Flashback, May 1943: Anti-Lynching Film ‘Ox-Bow Incident’ Jars American Conscience

In the middle of a war fought against foreign dictatorships, the western The Ox-Bow Incident—released in U.S. theaters 75 years ago this week—delivered a somber warning: Under the auspices of democracy, even a group of rambunctious individualists can be manipulated by a bullying poseur into overriding the rule of law. 

I remember watching The Ox-Bow Incident in sociology class in high school. It was like dunking in ice-cold water a group of adolescents whose principal preoccupations were the correct party to attend that weekend, Sunday afternoon football, and catching the eye of the opposite sex every day of the week. The movie was obvious—especially in a letter read by Henry Fonda that should have had “MESSAGE” written all over it—but it was just the type of thing that kids needed then.

Come to think of it, that lack of subtlety might be the only way to get through to some adults today who need to heed the movie’s caution that “law is the very conscience of humanity.”

The “incident” at the heart of the movie—the lynching of three innocent men on the Nevada frontier in 1885—had particular meaning for star Henry Fonda (left, in the attached image, with Dana Andrews, center), whose witnessing of a similar event on the streets of Omaha at age 14 in 1919 inspired his subsequent lifelong liberalism. (That episode is described in Scott Eyman's recent dual bio of lifelong friends Fonda and James Stewart, Hank and Jim.)

Now, with race riots bursting out in some of America’s biggest cities and Japanese-Americans compelled into internment camps, Fonda, screenwriter-producer Lamar Trotti, and director William Wellman wanted to signal, in unmistakable terms, the dangers in disregarding laws and the rights of minorities.

Lynching, though reduced in number, was hardly absent from either Americans’ memory or even short-term experience nearly a year and a half after Pearl Harbor. The three recorded in 1943, as well as the 16 that occurred in the 1941-45 war years, were, to be sure, a good deal lower than the 20 of 1935, let alone the postwar high of 83 in 1919. 

But the attempt to pass federal anti-lynching legislation had proven as futile as it was unrelenting. The last serious attempt to do so, in 1938, had foundered when President Franklin Roosevelt decided he could not support the bill lest it fracture a New Deal coalition that included a segregationist Southern contingent on Capitol Hill. 

Highlighting this situation in a western, seemingly far removed from contemporary reality, seemed tailor-made for a cinematic treatment more palatable to audiences. (Especially the year 1885, the last time that the number of white lynching victims outnumbered black ones.) But just about every studio in town rejected “Wild Bill” Wellman’s pitch. 

As a last resort, the director took the treatment to Darryl Zanuck. Wellman’s last encounter with the Twentieth-Century Fox head had ended in disaster: a fistfight on a camping trip. After getting over his surprise over hearing from Wellman again, Zanuck called him back as promised within 48 hours and agreed with him that it was a great project. 

Even so, Zanuck was dubious about the commercial prospects of such grim subject matter. He only ended up giving the green light to the project for three reasons:

*Wellman’s prior record of commercial success;

*The director’s agreement to keep a tight lid on costs, which would improve its slim chances of earning even a slight profit; and

*A commitment on the part of Wellman to direct, sight unseen, two other scripts of Zanuck’s choosing, in return for approving Wellman’s dream project.

Within these restrictions, Wellman created an admirably lean, taut western with a low budget that worked to its advantage. 

At only 75 minutes long, the movie tells its story swiftly, like a novella. The need to compress characters forced Wellman and Trotti to combine characters and make them more complex—which worked especially well for the African-American preacher Sparks (significantly, the first character among the posse to vote against the lynching) and the mob’s Mexican victim (played by a scene-stealing Anthony Quinn). 

Moreover, instead of the wide vistas that were a staple of the genre, Wellman began with shots of a small town and the bar that served as a flash point of civilization before switching to nocturnal scenes that symbolized the posse members’ individual and collective descent into moral darkness.

