Guilty Pleasures: The Sun Also Rises

1957 Drama 

From 20th Century Fox

Directed by Henry King

Starring

Tyrone Power

Ava Gardner

Mel Ferrer

Errol Flynn

Eddie Albert

Gregory Ratoff

Robert Evans

Juliette Gréco

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.

There have always been such strong and divergent opinions about this movie but it seems those who put it down are fierce.  I get both sides which is, I guess, why it becomes a guilty pleasure here.  Mostly it is a pleasure.  I cannot, however, deny that the film's shortcomings aren't most apparent.

I have always loved the works of Hemingway and his pal Fitzgerald and a few others especially when they wrote about The Lost Generation.  In time I would find John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Ezra Pound and others who took me on such incredible journeys in Paris and Spain with some of the most interesting and messed-up poets, writers, painters and artists in the 1920s.

I could take this further.  If you've lived long enough you've probably been asked what period of time, in all of history, would you like to have been part of.  This American Expatriate adventure of the 20s is it for me.  

These people were trying to recover from The Great War, as they called it then,  The term lost generation was coined by Stein but in The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, Hemingway's first novel, the author gave life to it and it has stuck.  Despite this, Hemingway said he liked to think of his characters as not so much lost as battered.  The novel was set in 1922, the year before Hemingway left Paris.

These famous characters are a mixed-up crowd... despondent and feeling alienated... the war has caused them to feel their life's values have been shattered.  They're not sure how to pick up the pieces but excessive drink, drugs, whoring and living the life of vagabonds are keeping them away from claiming the prize. They do have their shared creative values and friendships seem real if transient.  They raised their romanticized versions of life to an art form.

Tyrone Power

Paris, a bustling cosmopolitan hub at the time, had a blossoming artistic community which attracted these writers and they, in turn,  brought a world-wide attention to it through their writings.

The characters here are all based on Hemingway and the people he knew.  There are two main characters.  Jake Barnes (Power) is a newspaperman working in Paris (he sure has a lot of time to galavant around).  He is disillusioned and a bit embittered because of an old war injury, as they might say, his son doesn't rise, he's impotent.  His impotence is the source of his troubling relationship with the other main character, Lady Brett Ashley (Gardner), an American who married a titled Brit.  Brett loves Jake dearly and has a love-hate thing with her own promiscuity.  She'd still like to work something out with Jake but he thinks not.

Let's add three more.  Robert Cohn (Ferrer) is an old college friend of Jake's, a writer who also boxes or a boxer who also writes.  He is married but desperately in love with Lady Brett in a one-sided thing that turns him into something of a pest.  

Mike (Flynn), Brett's newest fiancé, arrives from Scotland at the same time as Jake's friend Bill (Albert) arrives from the States.  As these two join the group, they reveal they are champion boozers and will fit in well with the others.

Errol Flynn

The first part of the film takes place in Paris with Jake and Brett and Robert as they take in Cafe Society.  Certainly a love story is at the core with Jake's condition never far away.  No one expects this lifestyle will last but they all certainly give it a boozy go as long as they can stand.

Mike and Bill come into the picture just as the quintet decides to go to Spain for more drinking and whoring and what could be more fun than adding the running of the bulls at Pamplona and a bullfight to the proceedings?  Additionally there is the 19-year old matador (Evans) who is hot for Brett and she will respond accordingly.  There is also a lot of bickering by this point but then too much booze and sunshine can bring on a certain testiness.

Hemingway liked no country more than Spain so that passion comes across in the screen version... certainly with the running of the bulls and the bullfights but also with the country enjoying a fiesta.

Darryl F. Zanuck was the head of production at 20th Century Fox but once in awhile had pet projects that he would produce and take a special interest in.  This is one of those projects.  He and Hemingway were also friends although it was a little lopsided.  The great novelist always made a little fun of the great studio head and Hemingway always said Zanuck wanted to be him.

Zanuck wanted a shot at making another Hemingway project because he knew the writer hated Fox's 1952 version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro.  The truth is, however, that Hemingway didn't like screen adaptations of most of his work.

Zanuck at first wanted Jake and Brett to be played by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones but for one reason or another that didn't work out.  He then turned to Power who, of course, was the studio's cash cow for years.  Zanuck then wanted Gardner for Brett but she asked for too much money and was not a Fox contract star so he turned to Susan Hayward.  (Interestingly, Hayward, Gardner and Peck were the stars of Kilimanjaro.)

