Henry King's 1957 film adaptation of Hemingway's Lost Generation classic features Tyrone Power as Jake Barnes, writer for the Paris Herald, whose cynicism is only increased by the war injury which has left him impotent; Ava Gardner as Brett Ashley, with whom Barnes has a platonic affair; and Mel Ferrer as Robert Cohn, the controversial character portrayed as the couple's sometime friend and constant nemesis. King captures with great flavor the Paris of their aimless meanderings, and takes us on what Hemingway wryly called “a splashy Cook's Tour of Europe's lost generation bistros, bullfights, and more bistros.”
“The characters indeed drink their way through Paris, Pamplona and Madrid, occasionally perplexing and indeed shocking the locals with their drunken behavior.... Except for some slight bows to the censorship code, the film is in fact a faithful and loving account of Hemingway's book....
“But by the 1950s, not only the book but also the ‘lost generation' it portrayed was a legend from another age.... (I)n portraying the ‘barflies' as culture heroes, the film faithfully reflects a theme of the Prohibition era in which the book was set and written.... For the generation which were college students in the late 1920s and 1930s...the Americans in Paris of the early postwar years became mythic forerunners. To drink, even to drink heavily, was now cosmopolitan, avant-garde, politically progressive, de rigueur for anyone with artistic or literary pretensions. Those who made The Sun Also Rises in 1957 were from this generation; the movie pays homage to the icons of their youth - not only to the book, but also to the Dionysian revels of its heroes.” --Robin Room