September 5, 2025 • 49 mins
This week on Rosie the Reviewer, we’re diving into the 2012 HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn. It’s all about the messy relationship between WWII reporter Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway. We get into the Spanish Civil War (and yes, the movie really drags its feet before getting to WWII), and honestly, we’re not sure either of them is all that likable. Plus, we talk about Caroline Moorehead’s biography Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, Martha’s own novel Point of No Return, and her travel memoir, Travels with Myself and Another.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Marja.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer.
This week we are talking about the movie Hemingway and Gilhorn.
(00:21):
It came out in 2012 and it was directed by Philip Kaufman and
written by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner.
It is based on the true stormy of the stormy romantic
relationship of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn
and author Ernest Hemming Wraith.
For out of Spanish, the Civil War and World War 2, but mostly
(00:41):
the Spanish Civil War. I want to say you can watch it
on Crave if you are in Canada oron HBO Max or Amazon Prime if
you're in the Netherlands. What did you think of these
movies? I thought it was long.
Yeah. I thought there were some
positive aspects. I thought Nicole Kidman did a
great job as Martha Gellhorn, particularly the older version
(01:04):
of Martha. There was just such this like,
groundedness to her, this, like,I don't know if she was just the
whole vibe. I thought she did a good job.
And yeah, there are parts of this movie where they lifted
dialogue straight from history. They tried to do this thing
while they were filming it, where they filmed parts of the
movie and sepia so that they could try and weave in real
(01:26):
clips from history, and they also placed the actors up
against the backdrop of these clips with mixed results.
I think sometimes it looks better than others, but you
know, I thought the attempt was interesting to watch anyways,
but I did find it dragged a little for me.
What about you? So I didn't really enjoy it very
(01:47):
much, but it's not to say I think it's a bad movie.
I just don't like any of the characters, at least not any of
her two main characters, like Ernest having raised a Dick and
Martha's also quite, I'm going to say abrasive.
She's just the kind of person that in real life I would not
get on with. I would be slightly intimidated
(02:09):
probably, but I also would just find her really annoying.
So it's not to do so much for the acting.
The acting is quite good, but it's mostly, I think, Hemingway
that's just annoying and it makes her annoying.
The entire vibe is just annoying.
But I did like learning a littlebit more about the Spanish Civil
War, and I didn't know it was going to be such a big part of
(02:31):
the movie, if I'm going to be totally honest.
But there's quite a lot of sex in this movie in a way that I
don't think it needs. It's on the verge of being
slightly wealthy, which I don't enjoy, so I don't know.
It was trying to do a couple of things at the same time as well,
especially toward the end where it got really dark really fast
(02:52):
and I don't know if I like it. So not my favorite movie, but
it's not interesting too much. I think the end just felt a
little rushed, particularly because they did spend so much
time in the Spanish Civil War. The ending felt kind of they
were like, oh also all this stuff happened during World War
2. The end.
Yeah, it was like 5 minutes or something.
It was felt really short. Yeah, so we did read some books
(03:13):
to get a little more information.
The biography that we had a lookat was Martha Gellhorn, A 20th
Century Life by Caroline Morehead, and I was interested
to find out that Caroline Morehead actually knew Martha.
Her mother, Lucy Morehead, was one of Martha's close friends,
and it's a pretty well researched, interesting
biography. I agree with you that I don't
(03:35):
think Martha is perhaps my type of person.
So I think as a human being I am.
I don't find her particularly likable, but she did lead quite
an extraordinary life, I suppose.
And I also read Point of No Return, which is a novel written
by Martha Gellhorn. It is her war novel, I suppose.
It's set during World War 2 and we'll talk a little bit more
(03:57):
about it later. Obviously what she lived through
informed what she wrote about inthe book.
And in order to compare Martha'snovel writing skills, I was a
little curious. I had read Hemingway before I
read The Sun Also Rises a littlewhile ago, but I wanted to read
one of his war novels, so I readthe one set during the Spanish
Civil War that he actually wrotewhile he was with Martha, For
(04:18):
Whom the Bell Tolls. So I read those two so I could
just like have some idea becausethe two of them were quite
competitive in their writing relationship.
And I would say, in summary, that Hemingway is the better
novel writer, but Martha was thebetter.
Journalist. I also read something.
I didn't read the entire book, but I read part of her travel
biography. It's called Travels with Myself
(04:40):
and Another, and it's basically her telling you about her life
through the five most, what she calls disastrous journeys that
she's made. And one of which, the one that I
read is also in the movie. It's when they go to China.
It's an interesting book. It gives you a little bit of
(05:01):
insight into her character, but also into her relationship with
Hemingway, who she refuses to name.
In her book, she names him. Unwilling Companion is his name
in the book, but you know it's him.
And I will say that the relationship they show in the
movie seems quite realistic in the sense that also in this
(05:21):
book, he's constantly like picking on her both to encourage
her as well as to be kind of just annoying.
So I feel like they did that in the movie as well, so.
Yeah, for sure. Neither of them seemed really
cut out for domestic life. And when they were traipsing
around Spain covering a war, they seemed to get along.
(05:42):
And then the second they had to go actually live in a house and
have a day-to-day life, they were fighting like cats and
dogs. But we'll definitely talk about
that more because there's quite a lot of that in the movie.
I want to say all the movies about it's about them agreeing
and disagreeing and agreeing again.
And by agreeing, I mean having sex.
Anyway, let's get into the plot.We open on an older Martha
(06:12):
Gellhorn. This is decades after her period
of time as a war correspondent during World War 2.
She's played by Nicole Kidman. She's, of course, as we said, a
war correspondent and a novelist, and she's being
interviewed. So she's having a chance to
discuss her past relationships alittle bit.
One thing that she touches on and that I think the biography
(06:33):
gives a pretty good account of is that I get the sense that
Martha Gellhorn was maybe on theasexuality spectrum.
She never really wanted sex whenshe was attracted to people.
It seemed more of kind of like ameeting of the minds type of
thing. And so even, you know, in this
movie where you see her having this very passionate affair with
Hemingway, I always got the sense that for her, the sex was
(06:57):
kind of a chore. So they touch on that a little
bit in this sort of initial interview moment that we get.
I feel like I think you're rightin the sense that even in a
movie, it always starts with herkind of disagreeing or not
wanting to, and then she gives in in a movie.
And that's what makes it sort sort of raky for me in the sense
(07:19):
that makes me uncomfortable. But I guess they were both, if
anything, they were both passionate people in terms of
characters and personalities. And they were also very often,
at least having very, very often, most drunk.
So that's always a factor. And they were in very so
multiple situations as well. So all things put together, it's
(07:40):
kind of a problem. Yeah, she seemed to see it as
paying the toll for getting to hang out with these interesting
famous man. Hemingway's not the only man
that she sort of seemed to perceive sex with in that way.
I don't know. You can't see my face, guys.
But I just pull the face. I don't like that very much.
(08:00):
But then if she made that choice, she made that choice.
It's not up to me. So in the movie, Ernest
Hemingway is played by Clive Owen.
We meet him. He's a famous American novelist,
as you know, and a war correspondent.
And we meet him as he's taking out a huge Marlin and will be a
focal point for the next scene, which is a Florida Bar scene
(08:23):
where he and go on meet for the first time and have a little
scene song together. Yeah, this seems to be more or
less how they met. She was traveling around with
her brother and her mom, and obviously she had written a few
things, but she was by no means famous.
And he was, of course, Ernest Hemingway.
I mean, at this time when they met, I think in the late 1930s,
(08:47):
mid 1930s maybe like he had already published The Sun Also
Rises. Fuck.
What's his World War One book, AFarewell to Arms?
He's quite famous already. She obviously recognizes him
and, you know, is kind of drawn to him because he's very, you
know, he's very lively at this. He's acting out.
He's got all his friends around him.
He's kind of the life of the party.
They all call him Papa for some reason which I found really
(09:11):
annoying. Like he has a name?
Come on. I guess if your name was Ernest,
you might prefer to go by a nickname as well.
What's wrong with Ernie? Nothing's wrong with Ernie in
the 40s. I don't think anyone called him
Ernie. I do think Martha sometimes
called him him, right? Yes, I think she does in the
movie. But if I'm going to compare this
(09:32):
to say the Lee movie, for example, if you look at Martha
and the way she's perceived in the movie by men, they did a
great job at making her look really good.
Like she's really fashionable and really like tall and
gorgeous. And I haven't seen that many
pictures of her, but I think shewas quite unlocker and they made
(09:53):
her look like that in the movie.And all the men are kind of ugly
her and being very annoying about it.
Yeah, Later on in life when she was aging, one of the things
that she really regretted most about aging was the fact that
she always used to be able to use her looks to get it into
places where a male journalist might have a hard time talking
his way in, etc. So similarly to Lee, I guess
(10:16):
you're also, I think, sad that was an advantage he had.
That's cool. Yeah.
So Gellhorn attends a dinner at Hemingways House wherein I don't
believe she was expecting to encounter Hemingways wife
Pauline, played by Molly Parker.And some of his friends are
there as well. So two of them, John Dos Passos,
played by David Strathern, he's a famous writer, and Joris
(10:39):
Evans, played by Lars Ulrich, are showing a film about the
rise of fascism, particularly inSpain.
And there's another friend namedPaco Zara, played by Rodrigo
Santoro. And he urges Martha, as a
journalist, to come to Spain to cover everything that's
happening over there as the civil war sort of gets underway.
I do like the scene. I like the fact that they kind
(11:00):
of to show you that these peoplevery much had this little hit
scene. They were very like minded
people and they liked to party, but they were also quite serious
about their cause. And I didn't realize that last
week is of the band Metallica. I did not look that in the
movie. So that kind of scratched me.
(11:20):
Yeah, pretty cool to see him something.
Yeah, and he plays obviously Yours Events is a Dutch guy.
He was born Gay York Harley Anton Yours Events in 1898.
So quite a bit before we meet him and I looked him up because
I didn't know who he was even though he was Dutch like I, I'm
(11:43):
supposed to know all the Dutch people, right?
But I didn't know who he was. But apparently this guy is quite
a famous documentary maker. And other interesting things he
did was he served as a field artillery Lieutenant in World
War One and other things he directed, apart from what he's
about to direct in our movie that we'll get to later In 1943,
(12:05):
he directed to propaganda films for the National Film Board of
Canada, which I thought was relevant to this podcast,
particularly including one called Action Stations, which is
about the Royal Canadian Navy's escorting of convoys in the
Battle of the Atlantic. Interesting.
