Nominated for 9 Academy Awards, Paramount’s blockbuster adaptation of the ‘hot’ Ernest Hemingway novel was given a grand Road Show release, then cut by over half an hour for general audiences. Poor studio curatorship left the biggest picture of its day in a restoration limbo. This new disc works with the existing UCLA Archive restoration. A few visual issues can’t diminish the power of the drama or the performances of Ingrid Bergman, Katina Paxinou, Akim Tamiroff and Gary Cooper; the production design of William Cameron Menzies represents the peak of Old Hollywood moviemaking in Technicolor, as does the film score by Victor Young.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
943 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 166 min. / Street Date October 28, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, Katina Paxinou, Vladimir Sokoloff, Arturo de Córdova, Mikhail Rasumny, Fortunio Bonanova, Eric Feldary, Victor Varconi, Joseph Calleia, Lilo Yarson, Alexander Granach, Adia Kuznetzoff, Leonid Snegoff, Leo Bulgakov, Duncan Renaldo, Frank Puglia, Pedro de Cordoba, Michael Visaroff, Martin Garralaga, Jean Del Val, Jack Mylong. Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Yvonne De Carlo, Konstantin Shayne.
Cinematography: Ray Rennahan
Production Designer: William Cameron Menzies
Art Directors: Hans Drier, Haldane Douglas, Bertram C. Granger
Film Editors: John F. Link, Sherman Todd
Visual Effects: Jan Domela, Farciot Edouart, Gordon Jennings, Irmin Roberts
Music Composer: Victor Young
Screenplay Written by Dudley Nichols from the novel by Ernest Hemingway
Executive producer: Buddy DeSylva
Produced and Directed by Sam Wood

For Whom the Bell Tolls was a gigantic Road Show attraction in 1943, one with a controversial subject. The Spanish Civil War had ended only four years before. Franco was sitting out WW2 as a neutral leaning toward Germany, and America was strongly divided on the issue. Film critic James Agee was incensed by the film’s attempt to downplay the politics by blurring the official names of the combatants. Yet there is no question which side Hemingway’s American hero is fighting for: the enemy, Franco’s rebels, wear German-style helmets.

The picture was a big undertaking in wartime, a Technicolor epic with Hollywood’s biggest stars, partly filmed on location. It was originally released in exclusive runs as a Road Show with an intermission, and just two showings a day. The trouble began when the film was cut down for general exhibition, with the full-length film left unprotected. For Whom badly needed a digital restoration, but the film elements to rescue it may no longer exist.

Dudley Nichols’ screenplay closely follows Hemingway’s book. In the middle of the Civil War, American volunteer Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) lends his engineering skills to the Republicans. He’s sent into the mountains to enlist a band of guerillas led by the murderous Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) to dynamite a strategic bridge during an all-out attack. Jordan befriends the aged guide Anselmo (Vladimir Sokoloff) and Pablo’s former woman, fiery guerilla Pilar (Katina Paxinou). The others (Arturo de Córdoba, Mikhail Rasumny, Fortunio Bonanova, Victor Varconi) are a selection of amusing and sentimental cutthroats. Pilar and Jordan solicit help from a neighboring village, in the person of chieftain El Sordo (Joseph Calleia). But the real prize for the Yankee is María (Ingrid Bergman), a young massacre survivor helped through the trauma by Pilar. Encamped in the rugged mountains, ‘Roberto’ and María become lovers.

The wartime easing of censorship restrictions gave For Whom the Bell Tolls a generous boost in the excitement department, with the mildly controversial ‘sleeping bag scene.’ The lovers are so gone on each other that Pilar runs down the hill laughing for them. It’s easy to conclude that they are making love during every fade or discreet cutaway. Greek actress Katina Paxinou steals the film, hands down. The camera loves her as much as it does Bergman. The dawn of the final day is first seen on Pilar’s face as she lies on a rock, waiting to begin a guerilla attack. Paxinou took home a Best Supporting Oscar for her work, the film’s only win.

Akim Tamiroff’s Pablo causes serious problems in the guerilla group because he resents Jordan’s taking over command. Pilar never trusts Pablo. He undergoes a change of heart and joins the battle, yet remains a selfish and ruthless killer. Tamiroff, Paxinou and Joseph Calleia would all become favorite actors for Orson Welles; each has a great, outsized character to play. Vladimir Sokoloff is an old softie with a kind heart. Mikhail Rasumny’s foolish gypsy hunts rabbits during a battle. Fortunio Bonanova was the Opera coach in Citizen Kane and the Opera fan in Kiss Me Deadly. He has some good scenes as a maddeningly non-committal comrade.

