Islands in the Stream, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, reunited George C. Scott with the director of Patton for a very different kind of story. Based on Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel, the film stars Scott as Thomas Hudson, an American painter living in self-imposed exile on the island of Bimini in the Bahamas during the Second World War. Hudson is a man who has deliberately removed himself from the world: he paints, he fishes, he drinks, and he avoids the war, his ex-wives, and his own past. Then the world comes to find him, first in the form of his three sons, who arrive for a summer visit, and later in the form of the war itself, which demands that he choose a side after all.
Schaffner, who had directed Scott to an Oscar in Patton, directs Islands in the Stream with a patience and a visual lyricism that suit Hemingway’s material. The film is structured in three parts, mirroring the novel: “Bimini”, in which Hudson’s sons visit and the family rediscovers its bonds; “Cuba”, in which Hudson, now living in Havana, is drawn into intrigue and loss; and “At Sea”, in which Hudson joins a mission to hunt for German submariners in the waters around Cuba. The Bahamian locations are photographed with a sun-drenched beauty that makes Hudson’s exile feel both idyllic and lonely. The sea is everywhere in the film: as a playground, as a workplace, and finally as a battlefield.
Scott’s Hudson is one of his most restrained and moving performances. He is not a general barking orders, nor a doctor raging at a system. He is a man who has chosen silence, and Scott plays that silence with great care. In the early scenes, Hudson is funny, gruff, and affectionate with his sons, teaching them to fish, teasing them, and showing them his paintings. Scott’s warmth with the young actors — including a young Hart Bochner as the eldest son, Tom — is genuine and unforced. He makes Hudson a father who loves his children but who does not quite know how to live with them, a man whose talent for solitude has become a habit he cannot break.
The film’s emotional centre is the Bimini section, which ends in tragedy when Hudson’s youngest son dies in a car accident after returning to America. Scott plays Hudson’s grief without histrionics. He receives the news, he goes quiet, and the camera watches him try to continue painting, drinking, and living as if nothing has changed, while everything has. It is a performance built on withholding, and it is devastating precisely because Hudson, like so many Hemingway heroes, believes that showing pain is a form of defeat. The audience sees the cost of that belief in Scott’s face, in the way his hands shake, in the way he looks at the sea as if it might offer an answer.
In the later sections, Hudson is drawn back into the war. He agrees to help American intelligence track a group of German survivors who have landed in Cuba, and the film becomes a tense, almost western-like pursuit across the water. David Hemmings, as a British intelligence officer, and Gilbert Roland, as a Cuban fisherman and friend, provide strong support, but the film belongs to Scott. His Hudson is no longer a young soldier, and he knows it. He is a middle-aged man, tired, grieving, and fighting not for glory but for a sense of purpose. When he is finally wounded in a confrontation with the Germans, he dies as he lived: stubborn, solitary, and unwilling to surrender. Schaffner films his death with a quiet dignity, Hudson alone in a boat, looking at the sky, at peace at last.
Islands in the Stream was not a major commercial success, and Hemingway adaptations are notoriously difficult, because so much of Hemingway’s power lies in what is left unsaid. Schaffner and screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc meet that challenge by trusting Scott’s face to carry the unsaid. Jerry Goldsmith’s score, nominated for an Academy Award, is one of his most beautiful, all strings and sea air, and it supports Scott without overwhelming him. The film’s reputation has grown over the years, as viewers have come to appreciate its patience, its beauty, and its refusal to turn Hudson into a conventional hero.
For Past Tunes readers, Islands in the Stream offers a different side of both Scott and Schaffner. It is a film about fatherhood, about exile, and about the moment when a man who has opted out of history discovers that history will not opt out of him. Scott’s Hudson is not Patton, and that is the point. He is a quieter, sadder figure, a man who has learned that strength is not always loud, and that the bravest act can be to stay, to love, and to face loss without flinching. It is one of the finest performances of Scott’s later career, and one of the most Hemingway-like films ever made.
The novel was published after Hemingway’s death, unfinished in places, and Schaffner wisely does not try to smooth away its loose ends. Instead he lets the three sections feel like three seasons in a man’s life: a summer of family, a season of loss and intrigue in Havana, and a final voyage in which Hudson stops running from the war and sails toward it. Scott holds those seasons together not with a single grand gesture but with consistency — the same dry humour, the same stubbornness, the same reluctance to explain himself — so that by the final scenes, the audience knows Hudson well enough to grieve for him without needing a eulogy.