Three Dangerous Summers: Orson Welles’s Unrealized Hemingway Trilogy

Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles shared a romantic enthusiasm for Spanish traditions, particularly bullfighting. Nevertheless, Welles rejected Hemingway’s influential interpretation of the corrida as well as the macho archetype the writer had established for the foreign aficionado. This article draws on new archival research to examine three distinct film projects Welles developed in his later years that imaginatively engaged with Hemingway’s personality and his legacy. These projects were left in varying states of incompletion, which has meant that an important theme in Welles’s late work has remained largely invisible until recent years.