We suspect that Ernest Hemingway had Gary Cooper in mind when he formulated the Robert Jordan character. He says he’s fighting Fascists in Spain so he won’t have to fight them at home, which may have been a way to pre-empt thoughts of communist ideology. Cooper projects Hemingway’s macho-humanitarian masculinity, adding a dash of ‘Cooper Cutes’, pixie-ish Frank Capra moments where he breaks character to flash boyish smiles and rub noses with María. The action stops more than once to allow Cooper and Bergman ‘special’ moments together. A couple of these appear to be retakes, adjustments to up the romance quotient.

For Whom is Ingrid Bergman’s first feature film in color. A ragged head of short hair transforms her enough to take on the character of María, a coltish youngster learning hard lessons about life, love and war in just a few days up in the Sierra de Guadarrama. The Swedish actress is of course the number one reason to see the movie; she glows with life. Cooper wisely gives her the spotlight. He hangs back with he-man poses and returns her girlish gushing with soulful, conflicted looks.

That short curly hairdo made the cover of Time magazine. Bergman said that women rushed out to get that haircut after seeing the movie — and then complained that they looked like drowned rats. The caption on the magazine cover reads,

For Whom the Bell Tolls is also the pinnacle of a certain kind of Hollywood artifice. Sam Wood directed the star performances, but the camera direction was fully the work of Production Designer William Cameron Menzies. The movie is designed down to the last detail of each shot. Most every scene that’s not a close-up or doesn’t take place in a cave seems to be a special visual effect. Countless tight angles use matte paintings for part of the frame, often wedging a sliver of blue sky up in a corner somewhere. Elaborate scenes are designed almost as would be an animated film, sometimes with cheated perspectives: a flight of planes taking off,  a train being dynamited,  a convoy of trucks climbing switchback mountain roads.

The ‘formal’ visuals mix location shots with a great deal of studio work, on elaborate sets and the process stage. Little or nothing was improvised; most shots are tightly composed and locked-down static. The matte effects mostly require that the camera stay still, which sometimes makes the show feel like a sophisticated silent film, but in full Technicolor. In general, Menzies seems to prefer static shots over a moving camera anyway.

Menzies was also fond of big close-ups, far more intense than the norm. Cooper and Bergman are given many huge choker close-ups, with a field of focus so shallow that the glints on their eyes are sharp but their ears are soft. Since Menzies wasn’t at all a director of actors, perhaps he wanted to ‘direct’ the intensity of his actors with his camera.

We can easily spot William Cameron Menzies’ personal design predilections: high horizons, odd fences in silhouette, and deep-focus stylized sets stand out sharply in movies as different as  Kings Row,  Address Unknown and  Invaders from Mars. In For Whom he uses eccentic compositions to telegraph impending doom. He essentially squeezes his characters into extreme parts of the film frame. In the very first scene with Roberto and his comrade Kashkin, Menzies masks away a big piece of the screen with a large, dark rock. Key images of Roberto and María are likewise all but blocked off the screen by rocks that obstruct our view. If the lovers don’t dominate the image, they can’t control their lives; it’s Menzies’ semaphore signal for death.

The big battle at the bridge is practically a movie-within-a-movie, an extended master sequence carefully worked out through all production departments, under designer Menzies’ direction. The stages of the attack establish spatial relationships between various guard shacks, the attacking guerillas and a road down which advances a line of armored enemy vehicles. A Cooper stand-in climbs onto the bridge’s superstructure for long shots. We realize how much of the location is being faked when troops crossing the bridge partly disappear behind a matte line. Any composite effect in Technicolor had to be done in triplicate. The effects men and lab experts must have needed a factory system to grind out all those near-perfect visual illusions.

The big bridge scene is an historical ‘event’ placed evenly between Buster Keaton’s silent  The General and David Lean’s  Bridge on the River Kwai. It is capped by a ‘moment of truth’ challenge that pushes the limit of dramatic contrivance – and succeeds. To escape, Pablo’s guerillas must race their horses across a gap that for several seconds exposes them to enemy fire, like ducks in a shooting gallery. It’s as ritualized as a bullfight or a game of Russian Roulette. It seems unlikely that any of the guerillas could run the gauntlet without being hit. Thus we are set up for Hemingway’s intense emotional finale.

