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For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
In director Sam Wood's Technicolored romantic war
drama set during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, based upon Ernest
Hemingway's 1950 novel of the same name:
- the opening segment of the detonation of a Nationalist
troop train, prefaced by John Donne's meditational quote on a title
screen: "Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved
in Mankinde: and therefore never send to know For Whom The Bell
Tolls It tolls for thee" - Spain 1937
- the intense scene of blue-eyed, short-haired guerrilla
fighter and peasant refugee Maria (Ingrid Bergman) with idealistic
American mercenary Robert "Roberto" Jordan (Gary Cooper)
fighting on the side of the Republicans in Spain against Franco's
Fascists, telling him how the Nationalists had murdered her parents
and then brutalized her before she was rescued by the guerrilla fighters: "My
father and my mother, I saw them killed. My father was the mayor
of our town and a Republican. When the Nationalists came to town,
they lined up the Republicans against the wall. My father cried out
very loud, 'Long live the Republic!' And then they shot him. But
my mother was not a Republican. She had no politics. But she loved
my father and she couldn't say that. So she just looked at my father
who lay there on his face at her feet, and she said, 'Long live my
husband who was the mayor of this town.' She said it very loud, like
a shriek, and then they shot and she fell, and I wanted to go to
her, but we were all tied - we were tied by the wrists in a long
line of girls and women. And I wanted to be shot too and I was gonna
say, 'Long live the Republic and my mother and my father.' But instead,
there was no more shooting. They, they herded us up the hill and
through the streets to the square..." - he interrupted her when
she was about to describe her rape, and he embraced her
- the famous scene of Robert and Maria with their subsequent
kissing scene: ("I'd like - I don't know how to kiss, or I would
kiss you. Where do the noses go?")
- the conclusion with ill-fated, seriously-injured
hero Jordan's final soliloquy to Maria when, with a broken leg, he
chose to self-sacrifice and be left behind to meet his certain death:
("You go now, Maria...what I do now I do alone. I couldn't do
it if you were here...There's no good-bye, Maria, because we're not
apart"); he assured her that his spirit would live on within
her
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- the final image - Jordan awaiting the approaching,
horse-riding Fascists, and readied behind a Lewish machine; when
they soldiers appeared, he fired the machine gun directly at the
camera, causing smoke to rise from the gun-fire; a bell tolled
his fate in the dissolve ending
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The Opening: (With John Donne's Quote)
Maria's Past Brutalization
"Where do the noses go?"
Ending: Jordan Readied to Fire Lewis Machine Gun
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