As popular as he was - and still is no doubt - that Hemingway headspace, mindset and especially his use of the English language (at least in the many movies I've seen over the years based upon his writings) in getting his narrative across remains completely lost on me. Personally speaking, although I've never really read any of Hemingway's prose aside from something back in high school in the mid 70's, pretty much every motion picture adaptation of a Hemingway story has left me cold. The three million dollar epic was headlined by two of Hollywood's greats, Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman - both favourite actors of mine though I feel quite miscast in this instance. While the film itself is well known - based upon the immensely popular story of partisan fighters in the Spanish Civil War by Ernest Hemingway - and was a huge hit with audiences at the time, the technical aspects of the movie probably slipped by most fans of the film. In this, the second part in my series examining a number of motion pictures overlooked and in many cases largely unknown to today's generation of multi-plex weened film audiences, we will be taking a look at the special photographic effects work from one of the biggest films of 1943, Sam Wood's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. The cumbersome Technicolor blimped camera
