Its action takes place during the First World War and is based on the wartime experiences of the writer Ernest Hemingway.

[2] This film is largely based on Hemingway's real-life experiences in the First World War as a young ambulance-driver in Italy.

He was wounded and sent to a military hospital, where he shared a room with Villard (who later wrote the book the movie is based on) and they were nursed by Agnes von Kurowsky.

In Italy during World War I, the US president has sent teams of Red Cross doctors and nurses to boost Italian morale and help with the wounded.

As she can't find Ernest to tell him the bad news in person, she asks their friend to give him a letter.

He declares his love for Agnes, asking her to meet him at a nearby hotel to spend their remaining time together and to promise each other daily letters, until they are able to get married.

The website's consensus reads, "Formulaic and trite, In Love and War unconvincingly recreates Ernest Hemingway's early life with all the stuffy tropes that the author would have excised in a second draft.

"[6] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2 out of 4 and wrote: "In Love and War is not much interested in Ernest Hemingway's subsequent life and career, and even in its treatment of this early period, it doesn't deal with themes such as his macho posturing, his need to prove himself, his grandiosity.

"[7] In The New York Times, Stephen Holden called the film "a generic historical romance and older woman-younger man fable of sexual initiation too muted for either character to come to life".