Although 1885 was surely chosen as the date for the novel and film because it was when the American frontier was still considered open, it also happens to be the last year in which white lynching victims outnumbered black ones. From this point on, the practice became overwhelmingly a weapon of racial control. Viewing lynching as a realistic possibility on the frontier enabled audiences to understand the stark issues this extrajudicial resort to murder posed outside of a racial context.

Zanuck was correct about the film’s poor prospects. From its earliest previews, audiences didn’t know what to expect and were not happy with the film’s tragic ending. But he was also right that it was a story worth telling. Critics hailed it immediately, and, despite its box-office failure, it earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. (Very unusually, the movie earned no other Academy Award nomination besides that.)

Sometimes considered the first “serious” western novel, The Ox-Bow Incident is also considered the forerunner of the “psychological” and “allegorical” western film genres. It dispensed with gunfights, guys in white and black hats, confrontations with Indians, and cowboy heroes. Instead, it considered the fragile circumstances by which men in society maintained the thinnest veneer of civilization.

It starts from the first scene in the bar, and hinges on the distorted sexual dynamics that will play a role in the later resort to vigilante justice. Told that a woman he had an understanding with, Rose, has unexpectedly skipped town, a drunken Gil (played by Fonda) ends up pummeling another townsman and, in turn, is knocked out by the bartender. As much in need of the restraints of the law as anyone else in town, he is also left gravely aware that he is an odd man out. When sidekick Art Croft (played by Harry Morgan) says they didn’t have to ride with the posse, Gil responds testily: “Look kinda funny if we hadn't, wouldn't it?” 

To satisfy the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship arm, Twentieth-Century Fox was forced to make Gil into a less passive member of the posse. The resulting changes helped solidify the Fonda’s image as the personification of American decency and fighter against injustice, one that he would enhance with 12 Angry Men, The Wrong Man, and The Best Man.

Trotti’s script, like Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel, dispensed with the usual genre clichés about the goodness of the common, uncorrupted man of the West. The denizens of Bridger’s Wells are animated by displacement, fear, and resentment of the outsider—all too malleable material for a cruel man with a will to power like “Major” Tetley, who dresses up in a Confederate uniform even though, Gil tells Croft angrily, he never served a day in the army.

Carter and Croft are buffeted by the same forces afflicting the other members of the posse, though. Opening and closing shots of them riding into town establish them as solitary drifters, with no standing in the community that would allow them to effectively challenge Tetley or influence the posse’s vote on whether to string up the unlucky trio they come across at night out in the valley.

In fact, nothing stands out so much in the film as the overwhelming ineffectuality of opponents of the lynching. The fiercest of these, the elderly storekeeper Davies, is dismissed with, “Shut up, Grandma. Nobody expects you to go.” Major Tetley browbeats his son into participating in the posse with, “I’ll have no female boys bearing my name.”

The two potboilers that Zanuck got Wellman to make in exchange for the director’s special project, Thunder Birds: Soldiers of the Air (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944), are little remembered today. But many of the great westerns to come that explored the psychology of westerners or that used the West as allegorical settings for the issues of their time were made possible by The Ox-Bow Incident: The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Naked Spur, The Searchers, Vera Cruz, Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. 

In trying to show readers how Germany, the country that produced Goethe and Beethoven, could cause the mayhem of Kristallnacht, Clark set his tale of a mob that yields up their individual consciences in a setting far closer to home: the American West. 

Those who doubt that such a tragedy—featuring a leader who denounces opponents as weaklings, and followers too nervous or apathetic to stand firmly in the way—can occur in today’s America have not paid much attention to the news recently.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Henry King, Versatile Director of Silent and Sound Eras)

Jan. 24, 1886—Henry King, a director who, across four decades, proved highly adept at multiple genres among more than 100 films, was born in Christiansburg, Virginia.

King did not leave his thumbprint on a particular genre, as did Alfred Hitchcock in the thriller or Billy Wilder in satire. Nor was his work characterized by an instantly recognizable visual style, as was the case with Vincente Minnelli, or by preoccupation with certain themes, as Howard Hawks was with males in extreme circumstances.

