When Papa Was a Boy

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. Time has given Hemingway's life an aura of the magical. Hence this is an enchanted movie in the same way that forests and sleeping beauties and prince charmings in children's storybooks are enchanted. Using ten of the autobiographical Nick Adams tales, including a capsule version of A Farewell to Arms, Scriptwriter A. E. Hotchner and the producer, the late Jerry Wald, have fashioned a reel-life pastiche that bears less resemblance to Hemingway's real life than to his stories.

Yet, purists who rush in to charge esthetic vandalism may be ill advised. The film is innocuous and nostalgically charming rather than pretentious. Its basic emotion, a ruminative sadness welling from the pastness of the past, is established in the opening hunting and fishing scenes in virginal upper Michigan lake country. The script pertinently explores the family conflict between Hemingway's mother (Jessica Tandy), a high-minded, iron-whimmed culture coach ("After you've practiced the viola there'll be time enough for hunting"), and his father (Arthur Kennedy), a gentle, outdoors-loving doctor who either ran away from or yielded to wifely pressures. This parental tug of war became part of the permanent tension of Hemingway's life and work, the he-man v. esthete contradiction in his personality.

As the young Hemingway, Richard Beymer is outrageously handsome (as was Hemingway), but much too callow. He is less the hero to whom things happen, in classic Hemingway fashion, than the gape-mouthed onlooker before whom life stages some of its sardonic little spectacles. He breaks off, edgily, with his home-town fiancee; he sees his father perform a Caesarean, without anesthesia, on an Indian squaw; he lights out for the big world via the hobo jungles and meets a punch-drunk ex-champion fighter. As the mentally woozy old "Battler," Paul Newman splats fist into palm in a ring-conditioned reflex, gropes spastically for the thoughts in his fogged-up brain, and achieves a vividly unflawed integrity of characterization that rebukes every lazy actor who ever let his own personality rub off on a part.

In any list of screen discredits, Susan Strasberg would rank high for her interpretation of the role of the nurse who inspired the character of Farewell's Gatherine Barkley. She plays it like a Manhattan West Side Camille without the cough. The film drags badly at this point and begins to conjure up dreadful possible sequels, e.g., Hemingway in Pamplona, Hemingway at Toots Shor's, Papa and "the Kraut."

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