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Drama. An American dynamiter (Gary Cooper), fighting with the Republicans in Spain, goes to the mountain stronghold of a guerilla band and with the aid of the guerillas blows up a bridge. The guerillas escape, including the girl with whom the American has fallen in love (Ingrid Bergman), but the American is mortally wounded and remains with a machine-gun to shoot it out with the attacking enemy cavalry.

On the surface this film version follows the Hemingway novel fairly faithfully, even to the inclusion of much Hemingway dialogue. But it is essentially a superficial resemblance, and the Hemingway depth, intensity, passion are translated into picture-postcard flatness. It is Hemingway's story degutted, or, more politely, de-motivated. The direction, in terms of narration, is painstakingly detailed. The mountain scenery is magnificent. Characterisations are carefully built up. But compared with what it might have been, this is a child's coloured storybook - except for one or two brief moments. Those moments are when Ingrid Bergman rises above the beauty-parlour make-up, the unearthly spotless cleanliness, to convey an emotional upwelling with memorable mastery; or when Katina Paxinou, as the woman guerilla leader Pilar, fights her way through the self-conscious pretty-prettiness to suggest a power of character and a richness of experience worthy of Hemingway's original. There is some competent, very competent, acting from supporting players, as from Gary Cooper. But the film remains essentially melodrama, magnificent but shallow.

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