The film covers the beginning and the ending of the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. You may like or hate the film, but this is not the point of the review.
The point is the figure of Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet operative in Spain during the Civil War. There is little known about the war, referred to as The Spanish War in Russia. The significance of it was overshadowed by the following wars: the ones against Finland and Japan, and later by the big war against Germany. Koltsov was known to the Soviet readers as a journalist and a founding editor of the Pravda. But there are some accounts of his presence in Spain as of Stalin's man. Not only he dispatched reports back to Pravda, but mainly coordinated the Soviet help to the Republicans.
The Koltsov's character is presented in the film as such, and not as a journalist. In Hemingway's To Whom The Bell Tolls he was supposedly a prototype to Karkov.
The collision between Germany and the USSR aiding the opposite sides in the war has never been accounted for as part of the WW2 and surprisingly so. Both countries were active in providing the fighting sides with ammunition, war machinery and most importantly, with people, particularly with the Soviets recruiting volunteers to join Republicans. The Republicans lost at war, and so did the Soviets. Mikhail Koltsov returned to Moscow, was seen at the party function with Joseph Stalin and then disappeared. His disappearance could mean one thing - arrest followed by execution or death in the GULAG.
Just to add to the Hemingway's book background - there are accounts suggesting the name of Robert Jordan's prototype. Apparently that was Khadji-Umar Mamsurov. Having been an ethnic Ossetian, he passed for a Spanish peasant and served at first as a military consultant, and later as a combat leader during the fight for Madrid.
