For Whom?

(See Cover)

In a human omelet which included Dorothy Lamour and Myrna Loy, an audience of 2,089 packed into Manhattan's Rivoli Theater to witness the most important screen premiere since Gone With the Wind--the first showing of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

For months, for years, the buildup had been developing; and not just the buildup but all the rest--the astronomically expanding budget, the ten thousand rumors and denials of political censorship, the interminable and ill-explained delays, like those whirs, buzzes and hangings which take place behind the curtain on the night Hamlet turns up drunk in a Hawaiian skirt. The audience was getting restless. But it was still eager. It knew Paramount had in Ernest Hemingway's novel the possibilities of one of the best pictures, greatest popular entertainments and most colossal money-makers ever produced. It wanted to see the new superproduction, the Gone With the Wind with hair on its chest and ideology in its hair. It wanted to see precisely for whom, in Paramount's endlessly considered and fabulously invested opinion, The Bell did, or did not, toll.

As it turned out, the tremendous Bell, upon whose casting Paramount had spent three years and nearly three million dollars, tolled for nobody in particular, and tolled off key at that.

Feat and Defeat. There was fine stuff in it, in great ill-digested, nervous chunks. But For Whom the Bell Tolls was not, by the kindest stretching of critical standards, a good picture. Nor was it reliable entertainment. Nor was the likelihood that it would pay its way more than a string of subjunctives.* It was, on a grand scale, a defeat of Hollywood by Hollywood. Censorship defeated it, and timidity; heavy investment defeated it, and pretentiousness; the very expectation of the public defeated it; and the desperate, driven, split, muddled desire to make a great picture and a great hit. It was a spectacular public demonstration of a fact often neglected in Hollywood--the fact that great entertainment depends upon some degree of good artistry, and that the effective functioning of artistry can be crippled by too anxious attention to entertainment.

For the person who was most likely to salvage the picture was also the best artist in the company, and the most simply attentive to an artist's job. Whoever else may have fumbled at the rope or muffled the clapper, the 27-year-old Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman, hit the Bell such a valiant and far-sounding clang that there had been nothing like it since her great compatriot Greta Garbo enchanted half the world.

Whatever might be said for and against the production--and there was much to say--one fact was beyond argument: a great new star had been born; perhaps even, many felt, a great new actress.

The Great New Star. Five years ago, when David Oliver Selznick, like a disguised Zeus, first started pawing up the turf and lowing in her vicinity, Ingrid Bergman was no easily-carried-away Europa. She was turning down offers, with the cool statement that she was doing very nicely as she was.

Nobody could argue the point. Her last three pictures had won her an international reputation. The Stockholm Daily News had named her as one of Sweden's ten outstanding women. It was only a year since she had led a fan-magazine poll as the most popular screen actress, any weight or country, in Sweden.* Although she was being sought by every major studio in Hollywood, it seemed to her a little worse than foolish to let anyone, at any price, try to improve on her life.

By that time, however, one of the cagiest men in one of the cooniest communities in the U.S. had seen Miss Bergman's Intermezzo. He usually got what he was after; and he was determined to get her. While calm Miss Bergman sat in Stockholm flicking off her wrist offers which nearly every actress in Europe would have rolled over and begged for, she reckoned without David O. Selznick. In that failure of reckoning began a sort of duel, and a sort of wooing, as rare in Hollywood as victorious talent.

Beauty & the Beast. It was simple enough, from Miss Bergman's point of view. Look at Charles Boyer since he went to the States, tiptoeing his great abilities across roles too thin to support a minimum human intelligence. Look at all the individual talents, as inimitable and irreplaceable as thumbprints, which had been turned into just so many highly decorative zombies. "Hollywood," she told the press, "has a queer way of taking an individual and fitting her into the American mold. I have worked hard to develop my style and I don't want anything to do with bathing suits and plucked eyebrows."

This was the sort of talk the Hollywood pashas had heard for years from' fourth-raters and sour-grape sideliners. If a proved professional talked like that it was just a come-on. The proper reaction was either to snort your opinion and move off or to up your offer. They upped their offers--and clonked in mild faints again as Miss Bergman again said, no thank you. But this sort of talk suddenly dazzled David Selznick with a new, if incredible, idea. The idea was that Miss Bergman meant precisely what she said. She was genuinely less interested in becoming one of the apotheosized queen bees in the dream hive of millions, less interested even in great wealth, than she was in getting good parts and doing them as well as she knew how without interference. That, accordingly, was the only basis on which to approach her. And on that basis, for twelve months, David Selznick sedulously stalked his prey.