The ending leaves such an indelible memory, the film’s soundtrack album had no text on its cover, just a close-up of an anguished, tearful María, listening to Roberto’s heart-wringing farewell. Ms. Bergman becomes the Technicolor queen of the bleary, soggy-eyed monster close-up. The trembling María seems ready to explode from the screen.

The emotionally-overpowering sequence also slip in more ‘censor forbidden’ content from the book, which tells us that María believes she has conceived Roberto’s child. The movie can’t say that directly, but it does retain an earlier speech by María’s dialogue about ‘a dream in which she meets Roberto’s mother, carrying a baby.’  Roberto’s delirious farewell to María, with its incoherent repetitions, implies that she has a responsibilty to live, to give birth to his child —  “You are all there will ever be of me.”   Unlike other movies under the Production Code, For Whom does not offer an alternate ‘chaste’ explanation for that time spent together in a sleeping bag.

Sometime after the end of its Road Show run For Whom the Bell Tolls was heavily edited for general release. The missing scenes for the Road Show version were only recovered years later, and then they had to come from Technicolor prints left on deposit in film archives. What’s obviously indicated is a full digital recomposite from color separations. If they still existed, we’d put this picture at the head of the line for a major digital restoration.

The cut-down shortened the movie by a full 34 minutes. A substantial part of that gap comes from Overture, Entr’acte and Curtain music, all played over black. Cuts to dialogue scenes were made throughout the movie, removing explanations for character relationships, as well as some of the best acting from Katina Paxinou, Akim Tamiroff and the supporting cast. One deletion removes several shots of Tamiroff’s lip dripping blood — those censors really had an aversion to showing blood on the screen, especially in Technicolor.

The film’s single main deletion is an extended flashback sequence. Pablo seems like little more than a surly cutthroat, but Pilar explains that was was once a great guerilla leader. Seizing a town held by the Fascists, Pablo personally executes a quartet of villains. The killing then gets out of hand — Pablo’s mob of farmers torments the rest of the prisoners and then throws them from a high cliff, one after another. Pilar remembers that some of the victims weren’t bad men at all. The sequence was dropped for time but possibly for content as well: it’s both unsually brutal and uncomfortably political. The moment the war ended, elected conservatives would go on the political attack against ‘premature anti-fascists’ — the main focus being the Spanish Civil War.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of For Whom the Bell Tolls is not a new restoration. The publicity text says that the edition ‘was mastered’ — not re-mastered — ‘in 4K from a 35mm restoration facilitated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.’  UCLA’s long-ago effort was quite an undertaking, because the best they could do was assemble the least-flawed film material they could find. The audio for the Overture and Entr’acte came from a veteran projectionist who preserved the footage by squirreling it away in secret.

UCLA could not really restore the film. The required original Technicolor matrices, which may have no longer existed. We’re told that UCLA’s work involved using The standard version scenes have better color and are quite sharp. The restored Road Show scenes were sourced from a Technicolor print held by the Library of Congress. Therefore, the image quality in the added sections does dip a little. Those scenes have blocky contrast and duller colors — Pilar’s ruddy complexion can become a shiny bronze.

Ten years ago a German company brought out a Region B Blu-ray that did good work with the reconstruction created by UCLA. We’re pretty sure that Kino’s mastering job scans the same source in 4K, but we still like the old OOP German disc more. The image on the Kino disc is cleaner and more stable, but they’ve chosen to darken many of the night scenes and much of the dawn attack sequence. The image feels more harsh, with flattened color values in the countless matte composite special effects. Many of the mattes now stick out more than they ever did, making them feel more artificial than they should. The rear-projection special effects always seemed soft, with more grain.

That said, much of the show is improved — especially the daylight scenes up in the Sierra Nevadas. Ingrid Bergman’s glowing performance is not compromised, and the audio has been cleaned up fairly well. Adding immeasurably is Victor Young’s stirring, Spanish-flavored romantic music score. The tense and exciting show can still put audiences through the wringer, both for action and emotions.

Back in 1943, For Whom the Bell Tolls was the biggest Hollywood production since Gone With the Wind. If only it had been preserved as well as that Selznick blockbuster. Kino’s sole extra is a full audio commentary from David Del Valle, with Dan Marino. 166 minutes is quite a lot of time to fill!

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements:
Audio Commentary by Film Historian David Del Valle and Film Historian/Producer Dan Marino
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 30, 2025
(7414toll)

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