For Whom the Bell Tolls (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Sam WoodRelease Date(s)
1943 (October 28, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: C-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C
Review
For what’s billed as a Blu-ray “mastered in 4K from a 35mm restoration facilitated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive,” Kino’s new Blu-ray of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a very problematic, disappointing release. The Ernest Hemingway adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman is restored only in the sense that its original roadshow release version, with a total running time of 166 minutes, including an overture, intermission break and entr’acte (apparently there was no exit music), along with about 30 minutes missing footage long unavailable from at least the late-1950s through the 1990s have been restored back into the picture.
But, overall, it’s really a reconstruction rather than a restoration because, by 2025 standards, the picture quality is almost shockingly sub-par. It was filmed in three-strip Technicolor, and most new video masters derived from this format are sourced from the three black-and-white camera negatives whenever possible. As black-and-white doesn’t fade in the usual sense, the brilliant hues are preserved, and allow for perfect alignment of the three components, through filters each recording one-third of the color spectrum. Outstanding examples of this can be seen in Blu-rays of movies like The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and King Solomon’s Mines. When those black-and-white elements are lost, or if the label considers the film too minor to justify the added expense of mastering three times the amount of film stock, they fall back on secondary, intermediary printing elements, as in the case of some of the early ‘50s Audie Murphy releases from Kino. That also seems to have been the case with the shorter, 130-minute reissue version used as a starting point here.
Further, the restored missing scenes were apparently derived from actual 35mm prints, usually the last resort when remastering a film for home video. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. It appears a great deal of digital tweaking—using 1990s technology—was conducted throughout the picture, presumably to mitigate what would be jarring cuts between the reissue cut and the lower-grade restored footage. Much of the story is set in a cave or nighttime exteriors, and the team behind this remaster may also have opted to drain some of the color as well. Some shots are so drained of color, in fact, they might as well be black-and-white.
The resultant video master doesn’t remotely approach the fine work of the Warner Archive, or even look much like three-color Technicolor. Although some close-ups look reasonably good, virtually the entire film is dull, soft, lacking in detail, with the color alternately from shot-to-shot between adequate to awful, with long stretches looking less like three-strip Technicolor than its immediate predecessor, two-strip Technicolor, the color process used in the 1920s and early ‘30s on movies like King of Jazz and Mystery of the Wax Museum. The flesh tones of the gypsy guerillas are so unnatural they look as if they had been dipped in bronze. Most of the film has a digitally-processed waxy look, and rarely like 35mm film.
In fairness, I think if I had seen this restoration when it was new in the late 1990s, I probably would have been quite pleased. But the lesson here is that a new 4K remastering of an old chemical-digital restoration more than a quarter-century old isn’t necessarily going to work. If any title calls for a from-the-ground-up remastering, For Whom the Bell Tolls is it.
Watching this release makes assessing the film more difficult, particularly some of its production aspects. The film makes extensive use of matte shots, rear-screen projection, etc., yet the image is so soft and murky at times it’s impossible to know what one is looking at from shot to shot.
The story: During the Spanish Civil War, American schoolteacher Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) fights in the International Brigades on the Republican side, against Francisco Franco’s fascist Nationalists. He’s ordered to destroy a bridge with the aid of mostly gypsy anti-fascist guerillas. In their cave hideout, Jordan discovers that their leader, Pablo (Akim Tamiroff), has become intolerably drunk, cowardly, and resentful of Jordan’s presence. It’s agreed that Pablo’s wife, Pilar (Katina Paxinou), take over. She’s assertive, frank, and practical. Also within the group is María (Ingrid Bergman), whose parents were executed and she gang-raped by the fascist Nationalists.
The story is something of an antecedent to later impossible-mission war epics like The Guns of Navarone (though its plot is more like Force 10 from Navarone); mostly gone are Hemingway’s politics. Franco isn’t mentioned by name, and there’s a ludicrous scene where Jordan tries to liken Spanish Republicans (mostly communists, socialists, and anarchists) with the U.S. Republican Party. Instead, the overlong film mostly has its cast lurking about in the mountains, a not-seamless but cleverly edited mixture of real location footage, mattes and miniatures, painted backdrops, and rear-screen projection. Parallel to the action is the improbable romance between María and Jordan. Coop is Coop and Bergman is very good, but never remotely believable as a Spaniard. She alone among the guerillas is spared the bronze-dipping to retain her emphatically Scandinavian features.
Timing allowed this political hot potato of a film to be made at all: in 1943, the Republicans with their Soviet allies fighting the Nationalists, heavily supported by the German Nazis and Italian fascists aligned with U.S. interests, but not immediately before and certainly not at all after. It’s ironic that Sam Wood directed the film, he being archly conservative and soon after the founder and first president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. An old-timer dating back to the early silent era, he brings a workmanlike approach to the material, the picture’s big visual flourishes obviously the work not of Wood but of production designer William Cameron Menzies: there are lots of meticulously-staged scenes, often silhouettes of one or more characters against snowy blue skies, or soldiers clamoring across elaborate soundstage mountain sets.
As with Bergman, the Spaniards are played by a dizzying mixture of nationalities, the best performances coming from Armenian-American Tamiroff, very good as a morally complex “villain”; Russian actor Vladimir Sokoloff as Anselmo, the sweet, elderly guide; and, especially, Greek actress Katina Paxinou as the strong-willed Pilar, whose performance is far and away the picture’s best and most captivating.
The video transfer of For Whom the Bell Tolls is described in detail above. More successful than the image is the DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono), which, unlike the PQ, is up to contemporary standards for a 1943 title. Optional English subtitles are provided on this Region “A” release. Incidentally, somewhat oddly, the film opens with the overture playing over the current Universal logo, then goes to black for the remainder of the overture, then switches to the Paramount logo c. 1943 for the start of the film.
Other than a trailer, the only extra is a new audio commentary track with film historians David Del Valle and Dan Marino.
An expensive but commercially successful film when it was new, For Whom the Bell Tolls on Blu-ray is a major disappointment, with a video transfer that falls way short of 2025 expectations. It really needs an entirely new restoration in this age of 4K video projectors and big home theater screens.
- Stuart Galbraith IV