James Cummins Bookseller

Scarce promotional still from Hemingway's Spanish War film of 1937

Promotional production still from 'The Spanish Earth', a film narrated and jointly written by Ernest Hemingway [1937].

(Ernest Hemingway).

Prometheus Pictures, 1937.

Price: $350.00

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About the item

8" x 10" Scarce promotional still from Hemingway's Spanish War film of 1937. Sepia toned photo still from the film, a few light surface marks and slight crease at bottom left but not enough to bend; overall very good.

Item #345836

The Spanish Earth was a 1937 documentary directed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. The idea came about in December 1936 when several literary figures, including Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Archibald MacLeish, formed and funded a company they named Contemporary Historians, Inc., to back the film. The backers specifically meant the film to demonstrate support for the Republican forces and the Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion who fought against the Nationalists, unlike Hollywood's only other effort on the subject, the apolitical 1937 film, The Last Train from Madrid.

The film was made up of footage of war and glimpses of rural Spanish life in its portrayal of the struggle of the Spanish Republican government against a rebellion by right-wing forces led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. The film was written by Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos (among others) and one version was narrated by Hemingway while another was done by Orson Welles in May 1937. A French-language version is narrated by Jean Renoir. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hemingway and Ivens to show the film at the White House in advance of its premiere. The version screened for the Roosevelts on July 8, 1937, was narrated by Orson Welles.