Yeah, that's really cool. I've not seen anything by him.
(12:27):
I'm kind of tickled now. I might want to check something
out in Spain. Marta uses her gift of speaking
to the everyone to get to know some soldiers on there National
Brigades. We watch her as she travels over
and talks to these two guys thatare kind of cute.
And Hemingway comes overseas notvery long after her.
We need talent as an ears in Spain, which is Mikhail Kotsov
(12:52):
played by Chinese Shahrukh and we also need Comet photographer
Robert Katta played by Santiago Cabrera.
Yeah, Kapa's kind of an interesting figure.
He was the only civilian photographer to land on Omaha
Beach on D-Day. He later supported Martha's
divorce from Hemingway. And actually, Hemingway's
(13:13):
marriage to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, is what effectively
ended their friendship because Kappa told him that he wasn't
behaving well, and Hemingway threw a bottle of champagne at
his head. Yeah.
And then, unfortunately, Kappa was killed about 10 years after
the end of World War 2 when he stepped on a landmine covering
what was happening in Vietnam. Always the work correspondent, I
guess for combat photographer inthis case.
(13:34):
Kind of sad that he had to step on a landmine.
Yeah, we're getting to see this Russian influence in Spain at
the time. Basically what had happened was
there was an elected republican government, and then the fascist
forces under Francisco Franco were trying to effectively
overthrow the government. So the groups that were
(13:56):
supporting the duly elected government were supported
secretly, not so secretly, by the Soviets, because of course,
the Communists were some of the earliest fighters against
fascism. And so that how a lot of impact
on Americans who would go overseas to fight in the Spanish
Civil War on the side of the elected government were often,
you know, they would come back and they would find themselves
(14:17):
victims of McCarthyism in the States because people would say,
oh, well, you were fighting for the communists.
You were an anti fascist too early.
Back then, only communists were anti fascist.
So I thought it was interesting in this movie that we do get to
see some Russian figures and some Russian influence at play.
I think it's quite complicated, if you don't know a lot about
the Spanish Civil War, to catch on to the political tendencies
(14:41):
of the time. They tried to explain it to you,
but they don't dumb it down. So it's good to read up on it a
little bit if you're watching the movie.
He also did not, by the way, recognize Santiago Cibera at
all. I was like, I know this guy, but
I don't know who he is. And then you told me who it was.
I was like, wait, what? I know, it's been so long since
BBC Musketeers. I love that show.
(15:03):
I don't know if I ever finished it, but I did like him on that.
I feel like he's one of the morelikeable characters in this
movie. Yeah, although we don't see too
much of him, I don't think. No, not after Spain, I guess.
Yeah, so a bombing shakes the hotel.
I mean, they're really kind of in the thick of it.
There's fighting happening in the streets not that far away
from them. And Hemingway locks Gellhorn in
(15:25):
her room, ostensibly for her safety, but you also get the
sense kind of to be a shithead. It's the continuation of this
really odd flirtation that continues as they tour the front
lines and back roads of Civil War era Spain.
There's a scene where they're insort of the lobby of the hotel,
and there's all these journalists around and, you
know, foreign people who have come to Spain to sort of be
(15:47):
involved in what's happening. And Hemingway challenges a
Russian general who's played by an uncredited Robert Duvall, By
the way. I went and looked it up, and I
was like, that was Robert Duvall.
Anyway, so Hemingway challenges this guy who's flirting with
Martha to a game of Russian roulette, which is based on real
events. She hates it, she doesn't like
it. She's like, God damn it, don't
(16:07):
do it, you stupid man. I feel like that's with every
kind of flirtation he throws at her.
She hates it, but she likes it. That's the same kind.
Yeah, I think maybe likes the attention, I don't know, in and
around or around this scene. There's this whole thing where
Hemingway, Gellhorn and a bunch of their journalist friends,
when they were writing what was happening in Spain, they would
(16:28):
tend to kind of loss over any negative things that the
Republicans were doing because they were obviously on their
side. They obviously perceived the
fascists as the bad guys. And so that's what they wanted
to cover. And so someone sort of brings us
up with Martha and is like, oh, like, you know, you're not
really sort of fairly covering this conflict.
And she says, fuck all your objectivity shit.
(16:49):
And the real Martha Gellhorn loved, you know, the phrase,
your objectivity shit. So this is definitely based on
real life. Yeah, it made me laugh, but it's
a difficult movie in the sense that it's kind of funny, but
it's also very serious at the same time, so I never know if
I'm allowed to laugh at what's going on.
But anyway, Speaking of serious,Gauhar and Martha rescues a
(17:12):
child from shelling, running outinto the street dangerously as
they're being shelled. So she's risking her own life,
and she's been struggling to write, and I guess that her
experiences of seeing the commonman in the war inspire her to
write. So when she gets back to the
(17:33):
hotel after rescuing the child, she finally sits down to write.
But that's when shelling hits the hotel, and she and Hemingway
smash in a very visceral scene that I didn't necessarily want
to see. It was so like the building is
shaking and there's plaster falling down onto the bed with
(17:55):
them. I thought it was a bit much.
But I mean, maybe that's becauseI'd already read past this part
in the biography where pretty much what happened in real life,
from Martha's point of view anyway, is that she realized
that it was dangerous to be in Spain in this era.
If you didn't quote, UN quote, belong to someone, you know, if
(18:15):
there was this perception that you belonged to a man, then
other men would leave you alone.So she kind of was like, well, I
like this guy Hemingway well enough, might as well smash him
for this purpose. I think that's also what
Hemingway tells her when he locks her in the first time,
right? Like if I leave the door open
and you're this blonde bombshelland this town full of Spaniards,
(18:39):
you're going to be in trouble. So that's what he says.
Well, a lot of men have come to fight, right?
And there's just not that many women around.
Yeah. The smashing, the blaster is
meant to be this sensual. It's, like, filmed in a really
strangely sensual way. And I'm like, Jesus Christ,
they're being bombed. Maybe not make this fancy lost
scene right now. Yeah.
(19:00):
I could have taken it or left it, you know?
Yeah. So behind the scenes, Paco has
supposedly been arrested by local Republican forces and shot
as an alleged fascist spy. Now, the character of Paco, his
name has been changed, and I canonly suspect that it's because
what happened with him is a little murky.
(19:20):
His real name was Jose Robles, and we think now that instead of
being killed by local Republicanforces, he may have been killed
by Soviet agents. He worked as an interpreter for
the local head of Soviet intelligence.
And they weren't very forgiving,you know, if information was
getting out and that kind of stuff.
After the Spanish Civil War, Stalin ended up purging a lot of
(19:42):
the Russians that had gone to Spain because he was not very
happy with how the war ended. But yeah, so the Paco's gone
anyway. He's vanished.
And Koltsov, he's our main Russian guy.
He accuses Dos Pasos of being a spy because Dos Pasos is very
close to Paco. And this causes a rift between
Dos Pasos and Hemingway. And we get a voice over from
(20:05):
Martha. Saying that, Cold Side was
arrested two years later in Russia and sentenced to death.
Yeah, I really like the brief appearance of this character of
Baca. He's like a guy in a horse, and
he's very hypuric. And we see him like shoot his
guns in a very cool way. He's like the symbol really in
the movie. And I guess maybe he was a
(20:26):
little bit in real life, I can'ttell.
But we also see him quote, UN quote, disappear.
We see him reluctantly get into some Russian and then we never
see him again. And those buses is really sad
about it and he's worried about him and he's the only one who's
asking about him and that's whatmakes him suspicious, I guess.
(20:47):
Yeah, and there's also this sortof thing that's happening sort
of in line with what I was saying about Hemingway and some
of the others presenting the warin a way that perhaps glossed
over some of the negative thingsthat the Republicans were doing.
Hemingway and others were sort of lending their celebrity to
Soviet propaganda, and they werekind of helping to cover up, for
example, possible Soviet responsibility for Robles death.
(21:10):
And so Dos Pasos was not keen onany of that.
Him and Hemingway really had a falling out over it.
So Hemingway collaborates with EUR Events, the documentary
maker, to produce their documentary The Spanish Earth,
which is the movie that was specially made at the party at
his house earlier in the film. So he takes over the job of
(21:33):
writing and reading the narration because they've got
backer out of the film entirely and the beef with those passes
becomes very permanent. And Martha again tells us in Boy
Shaffer that dos pesos politics eventually shifted very far to
the right, so he leaves. Yeah, being up close and
personal with Soviet repression in Spain really turned him away
(21:55):
from left wing politics. He later actually campaigned for
Richard Nixon. Hemingway says something to Dos
Pesos that made me go, oh, that hurts because he says being a
coward doesn't stop you from writing a book or something like
that. And then earlier in the film,
they they said something about there being a need for more
(22:17):
books or something. So it's like the script.
He's just flat out calling him acoward.
Because when they were being under attack earlier in the
movie, the spouses had not wanted to join them at the front
for shooting the documentary. So it was not a very good look
for the spouses, I guess. But I also kind of felt for him.
Yeah, for sure. We're definitely getting sort of
(22:38):
a inside bar from the main relationship between Gellhorn
and Hemingway. We're also getting a little bit
of the mid century American intelligency, a drama if you
will. And in this scene, it's
interesting because you see Gellhorn doing sound effects,
like she's sort of mimicking these different sounds that, you
know, like when they're making the movie, they need a sound
(23:00):
like a shelling. So she's got to make these sound
effects. And apparently real life Martha
did do the sound effects for that movie.
Or some of them, anyway. Mint.
I mean, it's kind of neat. How do you really hate
Hemingway? I think he's not a very nice
man. Well, we'll talk about it a
little bit later, but he had some problems.
You don't sell. Yeah, So Hemingway begins work
(23:23):
on his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
That's the one that I read. It's quite substantially based
on his experiences. Like you can tell that he was
there and a lot of the real stuff that he experienced got
incorporated into the novel. At this point, obviously, he's
hanging out with Martha quite a He asks Pauline for a divorce
and she reacts very badly. I was like, girl, because
(23:45):
Hemingway actually left his first wife for Pauline, who is
also a writer. So I'm like, girl, if he'll
leave someone for you, he will leave you.
And then when he left Pauline, he actually married Martha 3
weeks later. So ostensibly his marriage to
Pauline ended in like 1939, but realistically he was with Martha
for quite a while before that. Probably in Spain I mean.
(24:08):
Definitely in Spain they were together.
