Rock Hudson plays the wounded ambulance driver who falls in love with his nurse (Jennifer Jones) while recovering from his injuries in First World War Italy in this dramatisation of Ernest Hemingway's autobiographical novel. The voluptuous Jones was married to the film's producer, David O Selznick, who not only wanted to pay adoring tribute to his wife's beauty, but also sought to repeat the huge success of his earlier blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Although not up to that standard, this is just as overblown and compulsively enjoyable (even with its disturbing depiction of war) as the other epic Selznick made with Jones, Duel in the Sun. Richard Attenborough's 1996 drama In Love and War, starring Sandra Bullock and Chris O'Donnell, deals with the real-life story behind Hemingway's novel.

An English nurse and an American soldier on the Italian front during World War I fall in love, but the horrors surrounding them test their romance to the limit.