THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701250045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: 82 lines
SINCE 1932, when Hollywood first adapted ``A Farewell to Arms'' to star Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, the movies have fitfully wrestled with the imagery of writer Ernest Hemingway.
Since Hemingway's literary power centered on his ability to make words suggest more than they said, adapting them for screen hasn't been easy.
Now, a new film attempts to reveal the forces that shaped this great American literary figure. ``In Love and War,'' directed by Oscar winner Richard Attenborough (``Gandhi''), chronicles the romance between 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway and 26-year-old Agnes von Kurowsky, who was his nurse for five months in an Army hospital in Italy during World War I.
The relationship apparently inspired Hemingway to write ``A Farewell to Arms,'' although the movie's plot is markedly different from the real-life events.
Kurowsky, discovered living in Florida 10 years after Hemingway's suicide, always claimed the romance was unconsumated and that she felt herself too old for the young man whom she called ``Kid.'' Not until after her death were the love letters between the two revealed in the book ``Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes Von Kurowsky'' by Henry S. Villard and James Nagel.
Villard, a wartime friend of Hemingway, was himself in love with Kurowsky. The late Villard believed that the Kurowsky affair shaped the rest of Hemingway's life - and particularly his attitude toward women. Kurowsky accepted a proposal of marriage from the fledgling writer when he went back to America in 1919. Shortly thereafter, though, claiming that the age difference between them was too much, she wrote to Hemingway and called off the relationship. Subsequently, she married an Italian nobleman.
Chris O'Donnell, the young actor who has starred in ``Scent of a Woman,'' ``Batman Forever'' and the recent ``The Chamber,'' says he was undaunted by the awesome assignment of playing Hemingway.
``Like Hemingway, I grew up near Chicago and, like him, I vacationed with the family in Michigan each year,'' O'Donnell said. ``There was a Midwestern identity. I read everything by him and about him I could find, but I tried not to think too much about what he became. I was playing him from a cocky, naive, teen-ager up to the beginning of adulthood. I had to be aware of what I was NOT supposed to know.''
Sandra Bullock is cast as Von Kurowsky. It is a marked break from her pert, contemporary roles.
``It's fortunate that no one knows Agnes - no one knows her mannerisms,'' Bullock said when she took time out from filming ``Speed 2.'' ``I think Chris had much the more difficult assignment. Everyone thinks they know Hemingway, even if they don't. They have advance ideas about how he should act and look.''
In spite of her All-American image, Bullock actually grew up amid European artistry. Her mother was an opera singer in Germany where young Sandra often performed as a part of the opera's children's chorus.
``It was an entirely different challenge for me to play a woman from 1918,'' Bullock said. ``The body language of how those women moved is even different. Richard (Attenborough) told me I had to get outside Sandra Bullock entirely. Everyone thinks of me in such contemporary terms. I'm this feisty, modern girl. To a lot of people, I'm just the chick that drove the bus. But every time Richard caught me sneaking in anything modern, he'd draw a letter `B' in the air to signal to me.''
Bullock feels that the Hemingway-Kurowsky affair was doomed from the first.
``Today, the age difference would have meant nothing, but then . . . it was too much. And I see the volatile side of the young Hemingway. He would have been her downfall. Stability was not something he could offer.''
O'Donnell feels that Hemingway never got over her. ``She was the woman against whom he judged all other women for the rest of his life. She was the idealized woman. Perhaps he made her more perfect in his own mind than she was, but he never wrote with such tenderness about another woman as he did about Catherine Barkley in `A Farewell to Arms,' and it's generally believed that's Agnes.''
On his way back to work playing Robin, the boy wonder, in ``Batman and Robin,'' due in theaters this summer, O'Donnell said, ``I really feel that if this affair had turned out differently, Hemingway's life would have been different. He might not have been the great writer he became, but, on the other hand, he might have been happier.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by New Line Cinema
Hemmingway (Chris O'Donnell) courts his wartime nurse (Sandra
Bullock)