HBO premiered a new film Monday on the love affair between Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn. A University of Idaho Hemingway scholar served as a consultant to the filmmakers.
Hemingway and Gellhorn is film about the love affair between literary giant Ernest Hemingway and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who would become his third wife. Susan Beegel, a Hemingway scholar and editor of The Hemingway Review, a journal published by The Hemingway Society and The University of Idaho, served as historical consultant on the film. “My role really was as a Hemingway expert, and in that capacity I was asked to read the script and comment on it several times.”
The film follows the writers through the Spanish Civil War and other events in their lives. “The director, Philip Kaufman, has been able to take actual clips of historical footage, and then actually insert the characters into that footage.”
As a scholar and historian, Beegel said she was moved by the production techniques used to recreate the period, because she says viewers are given a real visual sense of where Hemingway and Gellhorn were at the moment and where the world was at that moment.