Borzage's personal favorite of his films, A Farewell to Arms is the most disarmingly direct expression of his stark moral vision. The brutal realism and stoic resignation of Ernest Hemingway's famous First World War novel is transformed into a pilgrim's progress in which total emotional conviction triumphs over world-weary cynicism (Hemingway, a much more reserved romantic, felt betrayed). Borzage makes poetic use of ellipses throughout and distills the peripatetic journey across the Italian front into a dense war montage accompanied by Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. This is counterbalanced at the end by a sustained exploration of doubt, renewal, and transfiguration accompanied, ineluctably, by the culminating Liebestod of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.