I think they met in 1936 and they took up with each other
pretty shortly after that. I do wonder, though, this
character of Pauline, they make her seem rather kind of
unwilling to know what she knows, because I'm sure she
knows, but she seems in a movie,she seems really convinced that
having raised in love with her and like.
(24:30):
Well, I mean, they have kids together and stuff, right?
And like, I think Hemingway liked the idea of a domestic
life more than he liked the actual domestic life.
So when he was around, you know,we do get some scenes where he's
being good with his kids, etcetera, but he wasn't very
good at actually being the husband and dad who was around.
Yeah, the scene where hamming mycells and Martha that he filed
(24:53):
for divorce and got in the divorce.
She doesn't like him. She's like, why'd you go and do
like? It doesn't seem to me that she
wanted to get married very much.In real life, she had quite a
long relationship with this French guy because she had lived
in Paris for a little while and her parents really did not
(25:14):
approve of it. Because he was married.
She took up with a lot of guys who were already married.
And I think part of her agreeingto marry Hemingway was that she
didn't want to be in this situation with her parents
again, where she was like, very publicly with this guy who was
married to someone else. I don't know that getting
married was ever her like ultimate goal in life by any
means. Maybe just again the means to an
(25:36):
end, rather like also in the world belonging to someone was
almost a means to an end. But yeah, what I thought was
funny again because Lars Oricus and Metallica has a song called
For whom? The Bell Souls based on the
Hamming Reebok. So I like these kind of
coincidences. Yeah, well, and I mean, the line
(25:57):
originally comes from a poem, I believe.
What did you think of the book? Is that a good book?
Hemingway has a distinctive writing style and like some
people are a really big fan. I totally get why he was such a
a famous eminent writer in the mid 20th century.
I think that he's a little heavyon the and I mean, he was known
(26:18):
for this, right? This like really like hyper
masculine sense of everything. I don't think that he writes
like amazing female characters by any means.
So I liked it. And I do have another Hemingway
book on my list because I do want to read A Farewell to Arms.
But yeah, I, I don't know that he was.
I would say he's my favorite writer, but just because his
style is not for me really, justnot because he's like a bad
(26:39):
writer or anything. So I don't think I'll read it
and I'll take your word for it. Hemingway and go her and acquire
home in Cuba. Think of it, this will become
their best for the remainder of the marriage.
And it's kind of a rundown house.
And it's filled with straight cats.
And it looks fun. Like, it looks like a fun summer
house, but not one that you'd live in permanently.
(27:01):
Did you visit for a day and thenleave?
They watch Frank eyes victory inthe news.
And that's in April 1939. So that's where we're at.
And, well, they're in their home.
Hemingway dedicates his new novel to her, which he really
likes. Yeah, Gillhorn had long been
vocal about Spain being the Canary in the coal mine, as it
(27:21):
were, for the spread of fascism.She was adamant that it was a
dress rehearsal for another Great War.
And of course, she was not the only person to say this.
But I always think it's interesting to hear about what
people thought on the cusp of World War 2, You know, that
people sort of had a sense of what was coming.
And yeah, Hemingway actually continued to live part time at
Fincha Vija throughout his marriage to his fourth and final
(27:44):
wife. And he actually would continue
to go there seasonally until theproperty was expropriated by the
Cuban government in 1960, when the when the Communists were in
power and is now actually a museum and you can visit.
Is it a machine about him? It is, Yeah.
Oh. Cool.
Gellhorn goes to Finland to cover the Winter War.
(28:05):
She and Hemingway exchange letters.
Well, she's gone for these two. Distance really makes the heart
grow fonder. When they're apart from each
other, they forget that they're having knocked down.
Drago fights all the time. There's this real Hemingway
quote that you hear in the moviewhere he says I am stinko deadly
lonely, if you can imagine author Ernest Hemingway saying
those words. I did like seeing some of the
(28:25):
Winter War, even though it looksbloody ridiculous to see
soldiers on skis I cannot get used to inventory.
The divorce from Pauline comes through.
Martha is reluctant to marry, but she lets Ernest talk her
into it. And then there after China, she
covered Japanese bombing, which is the second senior Japanese
war. And Martha is on an assignment
(28:47):
for Colliers magazine and Ernestis just following a log.
So this is in her book. She calls him the unwilling
companion. And the way she describes this
in her book, she's quite in her trifle book.
She's quite funny. I quite like her writing, but
she also seems to think if she were just about everything
that's going on around her. So she hates the way people
(29:09):
snore and the way people talk inthe way she has to go to an art
house to do her business and allthat sort of thing.
And Hemingway just finds it hilariously funny.
He's like, you wanted to go to China.
Look who's in China now. So Hemingway hangs out at the
hotel and he's kind of hanging out with the elite.
And Martha is something that thick of it up to her, Elvis in
(29:31):
the muck, basically being guidedaround by government
representative Mr. Ma, played byKeanu Young.
And this character is also in a book, and he's exactly like he
is in a movie. So they captured him really
well. Famous.
So what's McCullough? He says it like 20 times.
Yeah, so the second, you know, Japanese war sort of led up to
(29:54):
and included World War 2. I think there is this sense of
perhaps separation for us. But I think if you lived in
China, it all kind of blended together.
I actually, I, it's funny that you say that about Martha
because that was one of the things I didn't like about her.
Reading about her in the biography was that she would get
to a place and she would immediately be like, I'm bored,
(30:14):
I hate this, this person isn't tolerable, I don't want to deal
with this, blah, blah, blah. Like the second that she got
somewhere, she was finding all the reasons why she should leave
and like that, to me, it was just frustrating.
It was just like, you know, someone who's just constantly
has negative thoughts about everything.
And they just, instead of actually like, addressing those
negative thoughts, they're just like, well, I'm just gonna
(30:35):
leave. I'm gonna go somewhere else.
And then the process just repeats itself.
That's really interesting because I think in the book,
because she wrote it afterwards,she's very aware of it and she
kind of makes fun of herself. So I guess she's got some like
retrospective awareness to her. She's like, I was being kind of
a annoying little shit about this.
(30:56):
What I thought was interesting, which is kind of a change from
the movie, is that in the book she describes Hemingway and her
going everywhere together. So when she goes off by herself
in the movie, Hemingway's prettymuch with her the entire time in
the book that she writes. But I don't know.
Yeah. I think also maybe pertinent to
(31:20):
later events is that after this trip, Hemingway ends up writing
a few pieces about the trip and his pieces get more traction
than hers because he's quite a bit more famous.
And she's kind of doesn't reallylike that very much.
And he's like, well, you made mecome.
I was there to protect you in China.
While they're in China, they interviewed General Chiang Kai
(31:40):
Shek, played by Larry Say. And I think the nickname for him
was Cash My Check because because he was sort of working
quite substantially behind the scenes with the Americans.
And they interviewed him and hiswife, Madam Chang, played by
Joan Chen. So General Chang led the
Republic of China from 1928 until his death in 1975.
(32:02):
Although, of course, if you knowanything about a 20th century
Chinese history, he had to lead his government from exile
because they were defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in
1949. So he, quote, UN quote, LED an
exiled government in Taiwan until 1970.
Five. And they also have the
opportunity to interview his, we'll call it political
opponent, Chuan Lai, played by Anthony Brandon Wong.
(32:24):
And Chuan Lai was a prominent communist.
He became the first premier of the People's Republic of China
after the communist coup. So they're kind of getting the
both sides of the situation here.
More jealousies flare up betweenthem.
Also in the biography, they sortof mentioned that both Hemingway
and Gellhorn, when they wrote about these meetings, they kind
of went a little soft on GeneralChang and perhaps should not
(32:48):
have done that. But yeah, I mean, yeah.
Interestingly enough, in the movie, Martha is kind of really
honest with Madam Chang. She offends her almost, and she
has to kind of talk her way out of that.
And she doesn't really make any friends in that conversation, I
don't think. Yeah, I'm not sure it went that
way in real life. Perhaps that's the way Martha
(33:08):
would have liked it to have gone.
Maybe. Sounds like something she wished
she would have done, like being that honest about.
Is it about the jade brooch being made by children's hands
or something in the movie? I already forgot something like
that. Yeah, I mean, this guy was the
the extremely corrupt authoritarian leader of China.
(33:31):
So he was doing a bunch of not great shit and they did not
really call him out on that in any way.
No, Martha is trying to get a war assignment in Europe in
1940. Three Well Hemingway plays war
quote UN quote and they argue when Hemingway done purchased
her position at Colliers, which is kind of a Dick move.
(33:53):
Yeah, so kind of what really happened was that Martha was
already in Europe. She had reported from
Czechoslovakia before the war. When the war started, she was
reporting from air bases in England.
She was interviewing bomber crews and that kind of thing.
She went to Italy, so she was reporting from Casino.
She's actually kind of in the thick of it in combat.
(34:14):
And she ended up reporting from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma,
Singapore, like all kinds of places immediately before and
during the war. And while she was overseas
filing these reports, she was getting all these letters from
Hemingway being like, well, if you were really my wife, you'd
be here in my bed and I like, I miss you and you should be here
with me and that's your duty as a wife, blah, blah, blah.
(34:35):
And she was like, well, why don't I give you a few of my
articles for a Collier so you have an excuse to come over here
and join me. Which was very generous of her
because she probably would have known that his name would take
precedence over hers in the publication.
And he was like, no, I don't want to you come here.
So she went home. She was there for a brief
period. They fought like cats and dogs.
(34:58):
And then that was when he decided that he was going to
take the Colliers thing after all.
And he was like, I have a seat on a plane.
Women aren't allowed. See you later.
So that's when he sort of fuckedoff overseas to start his war
reporting on World War 2. And she had to kind of find her
own way over there. What a crybaby.
Oh fuck. Why didn't they make the movie
(35:19):
about all the things she was doing and all the places she was
like? If you look at the list of where
she's been and what she's reported on?
Great movie. Yeah, they definitely made this
movie about the relationship andless about her, I guess.
I mean, it's her perspective of the relationship, but yeah.
And there's a real quote from Hemingway that he apparently
(35:40):
yelled at Martha, which was They'll still be reading me long
after you've been eaten by worms.
What a fun and supportive husband.
Yeah, So Gellhorn, so far, she'snot having a lot of luck as a
female war correspondent. And she decides that she wants
to cover the D-Day landing. So she sort of blags her way
onto a nursing ship, and she goes to Normandy.