In fact, his tendency to submerge his themes or concerns for the sake of a particular story made him an ideal foil in a seminal essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” by critic Andrew Sarris, who perfectly summed up the attitudes of many auteur critics at midcentury: “On a given evening, a film by John Ford must take its chances as if it were a film by Henry King. Am I implying that the weakest Ford is superior to the strongest King? Yes!”

The King film that Sarris uses for his exercise in absurdity is Twelve O’Clock High, one of five films for which King received an Oscar nomination without ever being awarded the statuette. That 1949 movie, along with another he made the following year with Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter, illustrates how King could bring texture and psychological insights to even hoary genres such as the war movie and the western.

It was King’s achievement and predicament to work efficiently and with little fuss within the Hollywood studio system, an environment in which a head of production or executive producer had the whip hand, with “creative control” the exception rather than the rule for directors. In King’s case, he was the go-to director for Darryl F. Zanuck, the co-founder, head of production and chair of Twentieth Century Fox, as well as one of Tinseltown’s most colorful, strong-willed moguls. Zanuck was a hands-on force in terms of casting, story ideas and scripts.King could influence, but had in the end to bow to, his edicts.

None of this is to say that King did not have special affinity for particular subjects. One of these was rural life—not surprising. One of his first notable films in the silent era, Tol’able David (1921), was filmed not far from the farm where he grew up as a child. A decade later, he returned to the rural milieu with State Fair (1933)

An eye for promising unknowns was also a hallmark of King. He raised to prominence some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Ronald Colman in The White Sister (1924); Gary Cooper, a Montana cowboy plucked from obscurity to play the male lead in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926); Don Ameche, in Ramona (1936); Jennifer Jones, who won an Oscar for playing the French peasant girl with visions of the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette (1943); and Alexander Knox, a Canadian actor who played America’s 28^th President in the 1944 biopic Wilson.

One young actor with whom he developed a longstanding professional relationship was Tyrone Power. King insisted on a screen test for the 21-year-old—who, up till then, had been attempting unsuccessfully to follow his late father into the movies—for the lead in Lloyd's of London, then persuaded Zanuck that the young man would be better in that role than the mogul’s initial preference, Ameche.

In time, Power became the chief box-office star at Twentieth-Century Fox, and King went on to direct him in 10 more films, including historical films (In Old Chicago), westerns (Jesse James), war films (A Yank in the RAF), and a whole series of swashbucklers (The Black Swan, Captain From Castile, Prince of Foxes, and King of the Khyber Rifles). The director--a licensed pilot who, during World War II served in the Civilian Air Patrol--initiated his star into the joys of flying when he took him in his plane to the set of one of their films. (Years later, King flew over the funeral service of the star, who had died on location at age 43, noting sadly, “Knowing his love for flying and feeling that I had started it, I flew over his funeral procession and memorial park during his burial, and felt that he was with me.")

The last collaboration of Power and King was The Sun Also Rises (1957). My decidedly mixed reaction to this adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel is here. It was just one of several literary adaptations made by King in the last decade of his career that, as often as not, turned out to be misfires. His brief role directing another Hemingway project, The Old Man and the Sea (1958), ended up uncredited—probably a good thing, considering what a production mess that Spencer Tracy vehicle became.

But other adaptations by King of Hemingway and his Lost Generation frenemy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, which did earn the director credits, turned out problematic in their own was:

*The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952): Hemingway told his friend Ava Gardner that the only things he liked about this treatment of his short story were her and the hyena.

*Beloved Infidel (1959): As with The Sun Also Rises, the period of the source material—in this case, from 1936 to 1940, during Fitzgerald’s affair with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, chronicled in her bestselling memoir—is blurred and even evoked inaccurately. Neither of the stars, Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr, was satisfied with the early script or footage—and, judging by critical reaction, they had reason to be concerned.

