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The Spanish Earth

The Spanish Earth is a 1937 anti-fascist film made during the Spanish Civil War in support of the democratically elected Republicans, whose forces included a wide range from the political left like communists, socialists, anarchists, to moderates like centrists, and liberalist elements. The film was directed by Joris Ivens, written by John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, narrated by Orson Welles and re-recorded by Hemingway (with Jean Renoir doing the narration in the French release), with music composed by Marc Blitzstein and arranged by Virgil Thomson.

The Spanish Earth

  • Orson Welles
    (English language version)
  • Ernest Hemingway
    (English language version)
  • Jean Renoir
    (French language version)

Contemporary Historians Inc.

  • July 11, 1937 (1937-07-11)

52 minutes

United States

English
Spanish
German

Production[edit]

In December 1936, 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 a film project proposed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Hellman and MacLeish collaborated on the story.[3] Ernest Hemingway was a major contributor as well.[4] The film's 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.[5] A later film, Blockade (1938), was also sympathetic to the Republicans.


Orson Welles, who starred in Archibald MacLeish's verse play, Panic (1935), and had recently performed the role of narrator in his CBS Radio verse play, The Fall of the City, recorded the narration for The Spanish Earth in May 1937. An additional English-language release is narrated by Ernest Hemingway. A French-language version is narrated by Jean Renoir.[6]: 617 [7]: 333, 337 [8]


President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hemingway and Ivens to show the film at the White House in advance of its premiere.[9] The version screened for the Roosevelts on July 8, 1937, was narrated by Orson Welles.[8]

Reception[edit]

A review in The New York Times found Hemingway's narration "a definitely propagandist effort" and preferred the camera work that "argues gently and persuasively, with the irrefutable argument of pictorially recorded fact, that the Spanish people are fighting, not for broad principles of Muscovite Marxism, but for the right to the productivity of a land denied them through years of absentee landlordship."[10] The same reviewer in a longer essay concluded that: "Contemporary Historians, Inc...are Ivens' employers and it is their right to dispose of his product as they see fit. They have used it as a violent outcry against fascism. Ivens might have made it lasting art as well."[11]


Ten years later, Bosley Crowther wrote: "The best film we've yet seen on the Spanish tragedy is still Joris Ivens' long-released The Spanish Earth.[12]

Preservation status[edit]

George Eastman House has preserved the film, which was shown on Turner Classic Movies on December 14, 2011. This version has the narration read by Orson Welles.[13][14]

(1937)

Spain in Flames

(1937)

España 1936

at IMDb

The Spanish Earth

at the TCM Movie Database

The Spanish Earth

at the Internet Archive (narration by Ernest Hemingway)

The Spanish Earth

Stephen Koch, “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles” reviewed by George Packer, including many references to the film