The Breaking Point is the wiriest of all the adaptations, while The Gun Runners, starring Audie Murphy, is the one Siegel movie I've never seen, but his clipped and succinct editing and storytelling are the nearest thing to Hemingway's prose style in Hollywood movies. There are also two other versions of the same novel: Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950) and Don Siegel's The Gun Runners (1958). The result was To Have And Have Not, which is more Casablanca 2 than Hemingway, but a classic nonetheless. Hemingway dared Howard Hawks to name his worst book, and film it. The exceptions prove my time-tested rule that the worse the book, the better the movie. Later big-budget adaptations such as The Snows Of Kilimanjaro and The Sun Also Rises just lie there on the screen, and The Old Man And The Sea is hampered by naff optical effects and a miscast Spencer Tracy ("The sloppiest picture I ever made," said director John Sturges). Frank Borzage's 1932 version of A Farewell To Arms is certainly a great movie, as sublime and rapturous as anything he made, but Borzage's aesthetic values are the polar opposite of Hemingway's – shimmering and intensely romantic, all his movies feel as if they were shot in heaven – and the result, which fits snugly into the director's canon, has no place at all in the writer's.
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