The Perils of Depicting Hemingway

When movie moguls got scared by TV in the 1950s, they turned to Hemingway—among other sources and subjects, of course—to demonstrate that the very bigness of the big screen still made it better than its little competitor. The resulting movies—The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Sun Also Rises (1957), A Farewell to Arms (1957), Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), and their spiritual predecessor, 1943’s For Whom the Bell Tolls—are big, bloated productions over-reliant on exotic locales and macho posturing. Though these were all adaptations of Hemingway’s fiction, they drew heavily on the myth of the man himself, deploying his larger-than-life persona both for cinematic thrills and award-worthy prestige (the dreadful For Whom the Bell Tolls got nine Oscar nods).