(36:04):
And Martha actually landed on the beach to help load wounded
to take them back to the ship, which, of course, made Hemingway
incredibly jealous because he obviously was not on the ground.
She's widely believed to be the only female journalist to be
present during the landings. And she actually lost her war
correspondent accreditation overit.
Like, she got arrested because of her stowaway shenanigans, but
(36:25):
that did not really stop her from further war coverage, just
made it a little bit more difficult at times.
And meanwhile, Hemingway meets the woman who will be his fourth
wife, Mary Welsh, played by Parker Posey, who I simply
cannot look at without thinking of White Lotus these days.
And Gellhorn catches them being cozy when she comes to visit
(36:45):
Hemingway after he's been injured in a car accident.
And it's kind of the straw that breaks the camel's back.
And she becomes the only one of his wives to ask for a divorce.
I absolutely hate that scene where he's in the hospital bed
and Mary Walsh is like draped over him and he's like, oh, it's
whatever he calls it. What's the nickname again?
He. Called her Marty.
(37:05):
It's the. Marty, It's the Marty.
It's like, come on, dude, It's the right.
But yeah, he's just a bitch. Yeah, they spoke about some
details of the divorce toward the end of the war in London,
and after that they never saw each other again.
And Gellhorn didn't really speakof him publicly, but they were
together for eight years and married for four.
(37:26):
And definitely the relationship had a long lasting impact on the
rest of her life. I wonder if that's why she
called him the unwinding companion in her book.
And also I guess because she didn't want to her work to be
overshadowed by him the entire time, which makes sense.
Yes, Hemingway was not quite as mum on his side of things.
(37:47):
I don't think he was mom about anything in general.
Yeah, it was just loud. Anyway, Martha covers.
It goes pretty quickly from here.
By the way, Martha covers DECA on Icebridge concentration
counts. And in the movie they show you
real footage from Deca, which I think I would have preferred
(38:09):
maybe if they didn't show because it's such an abrupt
scene, they almost don't give itenough time for it to be
respectful. Like it's very quick, but it's
very jarring in a sense. It's also very quick and very
jarring to her. She talks about how it made her
feel, but I don't think I like it very much.
I think it I don't need it more time to breathe or just not have
(38:33):
been their shots. Yeah, I think it could have been
like an end card even, just because, you know, this movie
needs to decide what it wants. Either it's a movie about their
relationship or it's a movie about her.
Yeah. In the novel I read, Point of No
Return, the main character is a Jewish soldier, and Martha
Gellhorn was Jewish, or she was partly Jewish.
(38:54):
I think both of her parents werelike half Jewish, and so they
were never a particularly religious family, but she had an
awareness of this part of her identity.
So in the novel she's written, this character who is a Jewish
soldier, he works as a Jeep driver for an officer, and he
witnesses Dachau at the end of the war.
And in a fit of rage driving hisJeep, he mows down a group of
(39:17):
Germans and kills some of them. And this is kind of an
articulation of how Dachau made her feel.
It made her so angry. And she actually wrote A
darkness entered my spirit therein that place in the sunny early
days of May 1945. I stopped being young.
I do not really hope now, not really.
I only feel one can never give up.
(39:37):
Yeah, I think we got a similar line from her in a movie after
we see those images too, about how Darker broke her.
Sure it did. Like it's one of the most awful
things you can imagine. I don't think anyone can go then
be unaffected by that. Yeah, so we cut to many years
later, Hemingway, depressed, undergoes shock treatment.
(40:00):
He's living an unhappy existencewith Mary, his fourth wife, and
we see him die by suicide July 2nd, 1961.
Yeah, kind of sad. I mean, he's a Dick, but I'm
still kind of sad. I did like how they made him age
in the movie. They did a great job of making
him look like second hanger and tired of life but was married
(40:23):
there for his suicide. Because it's implied that she's
in the other room as he shoots himself.
Yeah, I think she was. And she told everyone that he
died in an accident cleaning hisgun.
But Hemingway suffered many serious health problems during
his life. He had a genetic condition
called hemochromatosis, which meant he was in a lot of pain a
lot of the time. His mental state was
(40:44):
deteriorating towards the end ofhis life.
He had severe injuries from 2:00, plane crashes, and he had
six untreated concussions, and he battled alcoholism and
depression. All of this was made worse by,
you know, those other injuries that he had.
And the suicide attempt that finally worked was not his first
attempt. And so he had previously been
(41:05):
taken to a hospital. His friends took him home so he
could get some of his clothes, and when he came into the house,
he made a beeline for the gun cabinet and chambered around.
But one of his friends tackled him and was able to take the gun
out of his hands. And on the way to the hospital,
he tried to, they took him by plane.
He tried to walk into the propeller.
And when they got him on the plane, he tried to jump out of
the plane. So this was a guy who was just
(41:27):
profoundly having a difficult time.
He was suffering a lot. And so I don't think it was a
gun accident. I think he killed himself.
Jesus, that's rough. We see the end of the interview
with older Martha, who says you won't be a footnote in someone
else's life, which is funny if there's a movie which is called
Hemingway and Gellhorn instead of Gellhorn and Hemingway.
(41:50):
But I don't think she would haveliked this movie particularly
much. She reminisces about the old
days once alone and then puts that away to go on another
assignment. And I like how she just decides
at the end of the interviews done, she's like, Oh no, we're
done. You can, you can leave.
Like, no, it's on my term charts.
Not at all. Yeah, for sure.
(42:11):
Very much like how she lived. Yeah.
And that's the end of it, yes. Martha went on to cover the
human face of further conflicts including Vietnam.
She covered a few civil wars in South America.
She was all over the place. She published a total of 15
(42:34):
books, including novels, collections of short stories,
and I think 3 non fiction works.She got married and divorced
once more through her relationship with her second
husband. She had a few stepchildren.
One of them she got along with particularly well.
She adopted a son of her own whom she did not get along with
particularly well. She lived all over the world
throughout her life. She would literally go places
(42:56):
and she would set up a home for herself.
So she lived in Mexico, she lived in Kenya.
She was all over. And she ultimately just
suffering a slow decline in health and blindness that made
it impossible to travel, read orwrite, which were kind of the
three central tenets of her life.
She also died by suicide on February 14th, 1998.
She was 89 years old. Imagine being that old and then
(43:20):
committing suicide because you're like, it's been enough.
Yeah, she was pretty effectively.
She was pretty much blind, like she couldn't read or write
without help. She was also hard of hearing.
She was just having a hard time doing all the stuff that was
interesting to her. And I think she also, she's a
little vain. She had all these young friends,
and I think there was this sensethat they were, you know, out
(43:40):
and about living these interesting lives.
And she finally was starting to really show her age.
Yeah. Sad.
Yeah. There's a few things that crop
up towards the end of the biography that really made me be
like, what? So she adopts this kid and I
think she has this sense that this is what's going to make her
happy. You know, this is going to be
(44:02):
the long term relationship that actually works because
throughout her whole life, the only relationship that really
seemed based on unconditional love and respect was the one she
had with her mother. So I think she thought adopting
this kid from an Italian orphanage would fill the hole in
some way and she just was perhaps not naturally suited to
(44:24):
being someones mother. She was constantly on the kids
case about his weight, she sent them to boarding school and
every time he was home it was constantly this battle of her
trying to withhold food from him.
And later on, towards the end ofher life, she rewrote her will,
saying that he wouldn't inherit anything unless he lost some
weight and. No, Martha.
(44:46):
Yeah, So I think she really, shehad a hard time with other
people not living up to her expectations, but she also had a
hard time with herself not living up to her expectations.
Like she would constantly write about how she regretted the way
a lot of her relationships had turned out, or she regretted her
own behavior in certain scenarios and that kind of
stuff. But she she doesn't seem to be
able to help herself. She was hard on everyone,
including herself. She.
(45:07):
Kind of in that way reminds me of Lee, who also seemed to be
never quite content with whatever was going on and then
moving on there. I think Lee might have been
slightly more successful in thatsense to Martha, but also these
very moving, always moving kind of personalities.
Oh yeah, she is very nomadic. She couldn't seem to settle
(45:30):
anywhere. And I yeah, I think she was
always just moving on to move on.
You know, maybe the next thing Ifind will be the thing it will
make me happy. You know, she was driving in
Africa when she was living thereand she hit and killed a child.
So that was the kid ran out on the road.
Like it wasn't her fault. But also, I mean, that's going
(45:52):
to do a number on your psyche, right?
Sure, yeah. So we should rent this movie?
How many cats in the Cuban houseout of town would you rent this
movie? Y'all, they had so many cats in
(46:12):
that house, like I'm not kiddingyou.
And they never got any of them fixed, so the problem just
compounded itself. I don't know man.
I think I'm going to give this movie 5 cats in the house out of
10. It was too long.
Not that I didn't appreciate theopportunity to learn more about
(46:32):
the sort of 20th century intellectuals and what they were
up to, but when I was reading the biography, I found it a bit
slow going. And I think it's because I just
didn't like Martha very much. I think, like I said at the
beginning, Nicole came and did agreat job.
I don't I don't think that I would necessarily recommend this
movie. I think if you want to find out
about Martha, you should definitely read the biography
and give this one a miss. What about you?
(46:53):
I think you are right on point. I am also going to give this
movie 5 Cats in a Cuban House. I already forgot my own rating
system. That's great, 5 cats in a Cuban
House out of 10, because I also thought the pacing was kind of
off and the way that distributedthe different periods in the
(47:14):
film, we're kind of often. I didn't particularly like the
relationship part of it either. So what is there to like?
It's not necessarily bad acting or anything, acting's fine, but
I don't know, it's just not a very, you don't want to root for
either of these people or for mostly any of the people in the
(47:35):
movie. I feel like you need something
to be happy about in this movie,and I really isn't very much of
it. So I also thought it was too
long. I was like, when's this movie
going to end and when is it going to get to World War 2?
It's also another thought I had when I was watching it.
So yeah, don't recommend for thestory excellence, fine, but like
(47:58):
don't watch it. I don't think unfortunately I
really wanted to like it, but now can't really say that I do.
Are you reading anything new since we last recorded?
I'm taking a crack at SAS Duty Before Glory by Tony Rushmore,
which is the book about Reg seekings and that will become
relevant soon. Excellent.
(48:19):
I'm also still reading, not books, so nothing new from me.
So I'm going to close down this episode for us.
Thank you everybody for listening.
You can follow us and find us wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast,
or you can visit our web rosiethereviewer.com.
