Influencers & Inspiration This a Special Deluxe Version of Influencers & Inspiration to trace how the creation in one particular genre influenced and inspired not only the film, The Sun Also Rises (1957), but so many other works of art, in so many other genres, through-out the decades that followed.
It starts with a book…
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway. Iconic best-seller, and longtime a high-school-must-read, about a group of ex-pats who travel from Paris to Pamplona, Spain to watch the bullfights and the running of the bulls during the San Fermin Festival. Muy, muy macho stuff,
which inspired the phrase…
“The Son-in Law Also Rises.” snidely quipped by studio employees after the 1930 marriage of David O. Selznick to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, Irene – and Selznick’s appointment as Head of Production for his father-in-law’s studio, otherwise known as MGM,
and influenced the children’s book…
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf (1936) lauded as a classic from the start, it capitalized on America’s new awareness of, and love/hate relationship with, bullfighting. It tells the un-macho tale of a peaceful, flower-loving, little bull named Ferdinand who doesn’t want to fight but only to be left alone to smell the flowers. And then there’s Hemingway’s lesser known, forgettable, children’s story as rebuttal, The Faithful Bull, published to no acclaim what-so-ever in Holiday magazine in March of 1951,
and inevitably, inspired the film adaptation…
The Sun Also Rises (1957) starring Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn. It emphasized the lubricated and hedonistic lifestyle embraced by the Lost Generation during the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, Spain. Told in brilliant Deluxe Color and CinemaScope,
which then influenced a home-decor fad…
Bullfighting Posters (circa late 1950s to 1970s). It seemed as though for decades there wasn’t a finished basement anywhere in suburban America that didn’t proudly display a bullfighting poster, a.k.a. early man-cave art,
And then which, inadvertently, inspired the least Hemingway scene ever to be put on film – at least any scene which involved bulls, that is…
City Slickers (1991) starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby. The opening scene is a running of the bulls featuring three New Yorkers attempting to walk — or rather run — in Hemingway’s macho-footsteps.
After watching this, all one can say is: “No mas, no mas.”
