Revamp Till Ready

In November 1937 Ernest Hemingway finished a play about the Spanish Civil War. At that time the Spanish war was big news, and Hemingway was in Madrid covering it. Most obvious question about Hemingway's The Fifth Column was: Who would be the lucky Broadway producer?

Soon it looked as if Producer Jed Harris had won. Then things began to happen. Harris and Hemingway couldn't agree on revisions, and Harris checked out. Austin Parker (a former husband of Miriam Hopkins) took a $1,000 option on the play, died a few days later. From then on The Fifth Column was batted around the market; finally Hemingway threw the script on the shelf.

In the fall of 1938 The Fifth Column appeared in book form, won critical acclaim. Producers again started dickering; to one of them according to Broadwayfarer Leonard Lyons, Hemingway angrily replied: "Fifth Column, sixth draft, seventh producer, eighth refusal." Soon after, he agreed to let Hollywood Writer Benjamin Glazer rewrite the play. Last December the Theatre Guild announced that it would produce the play, with Franchot Tone as lead. Last week (with the financial assistance of Billy Rose) The Fifth Column opened at last on Broadway.

By last week the play was anything but newsworthy: it sounded more like a familiar gramophone record about Spain than a vibrant radio voice. It also did not sound overmuch like what Hemingway had written. In Adapter Glazer's hands, it was less a personal memoir of Spain than a general tale of war. There was more drama in it, but more melodrama. Its sexual passion had been transformed into romantic love, its psychological conflicts swollen into moral crises.

As produced, The Fifth Column told of Philip Rawlings, a U. S. newspaper man doing counter-espionage work for the Loyalists in Madrid.* Rawlings' job has got him down. He meets an American girl, rapes her in a fit of drunken violence, then falls madly in love with her. Against the pleas and warnings of his superiors, he plans to desert his job and clear out with the girl. At the last minute he is free to do so, because of a Loyalist order releasing all foreign volunteers from service. Then, from a sense of honor and devotion to a doomed cause, he decides to stay.

The play that Hemingway wrote was different. It was a picture of wartime Madrid, a tale of a man and his work, a man and his girl. In the end he simply kicked the girl out and went on working. There were few "big" scenes: Death in the Afternoon had merely taken on a new and more grisly meaning. Most of it was casual. Much of it was real. A good bit of it (in stage terms) was undramatic.

The acting version is far more dramatic --the first half, indeed, is often extremely exciting theatre. But the new version is also much more romantic, and bulging with high ethical conflicts. One seems valid: the struggle in Rawlings between the idealism that made him take on a sickening job, and the nausea induced by the job itself. The other conflict--love v. duty--is old stage twaddle which Adapter Glazer could not bring to life. Despite its bold beginning, the love affair is flimsy, vaporous, unreal, nearly sinks the play. Only eloquent rhetoric holds the second half of The Fifth Column together. And nothing could be less characteristic of Hemingway than eloquent rhetoric.

*The play's title refers to the Insurgents' statement that they "had four columns advancing on Madrid and a fifth column of sympathizers inside the city to attack the defenders . . . from the rear."

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