And if you want to send this episode to a friend, despite the
(48:40):
fact that the movie's not very interesting, I think this
episode's quite nice. So do send it to a friend.
And don't forget to read this because we love you if you do.
See you next week. Bye.
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Marja.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer.
This week we are talking about the movie Hemingway and Gilhorn.
(00:21):
It came out in 2012 and it was directed by Philip Kaufman and
written by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner.
It is based on the true stormy of the stormy romantic
relationship of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn
and author Ernest Hemming Wraith.
For out of Spanish, the Civil War and World War 2, but mostly
(00:41):
the Spanish Civil War. I want to say you can watch it
on Crave if you are in Canada oron HBO Max or Amazon Prime if
you're in the Netherlands. What did you think of these
movies? I thought it was long.
Yeah. I thought there were some
positive aspects. I thought Nicole Kidman did a
great job as Martha Gellhorn, particularly the older version
(01:04):
of Martha. There was just such this like,
groundedness to her, this, like,I don't know if she was just the
whole vibe. I thought she did a good job.
And yeah, there are parts of this movie where they lifted
dialogue straight from history. They tried to do this thing
while they were filming it, where they filmed parts of the
movie and sepia so that they could try and weave in real
(01:26):
clips from history, and they also placed the actors up
against the backdrop of these clips with mixed results.
I think sometimes it looks better than others, but you
know, I thought the attempt was interesting to watch anyways,
but I did find it dragged a little for me.
What about you? So I didn't really enjoy it very
(01:47):
much, but it's not to say I think it's a bad movie.
I just don't like any of the characters, at least not any of
her two main characters, like Ernest having raised a Dick and
Martha's also quite, I'm going to say abrasive.
She's just the kind of person that in real life I would not
get on with. I would be slightly intimidated
(02:09):
probably, but I also would just find her really annoying.
So it's not to do so much for the acting.
The acting is quite good, but it's mostly, I think, Hemingway
that's just annoying and it makes her annoying.
The entire vibe is just annoying.
But I did like learning a littlebit more about the Spanish Civil
War, and I didn't know it was going to be such a big part of
(02:31):
the movie, if I'm going to be totally honest.
But there's quite a lot of sex in this movie in a way that I
don't think it needs. It's on the verge of being
slightly wealthy, which I don't enjoy, so I don't know.
It was trying to do a couple of things at the same time as well,
especially toward the end where it got really dark really fast
(02:52):
and I don't know if I like it. So not my favorite movie, but
it's not interesting too much. I think the end just felt a
little rushed, particularly because they did spend so much
time in the Spanish Civil War. The ending felt kind of they
were like, oh also all this stuff happened during World War
2. The end.
Yeah, it was like 5 minutes or something.
It was felt really short. Yeah, so we did read some books
(03:13):
to get a little more information.
The biography that we had a lookat was Martha Gellhorn, A 20th
Century Life by Caroline Morehead, and I was interested
to find out that Caroline Morehead actually knew Martha.
Her mother, Lucy Morehead, was one of Martha's close friends,
and it's a pretty well researched, interesting
biography. I agree with you that I don't
(03:35):
think Martha is perhaps my type of person.
So I think as a human being I am.
I don't find her particularly likable, but she did lead quite
an extraordinary life, I suppose.
And I also read Point of No Return, which is a novel written
by Martha Gellhorn. It is her war novel, I suppose.
It's set during World War 2 and we'll talk a little bit more
(03:57):
about it later. Obviously what she lived through
informed what she wrote about inthe book.
And in order to compare Martha'snovel writing skills, I was a
little curious. I had read Hemingway before I
read The Sun Also Rises a littlewhile ago, but I wanted to read
one of his war novels, so I readthe one set during the Spanish
Civil War that he actually wrotewhile he was with Martha, For
(04:18):
Whom the Bell Tolls. So I read those two so I could
just like have some idea becausethe two of them were quite
competitive in their writing relationship.
And I would say, in summary, that Hemingway is the better
novel writer, but Martha was thebetter.
Journalist. I also read something.
I didn't read the entire book, but I read part of her travel
biography. It's called Travels with Myself
(04:40):
and Another, and it's basically her telling you about her life
through the five most, what she calls disastrous journeys that
she's made. And one of which, the one that I
read is also in the movie. It's when they go to China.
It's an interesting book. It gives you a little bit of
(05:01):
insight into her character, but also into her relationship with
Hemingway, who she refuses to name.
In her book, she names him. Unwilling Companion is his name
in the book, but you know it's him.
And I will say that the relationship they show in the
movie seems quite realistic in the sense that also in this
(05:21):
book, he's constantly like picking on her both to encourage
her as well as to be kind of just annoying.
So I feel like they did that in the movie as well, so.
Yeah, for sure. Neither of them seemed really
cut out for domestic life. And when they were traipsing
around Spain covering a war, they seemed to get along.
(05:42):
And then the second they had to go actually live in a house and
have a day-to-day life, they were fighting like cats and
dogs. But we'll definitely talk about
that more because there's quite a lot of that in the movie.
I want to say all the movies about it's about them agreeing
and disagreeing and agreeing again.
And by agreeing, I mean having sex.
Anyway, let's get into the plot.We open on an older Martha
(06:12):
Gellhorn. This is decades after her period
of time as a war correspondent during World War 2.
She's played by Nicole Kidman. She's, of course, as we said, a
war correspondent and a novelist, and she's being
interviewed. So she's having a chance to
discuss her past relationships alittle bit.
One thing that she touches on and that I think the biography
(06:33):
gives a pretty good account of is that I get the sense that
Martha Gellhorn was maybe on theasexuality spectrum.
She never really wanted sex whenshe was attracted to people.
It seemed more of kind of like ameeting of the minds type of
thing. And so even, you know, in this
movie where you see her having this very passionate affair with
Hemingway, I always got the sense that for her, the sex was
(06:57):
kind of a chore. So they touch on that a little
bit in this sort of initial interview moment that we get.
I feel like I think you're rightin the sense that even in a
movie, it always starts with herkind of disagreeing or not
wanting to, and then she gives in in a movie.
And that's what makes it sort sort of raky for me in the sense
(07:19):
that makes me uncomfortable. But I guess they were both, if
anything, they were both passionate people in terms of
characters and personalities. And they were also very often,
at least having very, very often, most drunk.
So that's always a factor. And they were in very so
multiple situations as well. So all things put together, it's
(07:40):
kind of a problem. Yeah, she seemed to see it as
paying the toll for getting to hang out with these interesting
famous man. Hemingway's not the only man
that she sort of seemed to perceive sex with in that way.
I don't know. You can't see my face, guys.
But I just pull the face. I don't like that very much.
(08:00):
But then if she made that choice, she made that choice.
It's not up to me. So in the movie, Ernest
Hemingway is played by Clive Owen.
We meet him. He's a famous American novelist,
as you know, and a war correspondent.
And we meet him as he's taking out a huge Marlin and will be a
focal point for the next scene, which is a Florida Bar scene
(08:23):
where he and go on meet for the first time and have a little
scene song together. Yeah, this seems to be more or
less how they met. She was traveling around with
her brother and her mom, and obviously she had written a few
things, but she was by no means famous.
And he was, of course, Ernest Hemingway.
I mean, at this time when they met, I think in the late 1930s,
(08:47):
mid 1930s maybe like he had already published The Sun Also
Rises. Fuck.
What's his World War One book, AFarewell to Arms?
He's quite famous already. She obviously recognizes him
and, you know, is kind of drawn to him because he's very, you
know, he's very lively at this. He's acting out.
He's got all his friends around him.
He's kind of the life of the party.
They all call him Papa for some reason which I found really
(09:11):
annoying. Like he has a name?
Come on. I guess if your name was Ernest,
you might prefer to go by a nickname as well.
What's wrong with Ernie? Nothing's wrong with Ernie in
the 40s. I don't think anyone called him
Ernie. I do think Martha sometimes
called him him, right? Yes, I think she does in the
movie. But if I'm going to compare this
(09:32):
to say the Lee movie, for example, if you look at Martha
and the way she's perceived in the movie by men, they did a
great job at making her look really good.
Like she's really fashionable and really like tall and
gorgeous. And I haven't seen that many
pictures of her, but I think shewas quite unlocker and they made
(09:53):
her look like that in the movie.And all the men are kind of ugly
her and being very annoying about it.
Yeah, Later on in life when she was aging, one of the things
that she really regretted most about aging was the fact that
she always used to be able to use her looks to get it into
places where a male journalist might have a hard time talking
his way in, etc. So similarly to Lee, I guess
(10:16):
you're also, I think, sad that was an advantage he had.
That's cool. Yeah.
So Gellhorn attends a dinner at Hemingways House wherein I don't
believe she was expecting to encounter Hemingways wife
Pauline, played by Molly Parker.And some of his friends are
there as well. So two of them, John Dos Passos,
played by David Strathern, he's a famous writer, and Joris
(10:39):
Evans, played by Lars Ulrich, are showing a film about the
rise of fascism, particularly inSpain.
And there's another friend namedPaco Zara, played by Rodrigo
Santoro. And he urges Martha, as a
journalist, to come to Spain to cover everything that's
happening over there as the civil war sort of gets underway.
I do like the scene. I like the fact that they kind
(11:00):
of to show you that these peoplevery much had this little hit
scene. They were very like minded
people and they liked to party, but they were also quite serious
about their cause. And I didn't realize that last
week is of the band Metallica. I did not look that in the
movie. So that kind of scratched me.
(11:20):
Yeah, pretty cool to see him something.
Yeah, and he plays obviously Yours Events is a Dutch guy.
He was born Gay York Harley Anton Yours Events in 1898.
So quite a bit before we meet him and I looked him up because
I didn't know who he was even though he was Dutch like I, I'm
(11:43):
supposed to know all the Dutch people, right?
But I didn't know who he was. But apparently this guy is quite
a famous documentary maker. And other interesting things he
did was he served as a field artillery Lieutenant in World
War One and other things he directed, apart from what he's
about to direct in our movie that we'll get to later In 1943,
(12:05):
he directed to propaganda films for the National Film Board of
Canada, which I thought was relevant to this podcast,
particularly including one called Action Stations, which is
about the Royal Canadian Navy's escorting of convoys in the
Battle of the Atlantic. Interesting.
Yeah, that's really cool. I've not seen anything by him.