Ava Gardner

Hemingway was not fond of Hayward and thought she was totally wrong to play Brett.  He insisted on Gardner since she was a good friend and drinking buddy and she was the only thing he liked about Kilimanjaro.  If she wasn't right to play a boozing, carousing nightcrawler, nobody was.  Hemingway insisted Zanuck pay her price.

Zanuck installed Henry King as director.  He was under contract to Fox, beloved by Zanuck and given many of the studios top productions to helm.  He never caused any grief for Zanuck or his cast but he didn't seem to understand the work of Hemingway.  King's ornate, detailed style didn't seem to mesh with the novelist's lean and spare style.  It was a similar complaint leveled against his handling of Kilimanjaro.  Sun would be his 11th and final time directing Power.

Zanuck chose Peter Viertel to write the screenplay.  Viertel was highly acclaimed as a writer in his own right and an incisive interpreter of others' work.  He also happened to be a friend of Hemingway's and Gardner's and a couple of years after the film's release would become the husband of Deborah Kerr.

There's good news and bad news about this cast.  By and large I thought the acting was good.  In addition to Gardner being so much like her character, the same could be said about Flynn's character who was a happy-go-lucky, irreverant, carousing drunk and I think the pair of them are the best thing about this film.  His glory days were far behind him as one could tell from his fourth billing.  He said he had a ball making the film.

Casting Flynn and Power in the same film caused some titillation in Hollywood and with gossip columnists since the two had been lovers when they were both at the height of their devastating beauty.  Both were considered bisexual although Power's attraction was mainly to men.  Flynn was the opposite.  It has been rumored they managed some one-on-one time while filming to see if that old spark was still there.

Power & Flynn

This is not Power's best work.  There was such a lethargy about him.  One might argue it was the character who was so wan and why wouldn't he be with his physical issues and being around the eager Brett?  But most have felt that he wasn't well, suffering from the heart issues that would kill him a year later at age 45.  Flynn would die a year after Power at age 50, also from a heart attack.

Ferrer seems well-cast in his role while I admit I paid scant attention to Albert.  Frankly, the only time his work interested me was when he played a villain.

A small role had yet to be filled, that of a woman who latches on to Jake at the opening of the story.  Ferrer's wife Audrey Hepburn, who was with her husband at the beginning of the shoot, was a good friend of French singer-actress Juliette Gréco and suggested she be tested for the role.  Not only was she hired but the married Zanuck fell for her big time and she became his mistress for a number of years.  Then Zanuck became even more interested in The Sun Also Rises.

Gréco and Zanuck

Zanuck spotted Evans in a nightclub and hired him on the spot to play the young bullfighter.  I never cared for him as an actor but admit I didn't think he was so bad here.  But I recognize I am in the minority.  King, Gardner and Power thought he was so bad and also arrogant and uncooperative that they went to Zanuck as a threesome and begged him to fire Evans.  Zanuck refused, saying the kid stays in the picture, which one day would be the title of Evans's autobiography.

Ok, now the bad news.  None of the five leads should have been cast because they were all too old for their parts.  C'mon, Hemingway's characters were all in their 20s and these people were twice that age.  It just didn't work.  Those who loved the novel knew this and were always vocal in their distaste for this cast.

Also perplexing is that fact that the nifty fifties and its prudishness kept The Sun Also Rises from being what it could have been.  There are moments when one senses a step forward but then it was two steps back.  Hemingway's works and the 1950s just didn't partner well.  At the same time is the oft-repeated notion that a film isn't as good as the book.  That is certainly true here.

The Paris scenes were filmed in Paris and the running of the bulls was filmed in Spain, in Pamplona.  But by the time of the bullfights, Pamplona was covered in snow so the company moved to Mexico, which stood in for Spain.

Author in Paris at time he wrote Sun

The film became the most expensive production Fox ever had that was filmed on location up to that time and it looks it.  Everything about it looks authentic and glorious in Cinemascope and saturated as it is in color with beautiful art direction, set decoration and superb cinematography by Leo Tover.  Sadly though, this was another Hemingway complaint.  He thought his small story under Zanuck's watch had become a little too grand and splashy.

I never had a hard time liking this film but I have always understood and agreed with the criticism.

HBO or Netflix or one of those should pick this up as an 8-10-segment project and give it the attention it really deserves.  Lay the entire novel out, show more character development.  Better yet, how about the same on all of Hemingway's famous works?  

Here's the trailer:

Next posting:

A fifties' western