*Tender Is the Night (1962): As with The Sun Also Rises and Beloved Infidel, King’s cinema swan song was marred by miscasting—in this case, Jennifer Jones (at 42, well past the age when she could be credible as two-decades-younger psychiatric patient Nicole Diver). In the case of all three films, King and Zanuck relied on actors with whom they had worked well with several times before without adequately considering whether they were age appropriate for this property.

As an aficionado of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I was disappointed in these treatments of this material. In certain ways, they showed King in all his limitations: as a professional less concerned with an artistic vision than with getting a movie made for a mainstream audience.

On the other hand, they also contain scenes of considerable skill and even beauty—aspects of his work that appear more consistently in, for instance, Twelve O’Clock High and The Gunfighter.  And his love of film--and even his affection for the sometimes problematic actors who feature in them, such as hellraiser Errol Flynn--made him a favorite of those he worked with. Four years before his death in 1982, this affable movie professional enjoyed renewed attention from a seven-week retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Its length testifies to his durability in an often-unforgiving industry.

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Premiere of ‘Dr. Dolittle’)

“ 'It’s really cute as hell,’ [publicist Perry] Lieber said. He has a boisterous, enthusiastic voice. ‘The animals are the star of the picture and they’ll be the hit of the evening. Sophie the Seal will arrive in a limo, and she’ll be wearing a rhinestone harness and walk right into the Paramount just like she was a star. And Chee-Chee the Chimp, we’ll have him dressed up in white-tie and tails and special patent-leather pumps.’ Lieber listened for a moment. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘All the animals will be wearing pants. They better be, or you’ll have some messed-up limos.”—John Gregory Dunne, The Studio (1968)

Forty-five years ago tomorrow, the premiere of the Rex Harrison musical Dr. Dolittle was held in Los Angeles, at the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The event sounds like something out of a Hollywood that, its attendees would know in a few years, was dying. While it had a nice charity benefiting from the $125-per-ticket cost to attend (the Hollywood and Television Relief Fund), the premiere was marked by the kind of crass promotion epitomized in Perry Lieber’s statement above, not to mention a hucksterish Joey Bishop saying on camera, to every arriving celebrity, a line that, each time it was repeated, became even more patently false: “I hear this is a marvelous picture, a wonderful picture.”

Screenwriter-novelist John Gregory Dunne could come up with funny lines with the best of them, but in his account of a single year at The Studio—i.e., Twentieth-Century Fox—he knew to get out of the way of his characters—not just the creators of film, but the execs who make the decisions guiding the production and promotion of movies.

One of the latter was legendary mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, at this point president of Twentieth-Century Fox. Puffing on his cigar, he let Dunne in on his concern about his studio’s product, a couple of weeks before the premiere of one of its major prestige pictures: “We’ve got $50 million tied up in these three musicals, Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly!, and quite frankly, if we hadn’t made such an enormous success with The Sound of Music, I’d be petrified. You’re never sure of a hit in that category. You’re never sure of a hit any goddamn time, but when you’re talking $20 million, it’s a bigger gamble.”

Zanuck was right to be worried. All three pictures tanked, leaving the studio in such a financial hole that it released only one film in 1970. In the case of Dr. Dolittle, Fox pulled off one miracle of sorts—nine Oscar nominations, including an inexplicable one for Best Picture, and two wins (including for its song “Talk to the Animals”)—testimony to an effective promotional stunt: boffo dinners for members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But critics were not especially kind, and the public reception was even worse, as its $9 million gross represented only half of its expenditure.

The film bombed not because of a shift in popular taste, but a lurch in it. Only three years before, Harrison had won the Best Actor Oscar for My Fair Lady, which not only was a moneymaker but a success with Academy voters (eight Oscars in all) and critics. By the time Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! came along, however, the kind of musical they represented—family-oriented, book- rather than dance-driven, opulent to the point of being overstuffed—had fallen out of favor. Studio heads didn’t realize it yet, but a new kind of movie musical was aborning, one epitomized within five years by Cabaret, where the songs spring organically from a performance rather than spontaneously--and the louche subject matter was definitely not one for the kiddies.