(12:27):
I'm kind of tickled now. I might want to check something
out in Spain. Marta uses her gift of speaking
to the everyone to get to know some soldiers on there National
Brigades. We watch her as she travels over
and talks to these two guys thatare kind of cute.
And Hemingway comes overseas notvery long after her.
We need talent as an ears in Spain, which is Mikhail Kotsov
(12:52):
played by Chinese Shahrukh and we also need Comet photographer
Robert Katta played by Santiago Cabrera.
Yeah, Kapa's kind of an interesting figure.
He was the only civilian photographer to land on Omaha
Beach on D-Day. He later supported Martha's
divorce from Hemingway. And actually, Hemingway's
(13:13):
marriage to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, is what effectively
ended their friendship because Kappa told him that he wasn't
behaving well, and Hemingway threw a bottle of champagne at
his head. Yeah.
And then, unfortunately, Kappa was killed about 10 years after
the end of World War 2 when he stepped on a landmine covering
what was happening in Vietnam. Always the work correspondent, I
guess for combat photographer inthis case.
(13:34):
Kind of sad that he had to step on a landmine.
Yeah, we're getting to see this Russian influence in Spain at
the time. Basically what had happened was
there was an elected republican government, and then the fascist
forces under Francisco Franco were trying to effectively
overthrow the government. So the groups that were
(13:56):
supporting the duly elected government were supported
secretly, not so secretly, by the Soviets, because of course,
the Communists were some of the earliest fighters against
fascism. And so that how a lot of impact
on Americans who would go overseas to fight in the Spanish
Civil War on the side of the elected government were often,
you know, they would come back and they would find themselves
(14:17):
victims of McCarthyism in the States because people would say,
oh, well, you were fighting for the communists.
You were an anti fascist too early.
Back then, only communists were anti fascist.
So I thought it was interesting in this movie that we do get to
see some Russian figures and some Russian influence at play.
I think it's quite complicated, if you don't know a lot about
the Spanish Civil War, to catch on to the political tendencies
(14:41):
of the time. They tried to explain it to you,
but they don't dumb it down. So it's good to read up on it a
little bit if you're watching the movie.
He also did not, by the way, recognize Santiago Cibera at
all. I was like, I know this guy, but
I don't know who he is. And then you told me who it was.
I was like, wait, what? I know, it's been so long since
BBC Musketeers. I love that show.
(15:03):
I don't know if I ever finished it, but I did like him on that.
I feel like he's one of the morelikeable characters in this
movie. Yeah, although we don't see too
much of him, I don't think. No, not after Spain, I guess.
Yeah, so a bombing shakes the hotel.
I mean, they're really kind of in the thick of it.
There's fighting happening in the streets not that far away
from them. And Hemingway locks Gellhorn in
(15:25):
her room, ostensibly for her safety, but you also get the
sense kind of to be a shithead. It's the continuation of this
really odd flirtation that continues as they tour the front
lines and back roads of Civil War era Spain.
There's a scene where they're insort of the lobby of the hotel,
and there's all these journalists around and, you
know, foreign people who have come to Spain to sort of be
(15:47):
involved in what's happening. And Hemingway challenges a
Russian general who's played by an uncredited Robert Duvall, By
the way. I went and looked it up, and I
was like, that was Robert Duvall.
Anyway, so Hemingway challenges this guy who's flirting with
Martha to a game of Russian roulette, which is based on real
events. She hates it, she doesn't like
it. She's like, God damn it, don't
(16:07):
do it, you stupid man. I feel like that's with every
kind of flirtation he throws at her.
She hates it, but she likes it. That's the same kind.
Yeah, I think maybe likes the attention, I don't know, in and
around or around this scene. There's this whole thing where
Hemingway, Gellhorn and a bunch of their journalist friends,
when they were writing what was happening in Spain, they would
(16:28):
tend to kind of loss over any negative things that the
Republicans were doing because they were obviously on their
side. They obviously perceived the
fascists as the bad guys. And so that's what they wanted
to cover. And so someone sort of brings us
up with Martha and is like, oh, like, you know, you're not
really sort of fairly covering this conflict.
And she says, fuck all your objectivity shit.
(16:49):
And the real Martha Gellhorn loved, you know, the phrase,
your objectivity shit. So this is definitely based on
real life. Yeah, it made me laugh, but it's
a difficult movie in the sense that it's kind of funny, but
it's also very serious at the same time, so I never know if
I'm allowed to laugh at what's going on.
But anyway, Speaking of serious,Gauhar and Martha rescues a
(17:12):
child from shelling, running outinto the street dangerously as
they're being shelled. So she's risking her own life,
and she's been struggling to write, and I guess that her
experiences of seeing the commonman in the war inspire her to
write. So when she gets back to the
(17:33):
hotel after rescuing the child, she finally sits down to write.
But that's when shelling hits the hotel, and she and Hemingway
smash in a very visceral scene that I didn't necessarily want
to see. It was so like the building is
shaking and there's plaster falling down onto the bed with
(17:55):
them. I thought it was a bit much.
But I mean, maybe that's becauseI'd already read past this part
in the biography where pretty much what happened in real life,
from Martha's point of view anyway, is that she realized
that it was dangerous to be in Spain in this era.
If you didn't quote, UN quote, belong to someone, you know, if
(18:15):
there was this perception that you belonged to a man, then
other men would leave you alone.So she kind of was like, well, I
like this guy Hemingway well enough, might as well smash him
for this purpose. I think that's also what
Hemingway tells her when he locks her in the first time,
right? Like if I leave the door open
and you're this blonde bombshelland this town full of Spaniards,
(18:39):
you're going to be in trouble. So that's what he says.
Well, a lot of men have come to fight, right?
And there's just not that many women around.
Yeah. The smashing, the blaster is
meant to be this sensual. It's, like, filmed in a really
strangely sensual way. And I'm like, Jesus Christ,
they're being bombed. Maybe not make this fancy lost
scene right now. Yeah.
(19:00):
I could have taken it or left it, you know?
Yeah. So behind the scenes, Paco has
supposedly been arrested by local Republican forces and shot
as an alleged fascist spy. Now, the character of Paco, his
name has been changed, and I canonly suspect that it's because
what happened with him is a little murky.
(19:20):
His real name was Jose Robles, and we think now that instead of
being killed by local Republicanforces, he may have been killed
by Soviet agents. He worked as an interpreter for
the local head of Soviet intelligence.
And they weren't very forgiving,you know, if information was
getting out and that kind of stuff.
After the Spanish Civil War, Stalin ended up purging a lot of
(19:42):
the Russians that had gone to Spain because he was not very
happy with how the war ended. But yeah, so the Paco's gone
anyway. He's vanished.
And Koltsov, he's our main Russian guy.
He accuses Dos Pasos of being a spy because Dos Pasos is very
close to Paco. And this causes a rift between
Dos Pasos and Hemingway. And we get a voice over from
(20:05):
Martha. Saying that, Cold Side was
arrested two years later in Russia and sentenced to death.
Yeah, I really like the brief appearance of this character of
Baca. He's like a guy in a horse, and
he's very hypuric. And we see him like shoot his
guns in a very cool way. He's like the symbol really in
the movie. And I guess maybe he was a
(20:26):
little bit in real life, I can'ttell.
But we also see him quote, UN quote, disappear.
We see him reluctantly get into some Russian and then we never
see him again. And those buses is really sad
about it and he's worried about him and he's the only one who's
asking about him and that's whatmakes him suspicious, I guess.
(20:47):
Yeah, and there's also this sortof thing that's happening sort
of in line with what I was saying about Hemingway and some
of the others presenting the warin a way that perhaps glossed
over some of the negative thingsthat the Republicans were doing.
Hemingway and others were sort of lending their celebrity to
Soviet propaganda, and they werekind of helping to cover up, for
example, possible Soviet responsibility for Robles death.
(21:10):
And so Dos Pasos was not keen onany of that.
Him and Hemingway really had a falling out over it.
So Hemingway collaborates with EUR Events, the documentary
maker, to produce their documentary The Spanish Earth,
which is the movie that was specially made at the party at
his house earlier in the film. So he takes over the job of
(21:33):
writing and reading the narration because they've got
backer out of the film entirely and the beef with those passes
becomes very permanent. And Martha again tells us in Boy
Shaffer that dos pesos politics eventually shifted very far to
the right, so he leaves. Yeah, being up close and
personal with Soviet repression in Spain really turned him away
(21:55):
from left wing politics. He later actually campaigned for
Richard Nixon. Hemingway says something to Dos
Pesos that made me go, oh, that hurts because he says being a
coward doesn't stop you from writing a book or something like
that. And then earlier in the film,
they they said something about there being a need for more
(22:17):
books or something. So it's like the script.
He's just flat out calling him acoward.
Because when they were being under attack earlier in the
movie, the spouses had not wanted to join them at the front
for shooting the documentary. So it was not a very good look
for the spouses, I guess. But I also kind of felt for him.
Yeah, for sure. We're definitely getting sort of
(22:38):
a inside bar from the main relationship between Gellhorn
and Hemingway. We're also getting a little bit
of the mid century American intelligency, a drama if you
will. And in this scene, it's
interesting because you see Gellhorn doing sound effects,
like she's sort of mimicking these different sounds that, you
know, like when they're making the movie, they need a sound
(23:00):
like a shelling. So she's got to make these sound
effects. And apparently real life Martha
did do the sound effects for that movie.
Or some of them, anyway. Mint.
I mean, it's kind of neat. How do you really hate
Hemingway? I think he's not a very nice
man. Well, we'll talk about it a
little bit later, but he had some problems.
You don't sell. Yeah, So Hemingway begins work
(23:23):
on his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
That's the one that I read. It's quite substantially based
on his experiences. Like you can tell that he was
there and a lot of the real stuff that he experienced got
incorporated into the novel. At this point, obviously, he's
hanging out with Martha quite a He asks Pauline for a divorce
and she reacts very badly. I was like, girl, because
(23:45):
Hemingway actually left his first wife for Pauline, who is
also a writer. So I'm like, girl, if he'll
leave someone for you, he will leave you.
And then when he left Pauline, he actually married Martha 3
weeks later. So ostensibly his marriage to
Pauline ended in like 1939, but realistically he was with Martha
for quite a while before that. Probably in Spain I mean.
(24:08):
Definitely in Spain they were together.
I think they met in 1936 and they took up with each other
pretty shortly after that. I do wonder, though, this
character of Pauline, they make her seem rather kind of
unwilling to know what she knows, because I'm sure she
knows, but she seems in a movie,she seems really convinced that
having raised in love with her and like.
