The Big One Gets Away Again

By Christopher Porterfield

ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

Directed by FRANKLIN J. SCHAFFNER

Screenplay by DENNE BART PETITCLERC

Hemingway and Hollywood have never been a very good match. The moviemakers have tended to play up Papa's most blatant streaks in mawkish romances (A Farewell to Arms), pseudo-profound he-man heroics (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and farragoes of exotic drinks, sports and angst (The Sun Also Rises). The Hemingway adaptation with the most spark left in it today is To Have and Have Not, in which Director Howard Hawks tossed out most of the original novel and wrenched the rest into a racy adventure yarn around Bogart and Bacall.

Islands in the Stream, based on Hemingway's posthumous 1970 novel, is more serious. It is an attempt to capture the elusive strains of tenderness and generosity that could inform Hemingway's writing when he stopped beating his breast. But except for George C. Scott in the leading role, it attempts to do this without anything approaching Hemingway's gifts, tarnished and erratic though they were toward the last. It remains an attempt--earnest and labored. After watching it, one is tempted to say: Come back, Howard Hawks.

The plot concerns Thomas Hudson (Scott), a famous sculptor, twice divorced, living in the Bahamas in 1940. Insofar as Hudson's story is a love story, it refreshingly focuses on his love for his three sons by both marriages (Hart Bochner, Michael-James Wixted, Brad Savage). During a long visit by the boys early in the film, he painfully reaches toward them across gaps of isolation, resentment and pride--his own and sometimes theirs. Later, when the oldest son is shot down while serving as a fighter pilot, Hudson has a bittersweet interlude with the boy's mother (affectingly played by Claire Bloom) and decides to return to the U.S. On the way, he is fatally caught up in the smuggling of Jewish war refugees by small boat into Cuba.

Beauty and Mystery. Denne Bart Petitclerc's script drastically compresses and rearranges Hemingway's story. At times this is all to the good: Petitclerc shears away reams of embarrassingly arch, blustery episodes and mannered barroom colloquies. Too often, though, what he salvages tends toward the simplistic and the soapy. This tendency is hardly helped by the hopelessly stilted direction of Franklin J. Schaffner (who directed Scott to somewhat better effect in Patton). Here is a movie about freedom, art, love and death, and there is not a breath of poetry in it. Indeed, it is most prosaic when it tries to be poetic, as when Hudson muses that the sea "has great beauty and mystery, and she is eternal," or when his middle son's day-long ordeal with a giant marlin that gets away magically triggers a reconciliation with Dad.

Scott can do little with moments like these, but he does wonders with many others. His performance searches out the Hemingway man beneath the macho mask--harsh but affectionate, exacting but forgiving, an aging beach comber sifting through the wreckage of his life for those few irreducible fragments of value that might justify it. He gets a surprisingly strong boost from David Hemmings, the onetime hip photographer in Blow-Up, who here turns in a pungent character portrayal as a local hanger-on equally devoted to Hudson and to rum.

Gilbert Roland's star billing is a mystery. Either it's for old times' sake, or his small role as a refugee-running boat captain is a remnant of the action-on-the-high-seas melodrama that this movie might have been. If the film makers did consciously reject such material in order to concentrate on the gentler, familial themes of Islands, they made a worthy choice. The pity is that they lacked the artistic energy to bring it off.

Christopher Porterfield

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