Member-only story
Ernest Hemingway & Gary Cooper
The Story of a Friendship
A Farewell to Arms was the first novel by Ernest Hemingway to be filmed, released by Paramount in 1932. Hemingway described it as an “abomination”, although there was something about its star, Gary Cooper.
Eight years later, in 1940, Hemingway heavily promoted Gary Cooper to play Robert Jordan in the upcoming production of For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway had sold the rights for $135,000 plus a percentage), with Cooper playing Jordan. Hemingway assured everyone that he actually had Cooper in mind when he created Jordan, and that Jordan’s innate goodness and integrity was all based on Cooper’s own.
And although Hemingway thought that Sam Wood’s 1943 film captured his novel well (Max Perkins, Hemingway’s literary editor, did not), it was the performance of Cooper that, for Hemingway, made the movie come alive, at the same time helping to sell tens of thousands of copies of the novel.
And Hemingway is right. Gary Cooper pulls off the young idealistic American saboteur, who joins a bunch of Spanish guerrilla fighters during the Spanish Civil War extremely well. But then Cooper was an actor who always portrayed himself, therefore his characters had to be good and honest people, as he was. It was good casting, and the film did well and still holds together pretty well to this day.