Yet, while studio heads did not immediately take to heart that particular lesson from Dr. Dolittle, they absorbed another one only too well. The film produced one of the greatest onslaughts of merchandise tie-ins ever to that point: not just the soundtrack album, but also puzzles, reprints of the Hugh Lofting books that inspired the movie, pet foods, even small toy figures in each package of "Shake-a-Pudding." Much of this did as abominably as the film itself. Thereafter, for a decade, film execs wouldn’t be caught dead even thinking about tie-ins.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when George Lucas shopped his idea for Star Wars around all the Hollywood studios. All but one passed on it: Twentieth-Century Fox, now headed not by Zanuck but by Alan Ladd Jr.

Ladd was correct in seeing box-office gold in the film. The movie would be such a mint for Fox, he figured, that giving Lucas the sequel, merchandising and soundtrack rights would be no problem, as sci-fi films of the time hadn’t been major hits, anyway.

Well, he was half right. Star Wars did make Fox a fortune—but this time, reversing the story of Dr. Dolittle, the merchandise flew off the shelves, too. That subsidiary revenue stream helped produce an entertainment empire for Lucas—and left the suits at Fox wistful about why they couldn’t see this coming.

Flashback, August 1957: Film of Hemingway’s ‘Sun Also Rises’ Opens

The generally dismal tradition of cinematic adaptations of Ernest Hemingway works continued, as Hollywood’s version of his Lost Generation classic, The Sun Also Rises, opened this week 55 years ago. The gorgeous Cinemascope presentation, on-location shooting in France, Spain, and Mexico, a respected producer and director, and major stars including Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, and Errol Flynn had executives at studio Twentieth-Century Fox dreaming of a “fiesta” (Hemingway’s original title for the book), but over time it turned out to be “siesta” at the box office.

It was one of the most expensive movies ever made up to that time by Fox (which, a mere five years later, would learn the true meaning of "cost overruns" with Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra). It was a “prestige” film, based on one of the most acclaimed works by an American Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Unfortunately, it all proved a vast disappointment. All hands should have taken a deep breath before they plunged into this project.

It wasn’t the first time that Hollywood swooned over Papa Hemingway. It all began back in 1932, with the first version of A Farewell to Arms. Even what was deemed his worst novel to date, To Have and Have Not, became a vehicle for Bogie and Bacall in 1944 (though precious little of the original source showed up in the screenplay by William Faulkner, another eventual Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner.)

What captivated Hollywood in the first place were the novelist’s much-hailed dialogue and deft scene creation. Hemingway’s characters, far more than most, sounded like real people, with distinctive ironies and sarcastic remarks included. There was, for instance, Mike Campbell’s response to a question about how he went bankrupt: “two ways . . . gradually and then suddenly.” Screenwriters need hardly create any lines: they were all there in the original, waiting to be harvested.

As for the scene creation: It is demonstrated quite well below, early in the novel. The passage works on the page, as an example of how Hemingway’s prose, at its best, could not only be athletic and vigorous but almost lyrical. For a screenwriter, it was almost made to order—not only a means of capitalizing on the location shooting in Paris, but of conveying emotion (the mutual despair of expatriate journalist Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, over their inability to consummate their relationship) entirely through cinematography—a director’s dream.

“The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then leveled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the sanding bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett’s hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue de Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett’s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down."

Several problems, however, made the novel more nettlesome to adapt than virtually any other Hemingway work:

*Little or no plot. For all the staggering amounts of drinking, sleeping around, and fighting that occur, the novel’s characters end up more or less where they started. In a medium such as cinema that rests on movement, that emphasis is problematic. (At least A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls had battle scenes, along with love affairs.) Hemingway concealed this well enough on the printed page with laconic prose and a very manageable (200-300) pages that was not the slightest bit padded. The men who eventually adapted the property, however, not only allowed the running time to reach 129 minutes, but left the pace slacken so much that editing out a half hour would only have improved matters.