This protracted wheedling of Beauty by what Beauty regarded as the Beast might have gone on until Miss Bergman inherited the shawl of Ouspenskaya but for a second Selznick brainstorm. Selznick decided that vociferous blandishments, promises and temptations by cable were still a shade too Hollywood, and quit wearying the wires with them. This was a task, he now realized, for flesh and blood. Considering Miss Bergman's mental picture of an American female executive, the casting of the role was brilliantly lucky. He sent over a particularly tactful lady named Kay Brown. And that did it. Miss Bergman was braced to resist something in unshaven tweeds with a Cremo breath and a voice like a moose decoy. What she met was "so sweet and human that I decided that anyone she worked for" (Mr. Selznick walked up the walls in devilish glee) "couldn't be nearly so crazy as I expected." When, in early April 1939, the Queen Mary docked at Pier 90, the remarkable Miss Brown had in tow the richest screen potentiality of a decade.

"The Palmolive Garbo" was David Selznick's epithet for his new property. The hard-veined, soft-souled gentlemen of the press felt differently. There was something about Miss Bergman--they clawed the air for adequate words--which made them coo and baa like fatuous old uncles. "Lunching with her," sighed Thornton Delehanty, "is like sitting down to an hour or so of conversation with a charming and highly intelligent orchid." An A.P. feature writer uttered the glad cry, "As unspoiled as a fresh Swedish snowfall." Bosley Crowther in the Times, after some startling lyricism involving a Viking's sweetheart, Ivory Soap, peaches, cream and Dresden china, concluded: "This reporter would like to go on record that he has never met a star who compares. . . ."

The ladies have been less abandoned in their eulogies, but even among them Miss Bergman has managed very nicely. She even got past the Scylla and Charybdis of the screen press without shipping any water: Hedda Hopper has had nothing but good to say of her, and Miss Bergman is probably the only woman in Hollywood who can say of Lolly Parsons, with transparent sincerity, that she is "really sort of sweet."

Hollywood itself, normally a paradise of private snidery, feels just as the press does. Not only is Ingrid Bergman without an enemy in the whole community: people like the way she works, too. If she muffs a line, her apology is so obviously sincere that there is not a man or woman on the set who would not overwork to please her.

Victor Fleming, who directed her in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, calls her Angel. Sam Wood calls her "a fine wholesome girl," and gracefully credits her and Cooper with the excellent morale of the whole outfit during difficulties on The Bell's location. Deafening Gregory Ratoff shouts: "Haffing diracted Meese Boergmann in her foerst two Amerrican peetures, I vould say puzzitiffly I hope I do de same tvanty-two timeps more. She is sansahtional!"

What Are Her Assets? As with the press and Hollywood, so also with the nation. But not even David Selznick's Palmolive epithet, though it is first-rate poetry, affords an analysis of Miss Bergman's peculiar assets. There has been no such analysis. Yet in some degree her assets can be listed:

> The abundance, in Hollywood, of women who are much more like each other than they are like Miss Bergman.

> Miss Bergman's particular kind of beauty. By external standards it is unremarkable. What makes it hard to compete with is that, coming from within, it is the beauty of an individual.

> The individual herself, who happens to be an uncommonly well-balanced and charming one.

Miss Bergman was an only child. Her mother died when she was three. Her father, a big, merry, popular photographer-artist, who liked to flex his basso in the bathtub, hoped his daughter would become an opera star, and early accustomed her to the enjoyment of routines before cameras. Ingrid was deeply attached to her father, but even before he died, when she was 13, she was much alone and without playmates. As soon as she learned to walk, and about as naturally, she learned her famous self-sufficiency and intactness. And she learned the thing that made it possible and preferable--her total absorption in acting. It began with rigging herself in her mother's old dresses. It went on with spouting poetry--any old poetry so long as it gave her histrionic impulses a canter. Later, at boarding school, though she was a' prize winner at declamation (see cut, p. 60), her tall, sensitive awkwardness increased her isolation.

Such solitude, which destroys some people, strengthens others. It seems to have strengthened her.

Born into a moderately well-to-do family of the upper middle class, Ingrid Bergman is, in addition, a European gentlewoman, who has lived less among the stultified members of her class than among the cultivated, the flexible, the gifted and the gay. As such, in Europe, she would be no more than an idealization of an attractive, not uncommon type. As such, in the U.S., she is as noticeable as a Negro President.

Something Rare. Even without talent, Miss Bergman would bring something rare to U.S. films. To cite one single asset which is hers almost exclusively, her photographed flesh looks neither like a Crane fixtures ad nor sponge rubber nor the combined efforts of a fashionable portraitist and a rural mortician; it looks like flesh. Many people, since life must go on, find this attractive, even when it surprises them to see it on the screen. The same thing goes for her poise, sincerity, reticence, sensitiveness and charm.

