seine, showing off the Cinemascope photography, the title and credits in a heroic, bright red font, with stirring music.
So far it resembles a big-screen biblical epic, but the novel was close-quarters—even the scenes of the countryside in Spain where Barnes and Bill Gorton go fishing, and the bull-fighting arena, are personal in the book, as described by Jake. Director King went for the gorgeous, while the novel is gritty. (I would have liked to see Huston direct it, after all—in black-and-white.)
While the plot follows the novel pretty closely, it probably would play better for someone who hadn’t just finished the book.
“We were part of that spectacular lost generation of young people [after the First World War] who continued to live as though they were about to die.” (None of this is in the book—it’s faux Hemingway, and doesn’t even sound like him. Reportedly, Hemingway himself walked out after watching twenty-five minutes. He said the best part of the movie was Errol Flynn, who didn’t appear in those first twenty-five minutes, but who was a drinking buddy of his.)
In the novel and the movie, Jake Barnes and his friends travel in a few groups from Paris to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermin, which features the running of the bulls (during which the beasts chase tourists), and six bull-fights featuring the bulls that ran.
There is really nothing wrong with the film per se; it’s just that it’s like a different story featuring the same locations and cast. The bull-fights are … colorful, the characters’ internal drama more oblique. (The bullfights were filmed in Mexico—a second unit, but not the actors, did shoot an actual San Fermin festival and some exteriors in Pamplona. The Paris scenes, were, ostentatiously, shot in Paris.)
One of the main metaphors of the book is that the bulls are killed, and not quickly, in the ring: this affects the characters in different ways. These deaths are described, disturbingly, in the novel, but not shown in the film and only alluded to in one throwaway remark. The bull-fights shown in the film are more like dances—the torero waves the cape and steps out of the way of the bull a few times, and that’s it.
Another distraction for those who read the book: the characters were in their twenties, the actors in their forties. (Hemingway, and by extension Jake Barnes, was 23 in 1922; Tyrone Power was 43 when he played Barnes.) Still, it’s entertaining in a historical way, especially if you haven’t read the book, and good-looking, and can be seen for the price of watching a few ads—several copies have been uploaded to YouTube. The Sun Also Rises is also on several streaming platforms for only a few dollars American.
Sources include PBS; AFI Catalog; and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.