(24:30):
Well, I mean, they have kids together and stuff, right?
And like, I think Hemingway liked the idea of a domestic
life more than he liked the actual domestic life.
So when he was around, you know,we do get some scenes where he's
being good with his kids, etcetera, but he wasn't very
good at actually being the husband and dad who was around.
Yeah, the scene where hamming mycells and Martha that he filed
(24:53):
for divorce and got in the divorce.
She doesn't like him. She's like, why'd you go and do
like? It doesn't seem to me that she
wanted to get married very much.In real life, she had quite a
long relationship with this French guy because she had lived
in Paris for a little while and her parents really did not
(25:14):
approve of it. Because he was married.
She took up with a lot of guys who were already married.
And I think part of her agreeingto marry Hemingway was that she
didn't want to be in this situation with her parents
again, where she was like, very publicly with this guy who was
married to someone else. I don't know that getting
married was ever her like ultimate goal in life by any
means. Maybe just again the means to an
(25:36):
end, rather like also in the world belonging to someone was
almost a means to an end. But yeah, what I thought was
funny again because Lars Oricus and Metallica has a song called
For whom? The Bell Souls based on the
Hamming Reebok. So I like these kind of
coincidences. Yeah, well, and I mean, the line
(25:57):
originally comes from a poem, I believe.
What did you think of the book? Is that a good book?
Hemingway has a distinctive writing style and like some
people are a really big fan. I totally get why he was such a
a famous eminent writer in the mid 20th century.
I think that he's a little heavyon the and I mean, he was known
(26:18):
for this, right? This like really like hyper
masculine sense of everything. I don't think that he writes
like amazing female characters by any means.
So I liked it. And I do have another Hemingway
book on my list because I do want to read A Farewell to Arms.
But yeah, I, I don't know that he was.
I would say he's my favorite writer, but just because his
style is not for me really, justnot because he's like a bad
(26:39):
writer or anything. So I don't think I'll read it
and I'll take your word for it. Hemingway and go her and acquire
home in Cuba. Think of it, this will become
their best for the remainder of the marriage.
And it's kind of a rundown house.
And it's filled with straight cats.
And it looks fun. Like, it looks like a fun summer
house, but not one that you'd live in permanently.
(27:01):
Did you visit for a day and thenleave?
They watch Frank eyes victory inthe news.
And that's in April 1939. So that's where we're at.
And, well, they're in their home.
Hemingway dedicates his new novel to her, which he really
likes. Yeah, Gillhorn had long been
vocal about Spain being the Canary in the coal mine, as it
(27:21):
were, for the spread of fascism.She was adamant that it was a
dress rehearsal for another Great War.
And of course, she was not the only person to say this.
But I always think it's interesting to hear about what
people thought on the cusp of World War 2, You know, that
people sort of had a sense of what was coming.
And yeah, Hemingway actually continued to live part time at
Fincha Vija throughout his marriage to his fourth and final
(27:44):
wife. And he actually would continue
to go there seasonally until theproperty was expropriated by the
Cuban government in 1960, when the when the Communists were in
power and is now actually a museum and you can visit.
Is it a machine about him? It is, Yeah.
Oh. Cool.
Gellhorn goes to Finland to cover the Winter War.
(28:05):
She and Hemingway exchange letters.
Well, she's gone for these two. Distance really makes the heart
grow fonder. When they're apart from each
other, they forget that they're having knocked down.
Drago fights all the time. There's this real Hemingway
quote that you hear in the moviewhere he says I am stinko deadly
lonely, if you can imagine author Ernest Hemingway saying
those words. I did like seeing some of the
(28:25):
Winter War, even though it looksbloody ridiculous to see
soldiers on skis I cannot get used to inventory.
The divorce from Pauline comes through.
Martha is reluctant to marry, but she lets Ernest talk her
into it. And then there after China, she
covered Japanese bombing, which is the second senior Japanese
war. And Martha is on an assignment
(28:47):
for Colliers magazine and Ernestis just following a log.
So this is in her book. She calls him the unwilling
companion. And the way she describes this
in her book, she's quite in her trifle book.
She's quite funny. I quite like her writing, but
she also seems to think if she were just about everything
that's going on around her. So she hates the way people
(29:09):
snore and the way people talk inthe way she has to go to an art
house to do her business and allthat sort of thing.
And Hemingway just finds it hilariously funny.
He's like, you wanted to go to China.
Look who's in China now. So Hemingway hangs out at the
hotel and he's kind of hanging out with the elite.
And Martha is something that thick of it up to her, Elvis in
(29:31):
the muck, basically being guidedaround by government
representative Mr. Ma, played byKeanu Young.
And this character is also in a book, and he's exactly like he
is in a movie. So they captured him really
well. Famous.
So what's McCullough? He says it like 20 times.
Yeah, so the second, you know, Japanese war sort of led up to
(29:54):
and included World War 2. I think there is this sense of
perhaps separation for us. But I think if you lived in
China, it all kind of blended together.
I actually, I, it's funny that you say that about Martha
because that was one of the things I didn't like about her.
Reading about her in the biography was that she would get
to a place and she would immediately be like, I'm bored,
(30:14):
I hate this, this person isn't tolerable, I don't want to deal
with this, blah, blah, blah. Like the second that she got
somewhere, she was finding all the reasons why she should leave
and like that, to me, it was just frustrating.
It was just like, you know, someone who's just constantly
has negative thoughts about everything.
And they just, instead of actually like, addressing those
negative thoughts, they're just like, well, I'm just gonna
(30:35):
leave. I'm gonna go somewhere else.
And then the process just repeats itself.
That's really interesting because I think in the book,
because she wrote it afterwards,she's very aware of it and she
kind of makes fun of herself. So I guess she's got some like
retrospective awareness to her. She's like, I was being kind of
a annoying little shit about this.
(30:56):
What I thought was interesting, which is kind of a change from
the movie, is that in the book she describes Hemingway and her
going everywhere together. So when she goes off by herself
in the movie, Hemingway's prettymuch with her the entire time in
the book that she writes. But I don't know.
Yeah. I think also maybe pertinent to
(31:20):
later events is that after this trip, Hemingway ends up writing
a few pieces about the trip and his pieces get more traction
than hers because he's quite a bit more famous.
And she's kind of doesn't reallylike that very much.
And he's like, well, you made mecome.
I was there to protect you in China.
While they're in China, they interviewed General Chiang Kai
(31:40):
Shek, played by Larry Say. And I think the nickname for him
was Cash My Check because because he was sort of working
quite substantially behind the scenes with the Americans.
And they interviewed him and hiswife, Madam Chang, played by
Joan Chen. So General Chang led the
Republic of China from 1928 until his death in 1975.
(32:02):
Although, of course, if you knowanything about a 20th century
Chinese history, he had to lead his government from exile
because they were defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in
1949. So he, quote, UN quote, LED an
exiled government in Taiwan until 1970.
Five. And they also have the
opportunity to interview his, we'll call it political
opponent, Chuan Lai, played by Anthony Brandon Wong.
(32:24):
And Chuan Lai was a prominent communist.
He became the first premier of the People's Republic of China
after the communist coup. So they're kind of getting the
both sides of the situation here.
More jealousies flare up betweenthem.
Also in the biography, they sortof mentioned that both Hemingway
and Gellhorn, when they wrote about these meetings, they kind
of went a little soft on GeneralChang and perhaps should not
(32:48):
have done that. But yeah, I mean, yeah.
Interestingly enough, in the movie, Martha is kind of really
honest with Madam Chang. She offends her almost, and she
has to kind of talk her way out of that.
And she doesn't really make any friends in that conversation, I
don't think. Yeah, I'm not sure it went that
way in real life. Perhaps that's the way Martha
(33:08):
would have liked it to have gone.
Maybe. Sounds like something she wished
she would have done, like being that honest about.
Is it about the jade brooch being made by children's hands
or something in the movie? I already forgot something like
that. Yeah, I mean, this guy was the
the extremely corrupt authoritarian leader of China.
(33:31):
So he was doing a bunch of not great shit and they did not
really call him out on that in any way.
No, Martha is trying to get a war assignment in Europe in
1940. Three Well Hemingway plays war
quote UN quote and they argue when Hemingway done purchased
her position at Colliers, which is kind of a Dick move.
(33:53):
Yeah, so kind of what really happened was that Martha was
already in Europe. She had reported from
Czechoslovakia before the war. When the war started, she was
reporting from air bases in England.
She was interviewing bomber crews and that kind of thing.
She went to Italy, so she was reporting from Casino.
She's actually kind of in the thick of it in combat.
(34:14):
And she ended up reporting from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma,
Singapore, like all kinds of places immediately before and
during the war. And while she was overseas
filing these reports, she was getting all these letters from
Hemingway being like, well, if you were really my wife, you'd
be here in my bed and I like, I miss you and you should be here
with me and that's your duty as a wife, blah, blah, blah.
(34:35):
And she was like, well, why don't I give you a few of my
articles for a Collier so you have an excuse to come over here
and join me. Which was very generous of her
because she probably would have known that his name would take
precedence over hers in the publication.
And he was like, no, I don't want to you come here.
So she went home. She was there for a brief
period. They fought like cats and dogs.
(34:58):
And then that was when he decided that he was going to
take the Colliers thing after all.
And he was like, I have a seat on a plane.
Women aren't allowed. See you later.
So that's when he sort of fuckedoff overseas to start his war
reporting on World War 2. And she had to kind of find her
own way over there. What a crybaby.
Oh fuck. Why didn't they make the movie
(35:19):
about all the things she was doing and all the places she was
like? If you look at the list of where
she's been and what she's reported on?
Great movie. Yeah, they definitely made this
movie about the relationship andless about her, I guess.
I mean, it's her perspective of the relationship, but yeah.
And there's a real quote from Hemingway that he apparently
(35:40):
yelled at Martha, which was They'll still be reading me long
after you've been eaten by worms.
What a fun and supportive husband.
Yeah, So Gellhorn, so far, she'snot having a lot of luck as a
female war correspondent. And she decides that she wants
to cover the D-Day landing. So she sort of blags her way
onto a nursing ship, and she goes to Normandy.
(36:04):
And Martha actually landed on the beach to help load wounded
to take them back to the ship, which, of course, made Hemingway
incredibly jealous because he obviously was not on the ground.
She's widely believed to be the only female journalist to be
present during the landings. And she actually lost her war
correspondent accreditation overit.