Also for talent, of which Miss Bergman has a lot. And she knows how to use it. Hollywood's talented people have developed marvelous skill in a tradition as rigid and elaborate as Javanese dancing, and almost as remote from life. Miss Bergman comes of a tradition in which an interest in realism, in the huge and various wealth of actual life, is as natural to a good actress as to a good novelist.

The U.S. will always like its great dancers and ritualists with good reason. But its fondness for Miss Bergman indicates, as well, an appetite for the sudden lights, edged shades and flexibilities of reality. As an actress, Miss Bergman has just one basic rule: "Never speak a line which does not make sense for the part." She is probably the best reader of lines in the business just now; and it appears to pay. Ingrid Bergman's first five U.S. pictures have brought her to an enviable position, which, for better or worse, her present role destroys for her forever. Hitherto people have liked her with the illusion of personal discovery: she has been the most widely recognized unrecognized player in the country. Everybody waited for her Maria with almost unhealthily sharpened interest.

The New Picture. The lovers and guerrillas and actions in Ernest Hemingway's novel were motivated and given their meaning by political intensities and by depths of human strength, weakness and need which Paramount has seen fit, or been forced, to remove. But the screen version of Ernest Hemingway's novel is still a story of love and violence in the Spanish Civil War. Gary Cooper is Robert Jordan, Hemingway's young Montana schoolteacher who has come to Spain to fight for democracy everywhere. Gary Cooper, over the years, has so cornered the beloved American romantic virtues of taciturnity, melancholy, tenderness, valor and masculine gauche grace that he has become, for millions, a sort of Abraham Lincoln of American sex. He plays modestly, sometimes beautifully.

As the guerrilla leader, Pablo, Hemingway's terrible symbol of a man devastated by the fear of death, Akim Tamiroff has some magnificent, all but tragic moments. As Pilar, Hemingway's salty symbol of Spain's people, Greek Actress Katina Paxinou would walk away with any less leaden show. Her hawk-fine face, wallowing walk, Goyaesque style and Noah Beery laugh assure her a rich future, if only she can find roles spacious enough. As the Soviet journalist, Karkov, Konstantin Shayne makes his characterization of a political commissar the most electrifying bit in years.

But those are the surprises. The rest of the time these actors go corky on their lines, overact operatically or sit and talk. Above all they talk. A tremendous effort has been made in this adaptation to keep Author Hemingway's characters intact. But the adaptation is too literary, too theatrical.

So is the cinema treatment of the central action of Hemingway's book. In Paramount's version Jordan's dynamiting of the strategic bridge is a genuinely exciting bit of suspense. But two dozen grade-B melodramas handle the same theme better every year.

And on the screen Ernest Hemingway's most delicate episodes, the nights that Jordan and Maria spend together in a sleeping robe, are expertly elusive. Paramount's answer to one wag's question, whether the Hays Office would let sleeping bags lie, is: Yes, but don't go near the water. The closest study cannot determine whether either or both the lovers are or are not in or out of the bag at any time.

Equally deft is Paramount's political touch & go. The rumors started as far back as the spring of 1941 that outside forces were tampering with the script and even with the production. Paramount's denials were prompt. So were everybody else's.

Paramount must be credited, to be sure, with letting Mr. Cooper murmur the no longer sensational news that Spain was a training ground for World War II. But that is about as impressive as the hind sight volubility of an upside-down parrot. Considering the particular hour and climate of world history which the Bell dramatizes, Paramount's executives have kept an almost divine political detachment. Says Chairman of the Board Adolph Zukor: "It is a great picture, without political significance. We are not for or against anybody." Says Director Sam Wood: "It is a love story against a brutal background. It would be the same love story if they were on the other side." Says Paramount President Barney Balaban: "We don't think it will make any trouble."

It won't. For when all the political whoopdedoodle about the film is over, there remains the only fact that, when all is said & done, anybody cares about --the fact that, whatever Hollywood's Bell tolled for, Ingrid Bergman rang it.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Hi Diddle Diddle (Pola Negri, Adolphe Menjou; TIME, July 26).

Lift Your Heads (British Ministry of Information, OWI; TIME, July 12).

Spitfire (Leslie Howard, David Niven; TIME, June 28).

Coney Island (Betty Grable, George Montgomery, Cesar Romero; TIME, June 21).

Stage Door Canteen (Show-business people galore; TIME, June 14).

* Nevertheless, Paramount will road-show it, until 1945, at 75-c- and $1.10 minimum (matinee & evening), demanding 70% straight percentage and guaranteeing the exhibitor a 12 1/2% profit. For GWTW, M.G.M. took 70%, guaranteed 10%.

* No. 1 today, according to the Swedish Gallup Institute: Greer (Mrs. Miniver} Garson; No. 2, Miss Bergman.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.