Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, we have an adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Episode #9 “Soldier’s Home”

(Dir by Robert Young, originally aired in 1977)

Having gone from attending college to serving in the Army during the Great War, Harold Krebs (Richard Backus) returns home to Oklahoma.  He arrives home later than most of the other soldiers who served.  (He stayed in Europe until 1919.)  As a result, there’s no big parade waiting for him.  Everyone in town seems to have moved beyond the war and they no longer have much of a desire to talk about it.

Harold, who was once a popular and optimistic member of the town’s social set, no longer feels that he fits in.  He feels detached, watching people as they go about their lives but never feeling any desire to join them.  His mother (Nancy Marchand) pushes him to go out and date and have a good time but Harold feels lost, regardless of how much she prays for him.

Ernest Hemingway’s short story was one of the first to realistically deal with the feelings of soldiers returning from combat.  Though Harold doesn’t talk much about his experiences, one can tell that he saw and experienced things that left him scarred.  After surviving the horror of The Great War, there’s no way Harold can just slip back into his normal routine.

The adaptation sticks closely to Hemingway’s story.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t really find the visual style necessary to capture the power of Hemingway’s words.  Hemingway was a deceptively simple storyteller and Robert Young’s film is a fairly straight-forward portrait of a young man who doesn’t want to do anything, one that fails to truly capture the subtext of Hemingway’s story.  Richard Backus’s blank-eyed acting style worked well when he was playing a member of the undead in Deathdream but, in this one, he just makes ennui seem boring and petulant.  Nancy Marchand, not surprisingly, is far stronger in the role of his well-meaning but clueless mother.

As was almost always the case when it came to attempts to adapt Hemingway, it’s best just to read the original.