* Sexual frankness. It was not only Jake’s horrible war injury that made the book run afoul of morals restrictions in the movie industry’s censorship office, the Production Code Administration (PCA). Brett, to use the modern phrase, is a cougar, and several other characters bed with abandon.

*World-weary, even despairing characters. Nobody in the circle of Jake Barnes does anything heroic. More often than not, they are self-pitying or self-destructive (admittedly, precisely Hemingway’s point on how unmanned and lost civilization became after the Great War). Finding a character that the audience could root for would be difficult.

*Anti-semitism. The most serious blemishes on the novel for readers today are the characters’ insults directed at Robert Cohn. There was no way, after the Holocaust, that such rancid attitudes would make it on screen. Instead, the screenplay emphasized a trait that Hemingway also was at pains to convey: that Cohn was a pain in the neck who didn’t know when to go away and leave well enough alone.

Ann Harding had bought this maddeningly elusive property in 1934 as a vehicle for herself to play the nymphomaniacal lush Lady Brett. It might have been a way for the patrician-looking Harding to break out of her stereotype as a suffering, virtuous patrician, but a) she was American, not British, b) she gave up Hollywood to wed in 1937, and c) by the time she returned to acting five years later, she was considered too old for the role. The other projected lead, Leslie Howard as Jake Barnes, would have been equally inappropriate: he was not only old (his early 40s), but was British rather than American.

In any case, Harding and her collaborators had an impossible time getting the film off the ground because of the opposition of  PCA head Joseph Breen. By 1949, however, the best chance for a fine adaptation came when Harding sold the rights to the property to Howard Hawks.

It wasn’t only that Hawks had created a genuinely interesting motion picture out of To Have and Have Not, but also that, in Only Angels Have Wings, he had demonstrated an affinity for the type of themes and characters Hemingway had explored: men of action caught in situations of high risk and drama, with a stray woman who comes between the male friends. Better yet would have been the projected male lead: Montgomery Clift, not yet, at 28, too old for the role, and blessed with an ability to express turbulent emotions beneath his great looks--altogether, a leading man with a character actor's ability to capture every nuance in a role

The PCA, however, remained too high a barrier, and Hawks withdrew several years later, selling his interest in the property to Twentieth-Century Fox. Darryl Zanuck, the longtime head of the studio, now on his own as an independent producer, had already made two films from Hemingway short stories, The Macomber Affair (1947) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952).

For this new project, Zanuck enlisted two people he was associated with most closely at Fox: director Henry King and Tyrone Power. The trio were, perhaps, too comfortable with each other, for otherwise they would have asked the essential question: Were they the ones best suited for this particular project?

Henry King was the kind of no-nonsense, versatile veteran of the studio system who had worked steadily all the way back to the silent era. He was highly competent, with a real feel for innovative camera work. What he was not, however, was inspired.

Unbeknownst to all, Tyrone Power was only one year away from a fatal heart attack at age 44. He had been known as “The King of Twentieth-Century Fox” for being that studio’s primary box-office star. He placed great trust and loyalty in King, who had championed him over a reluctant Zanuck for his star-making role in Lloyds of London. By this time, two decades later, Zanuck believed the actor’s human qualities placed him far above virtually all other Tinseltown matinee idols, just as Hemingway’s hero Barnes was fundamentally better than his irresponsible friends.

Power’s looks—considered extraordinary even by Hollywood’s standards—had long interfered with appreciation for his not-inconsiderable talent. That factor would not come into play this time, for his face was heavier and his hairline thinner.

The casting of Power placed at the heart of the film an issue that perhaps no other Hollywood film since the Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer-John Barrymore (actors in their 40s and 50s, playing teenagers) Romeo and Juliet had addressed so starkly: At what point does an actor’s skill compensate for the loss of dramatic realism?

