Superb direction, it's what carries the entire film.

Won 2 Oscars (Best Cinematography & Best Sound, Recording) and got 2 other nominations (Best Picture & Best Art Direction). And it is a stylistic piece of work by the great director Frank Borzage. He is also someone who understand the little things that makes a good love story work. While Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes are no Farrell/Gaynor, he still knows how to direct them with their limitation in a way to make it sweet and believable. Other then that Adolphe Menjou deserves a thumbs up.

Borzage barely changes a word, but the whole nature of the relationship is much more palatable under his hand. Helen Hayes' natural strength and Cooper's natural gentleness balance out their characters' failings. He'll take lines from the book that come off stone serious like "I'm nothing when I'm not with you" and make them sweet and frivolous, like they're products of frustration and not codependency.

Frank Borzage rescues A Farewell to Arms from the flaws inflicted upon it by Benjamin Glazer and Ernest Hemingway's screenplay through his fabulous sense of style and emotional evocativeness. He turns this tragicomic melodrama into that of consuming, engagingly romantic cinema, fashioning what might have been - with the aid of a sturdier screenplay - one of the great love stories of the 1930s. If the film never becomes truly great, it at least testifies to his directorial competence.

This is pretty great. It doesn't seem to be recognized as a classic, but perhaps that's due to the previously poor quality of the available prints and any differences to Hemingway's novel. You would never know this was a literary adaption. Borzage and d.p. Charles Lang demonstrate tremendous visual style --a highlight is the expressionistic battle scene. Cooper and Hayes really sell their roles as well.

I was worried briefly Borzage and Glazer would skirt the bleakness of the story's climax, but the cinematic A Farewell to Arms is very faithful adaptation of Hemingway's classic war novel. Cooper is perfectly cast, despite not being able to act a lick.