Like, she got arrested because of her stowaway shenanigans, but
(36:25):
that did not really stop her from further war coverage, just
made it a little bit more difficult at times.
And meanwhile, Hemingway meets the woman who will be his fourth
wife, Mary Welsh, played by Parker Posey, who I simply
cannot look at without thinking of White Lotus these days.
And Gellhorn catches them being cozy when she comes to visit
(36:45):
Hemingway after he's been injured in a car accident.
And it's kind of the straw that breaks the camel's back.
And she becomes the only one of his wives to ask for a divorce.
I absolutely hate that scene where he's in the hospital bed
and Mary Walsh is like draped over him and he's like, oh, it's
whatever he calls it. What's the nickname again?
He. Called her Marty.
(37:05):
It's the. Marty, It's the Marty.
It's like, come on, dude, It's the right.
But yeah, he's just a bitch. Yeah, they spoke about some
details of the divorce toward the end of the war in London,
and after that they never saw each other again.
And Gellhorn didn't really speakof him publicly, but they were
together for eight years and married for four.
(37:26):
And definitely the relationship had a long lasting impact on the
rest of her life. I wonder if that's why she
called him the unwinding companion in her book.
And also I guess because she didn't want to her work to be
overshadowed by him the entire time, which makes sense.
Yes, Hemingway was not quite as mum on his side of things.
(37:47):
I don't think he was mom about anything in general.
Yeah, it was just loud. Anyway, Martha covers.
It goes pretty quickly from here.
By the way, Martha covers DECA on Icebridge concentration
counts. And in the movie they show you
real footage from Deca, which I think I would have preferred
(38:09):
maybe if they didn't show because it's such an abrupt
scene, they almost don't give itenough time for it to be
respectful. Like it's very quick, but it's
very jarring in a sense. It's also very quick and very
jarring to her. She talks about how it made her
feel, but I don't think I like it very much.
I think it I don't need it more time to breathe or just not have
(38:33):
been their shots. Yeah, I think it could have been
like an end card even, just because, you know, this movie
needs to decide what it wants. Either it's a movie about their
relationship or it's a movie about her.
Yeah. In the novel I read, Point of No
Return, the main character is a Jewish soldier, and Martha
Gellhorn was Jewish, or she was partly Jewish.
(38:54):
I think both of her parents werelike half Jewish, and so they
were never a particularly religious family, but she had an
awareness of this part of her identity.
So in the novel she's written, this character who is a Jewish
soldier, he works as a Jeep driver for an officer, and he
witnesses Dachau at the end of the war.
And in a fit of rage driving hisJeep, he mows down a group of
(39:17):
Germans and kills some of them. And this is kind of an
articulation of how Dachau made her feel.
It made her so angry. And she actually wrote A
darkness entered my spirit therein that place in the sunny early
days of May 1945. I stopped being young.
I do not really hope now, not really.
I only feel one can never give up.
(39:37):
Yeah, I think we got a similar line from her in a movie after
we see those images too, about how Darker broke her.
Sure it did. Like it's one of the most awful
things you can imagine. I don't think anyone can go then
be unaffected by that. Yeah, so we cut to many years
later, Hemingway, depressed, undergoes shock treatment.
(40:00):
He's living an unhappy existencewith Mary, his fourth wife, and
we see him die by suicide July 2nd, 1961.
Yeah, kind of sad. I mean, he's a Dick, but I'm
still kind of sad. I did like how they made him age
in the movie. They did a great job of making
him look like second hanger and tired of life but was married
(40:23):
there for his suicide. Because it's implied that she's
in the other room as he shoots himself.
Yeah, I think she was. And she told everyone that he
died in an accident cleaning hisgun.
But Hemingway suffered many serious health problems during
his life. He had a genetic condition
called hemochromatosis, which meant he was in a lot of pain a
lot of the time. His mental state was
(40:44):
deteriorating towards the end ofhis life.
He had severe injuries from 2:00, plane crashes, and he had
six untreated concussions, and he battled alcoholism and
depression. All of this was made worse by,
you know, those other injuries that he had.
And the suicide attempt that finally worked was not his first
attempt. And so he had previously been
(41:05):
taken to a hospital. His friends took him home so he
could get some of his clothes, and when he came into the house,
he made a beeline for the gun cabinet and chambered around.
But one of his friends tackled him and was able to take the gun
out of his hands. And on the way to the hospital,
he tried to, they took him by plane.
He tried to walk into the propeller.
And when they got him on the plane, he tried to jump out of
the plane. So this was a guy who was just
(41:27):
profoundly having a difficult time.
He was suffering a lot. And so I don't think it was a
gun accident. I think he killed himself.
Jesus, that's rough. We see the end of the interview
with older Martha, who says you won't be a footnote in someone
else's life, which is funny if there's a movie which is called
Hemingway and Gellhorn instead of Gellhorn and Hemingway.
(41:50):
But I don't think she would haveliked this movie particularly
much. She reminisces about the old
days once alone and then puts that away to go on another
assignment. And I like how she just decides
at the end of the interviews done, she's like, Oh no, we're
done. You can, you can leave.
Like, no, it's on my term charts.
Not at all. Yeah, for sure.
(42:11):
Very much like how she lived. Yeah.
And that's the end of it, yes. Martha went on to cover the
human face of further conflicts including Vietnam.
She covered a few civil wars in South America.
She was all over the place. She published a total of 15
(42:34):
books, including novels, collections of short stories,
and I think 3 non fiction works.She got married and divorced
once more through her relationship with her second
husband. She had a few stepchildren.
One of them she got along with particularly well.
She adopted a son of her own whom she did not get along with
particularly well. She lived all over the world
throughout her life. She would literally go places
(42:56):
and she would set up a home for herself.
So she lived in Mexico, she lived in Kenya.
She was all over. And she ultimately just
suffering a slow decline in health and blindness that made
it impossible to travel, read orwrite, which were kind of the
three central tenets of her life.
She also died by suicide on February 14th, 1998.
She was 89 years old. Imagine being that old and then
(43:20):
committing suicide because you're like, it's been enough.
Yeah, she was pretty effectively.
She was pretty much blind, like she couldn't read or write
without help. She was also hard of hearing.
She was just having a hard time doing all the stuff that was
interesting to her. And I think she also, she's a
little vain. She had all these young friends,
and I think there was this sensethat they were, you know, out
(43:40):
and about living these interesting lives.
And she finally was starting to really show her age.
Yeah. Sad.
Yeah. There's a few things that crop
up towards the end of the biography that really made me be
like, what? So she adopts this kid and I
think she has this sense that this is what's going to make her
happy. You know, this is going to be
(44:02):
the long term relationship that actually works because
throughout her whole life, the only relationship that really
seemed based on unconditional love and respect was the one she
had with her mother. So I think she thought adopting
this kid from an Italian orphanage would fill the hole in
some way and she just was perhaps not naturally suited to
(44:24):
being someones mother. She was constantly on the kids
case about his weight, she sent them to boarding school and
every time he was home it was constantly this battle of her
trying to withhold food from him.
And later on, towards the end ofher life, she rewrote her will,
saying that he wouldn't inherit anything unless he lost some
weight and. No, Martha.
(44:46):
Yeah, So I think she really, shehad a hard time with other
people not living up to her expectations, but she also had a
hard time with herself not living up to her expectations.
Like she would constantly write about how she regretted the way
a lot of her relationships had turned out, or she regretted her
own behavior in certain scenarios and that kind of
stuff. But she she doesn't seem to be
able to help herself. She was hard on everyone,
including herself. She.
(45:07):
Kind of in that way reminds me of Lee, who also seemed to be
never quite content with whatever was going on and then
moving on there. I think Lee might have been
slightly more successful in thatsense to Martha, but also these
very moving, always moving kind of personalities.
Oh yeah, she is very nomadic. She couldn't seem to settle
(45:30):
anywhere. And I yeah, I think she was
always just moving on to move on.
You know, maybe the next thing Ifind will be the thing it will
make me happy. You know, she was driving in
Africa when she was living thereand she hit and killed a child.
So that was the kid ran out on the road.
Like it wasn't her fault. But also, I mean, that's going
(45:52):
to do a number on your psyche, right?
Sure, yeah. So we should rent this movie?
How many cats in the Cuban houseout of town would you rent this
movie? Y'all, they had so many cats in
(46:12):
that house, like I'm not kiddingyou.
And they never got any of them fixed, so the problem just
compounded itself. I don't know man.
I think I'm going to give this movie 5 cats in the house out of
10. It was too long.
Not that I didn't appreciate theopportunity to learn more about
(46:32):
the sort of 20th century intellectuals and what they were
up to, but when I was reading the biography, I found it a bit
slow going. And I think it's because I just
didn't like Martha very much. I think, like I said at the
beginning, Nicole came and did agreat job.
I don't I don't think that I would necessarily recommend this
movie. I think if you want to find out
about Martha, you should definitely read the biography
and give this one a miss. What about you?
(46:53):
I think you are right on point. I am also going to give this
movie 5 Cats in a Cuban House. I already forgot my own rating
system. That's great, 5 cats in a Cuban
House out of 10, because I also thought the pacing was kind of
off and the way that distributedthe different periods in the
(47:14):
film, we're kind of often. I didn't particularly like the
relationship part of it either. So what is there to like?
It's not necessarily bad acting or anything, acting's fine, but
I don't know, it's just not a very, you don't want to root for
either of these people or for mostly any of the people in the
(47:35):
movie. I feel like you need something
to be happy about in this movie,and I really isn't very much of
it. So I also thought it was too
long. I was like, when's this movie
going to end and when is it going to get to World War 2?
It's also another thought I had when I was watching it.
So yeah, don't recommend for thestory excellence, fine, but like
(47:58):
don't watch it. I don't think unfortunately I
really wanted to like it, but now can't really say that I do.
Are you reading anything new since we last recorded?
I'm taking a crack at SAS Duty Before Glory by Tony Rushmore,
which is the book about Reg seekings and that will become
relevant soon. Excellent.
(48:19):
I'm also still reading, not books, so nothing new from me.
So I'm going to close down this episode for us.
Thank you everybody for listening.
You can follow us and find us wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast,
or you can visit our web rosiethereviewer.com.
And if you want to send this episode to a friend, despite the
(48:40):
fact that the movie's not very interesting, I think this
episode's quite nice. So do send it to a friend.
And don't forget to read this because we love you if you do.
See you next week. Bye.
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