I became interested in watching the film again, over three decades after first seeing it, when I saw a short clip of Power facing off against Mel Ferrer as Barnes’ friend, Robert Cohn. I had forgotten how good Power was in conveying Barnes’ surface hard-boiled nature. After seeing the film in its entirety again, I found that he had also evoked the character’s innate decency, creating deep audience sympathy.  To an extent, even the actor’s aging, exposed so pitilessly on the big screen, had its advantages in this regard: Power’s Barnes looks as if life has beaten the hell out of him.

Yet he is in no way what Hemingway intended: a twentysomething man who should be enjoying the prime of life, but cannot because of a war wound that has left him impotent. At the same time, it would be difficult to find an actor of the right age with the technical skill to suggest this agony. It would require a Clift, a Brando, a Dean.

The young actors that were cast in The Sun Also Rises could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be placed in such exalted company. Chanteuse Juliette Greco owed  her role as a prostitute, in a small but crucial scene with Power, to a simple fact: she was Zanuck’s girlfriend at the time.

As for Robert Evans, the lucky streak that began earlier in the year--when Norma Shearer had liked the good-looking youth at the poolside of a hotel enough to suggest him to play her husband, Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces—continued, as Zanuck, observing him in the lobby of a New York hotel, thought he would be great as Hemingway’s brave bullfighter, Pedro Romero. Yet Evans' daily rushes were so bad that other cast members joined with the novelist in insisting he needed to go. Zanuck’s abrupt dismissal of the idea—“The kid stays in the picture”—might have furnished the title of the memoir of the future Paramount production head. But the resulting scenes were so embarrassing that they also confirmed Evans’ later, refreshingly candid evaluation of his thespian ability: By the end of the fifties, he was "sure of one thing: I was a half-assed actor."

Ava Gardner was only slightly older than Brett in the novel (34); drinking hadn't yet eroded the beauty that drove Frank Sinatra clear around the bend; like Brett, she had been known to cavort with bullfighters; and Hemingway's description of the friend he fondly called "Daughter"--"the most exciting woman of her generation"--could easily apply to Brett. She might not, technically, be the most accomplished actress, and her Southern accent made it a bit hard to accept her as the titled Lady Brett, but she brought an identification with the hard-drinking, desperate glamor girl  to the role.

The most glaringly age-inappropriate actor might, paradoxically, also have been the one who worked out best. Intense drinking had put Errol Flynn a very, very long way from his swashbuckling roles as Robin Hood and Captain Blood at Warner Brothers, but nobody questioned his authenticity as the irresponsible, wisecracking, seriously alcoholic Campbell. In fact, Flynn brought such brio to the part at points (e.g., in a glorious bit of improvising, letting loose a dollar bill in the "running of the bulls" scene) that he was even mentioned as a possible Oscar nominee as Best Supporting Actor. (His remaining roles in the year he had left before his untimely death--The Roots of Heaven and Too Much, Too Soon--also capitalized on his reputation as a lush.)

As with his other work adapted to film, Hemingway had taken the money for the rights to his novel without retaining creative control. That, combined with Gardner's reports of difficulties during filming, led him to dismiss the movie as a "travelogue." Indeed, it had lost a good deal of the spare toughness of the novel. (To create the possibility of a happy ending, screenwriter Peter Viertel inexcusably eliminated one of the most bitingly ironic lines in all of literature, Jake's response to Brett's claim that the two of them could have had a "fabulous time together": "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?")

Yet much of Hemingway's dialogue did make it to the screen, and the basic outlines of his novel could still be seen. Such was not the case 27 years later, when NBC ran a mini-series. This time, the principals were age-appropriate, and, in at least one case--Jane Seymour as Brett--superior to the original actors. But, in an attempt to add plot, whole scenes never even contemplated by Hemingway were created (e.g., Romero kills an admirer of Brett's who takes to stalking her).

Oh, a film or TV version of the book that is perfectly cast, well-written, and reasonably faithful to one of the pioneering works of modern literature: Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?