It's time to explode a few myths here. Like the so-called ideal marriage between the Kennedy's that was propped up by the media for years and was finally shown to have been wrought with serial infidelities by both parties, so in the world of movie land we have some sacred cows that have to be taken out to the slaughterhouse and be ground up into decent hamburger. A Farewell to Arms is one such sacred cow. Gary Cooper struts through the movie like a tall, lanky, slow-talking, goofy string bean with an amoral attitude towards women, the army and life in general. He chooses to desert his comrades - so much for Semper Fidelis - to run back to a woman he impregnated in a night of passion. Helen Hayes is the love interest, whose acting resembled nothing so much as a cut-out paper doll in a puppet show; her cardboard expression and lifeless lines were so two dimensional it was painful to watch - Olive Oil in the Popeye cartoons had more sex appeal. There was no chemistry between her and Cooper, how could there be, he was over six feet tall and she was so short he had to hold her up in order not to stoop to kiss her in one scene. IMDb can cut this next comment out if it is not permissible to talk about other review sites, but those fawning idiots over at Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a 90% rating in true Rotten Tomatoes lock step fashion, while giving a truly great movie, The Mission, with standout performances by Robert Di Nero, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn, and that won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and whose musical score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, ranked 1st on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) Classic 100 Music in the Movies, well Rotten Tomatoes only gave THAT movie a 65% rating. That's why I take Rotten Tomatoes with a pound of salt and always go to IMDb to see if any movie is any good.
Review of A Farewell to Arms
