hen movie moguls got scared by TV in the 1950s, they turned to Hemingway—among other sources and subjects, of course—to demonstrate that the very bigness of the big screen still made it better than its little competitor. The resulting movies—The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Sun Also Rises (1957), A Farewell to Arms (1957), Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), and their spiritual predecessor, 1943’s For Whom the Bell Tolls—are big, bloated productions over-reliant on exotic locales and macho posturing. Though these were all adaptations of Hemingway’s fiction, they drew heavily on the myth of the man himself, deploying his larger-than-life persona both for cinematic thrills and award-worthy prestige (the dreadful For Whom the Bell Tolls got nine Oscar nods).
Now that TV—and especially premium cable—is flexing its own macho muscles, it was perhaps just a matter of time before the siren song of Papa caught HBO’s ears. (Faulkner is on his way, too.) But the network has introduced a very welcome twist: Their upcoming movie Hemingway & Gellhorn is, as the title suggests, not only about the author of The Old Man and the Sea (adapted in 1958) and so on, but also Martha Gellhorn, a writer equally worthy (perhaps more so) of the biopic treatment. And if the nearly five-minute trailer thatjust surfaced online is any indication, Gellhorn, played by Nicole Kidman, is even more front-and-center in this movie than her one-time husband (played by Clive Owen):
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