The Ernest Hemingway Film Collection

Each of the five films collected in this boxed set is based on a novel or short story by Ernest Hemingway, and while none ever attained “classic” status, there isn't an outright dud in the bunch. A Farewell to Arms (1957), a classic story of love and loss in the snowy Alpine mountains during World War I, features Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones as the star-crossed lovers in this glossy adaptation. The Sun Also Rises (also 1957), perhaps the best movie in the quintet, stars Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, and Errol Flynn as members of the “lost generation”—expatriate Americans who flooded Europe during the 1920s—in a script that hews closely to Hemingway's novel (Flynn, in particular, impresses as a dissipated rake). Similar thematic territory is covered in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, based on the much-anthologized short story. Under My Skin (1950) features John Garfield as a crooked jockey in a loose adaptation of Hemingway's short story “My Old Man.” The author's semiautobiographical Nick Adams stories supply the basis for Adventures of a Young Man (1962), in which West Side Story's Richard Beymer, playing Nick, is upstaged by supporting actor Paul Newman, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for his scene-stealing performance. DVD extras include audio commentaries, restoration comparisons, and “making-of” featurettes. Recommended. (E. Hulse)