Alma : Sit down and – and get comfortable. I’ll make you a martini and see what’s to cook for dinner.
Robert E. Lee “Prew’ Prewitt : Hey, this is like being married, ain’t it?
Alma : It’s better.
From Here To Eternity
The most famous kisses in American cinema?
So this is the movie with that scene on the beach where the lovers kiss madly in the mad waves – the scene that was parodied by Airplane! and probably The Simpsons at some point. As the opening credits roll, we are told we are at Camp Schofield in Hawaii, and it’s 1941. So you already know the end of the story: Pearl Harbor gets bombed by the Japs. And along the way guys will fight, girls will get jealous, and beer will be drunk, along with rum and gin. Probably someone will have to die (Remember: the Japanese will attack Pearl Harbor.).
But when is art ever about not knowing the story? When is it about being surprised? The ancient Greeks believed “surprise” was a cheap and shallow emotion, bereft of catharsis and thus unwanted in theater. They were – as in most cases – correct. I can surprise my young son in the bathtub or my aging neighbor on her porch, and the effort to do so is largely the same, as is the reaction. The ’emotion’ of surprise lasts a second or two, and nothing is learned through the experience.
So if you want to be surprised, watch a film like Cypher (2002, Vincenzo Natali, dir.), a film so desperate to surprise at the end that it starts giggling its secrets like a twelve-year old at a slumber party about 20 minutes in. The film also forgets that for the surprise to have any impact on an audience at all, we have to have a sense of why the characters are going through their machinations and we have to be given some reason to give a damn. Cypher offers none of these, and one can only hope that if anyone bothers to box a ‘Director’s Cut,’ they’ll re-insert the scene that was meant to explain why the companies involved are doing whatever it is we think they are doing. And as long as I am disparaging, can Lucy Liu do anything besides stare just past the camera with a look determined sexuality?
In contrast, if you know ‘something’ about From Here To Eternity but have never seen it, be prepared to be awed. In fact, the more you know of the history (the summer before the ‘day of infamy’) and the more you know about the institution explored (the US Army, blissfully aware that a war is coming, just not yet…), the better the film plays: The characters and their motives and their hopes and their weaknesses come dripping or flowing onto the screen with a humanity that feels more like Hamlet than Hollywood. Who goes to a performance of a Shakespeare play to be surprised by a plot twist anyway?
From Here To Eternity focuses on two skewed romances: that of Sargent Warden with his commanding officer’s wife, Mrs. Holmes, and that of Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt and Alma (aka Lorene “because it sounded French”). Yet it is so much richer than that and a wonderful ensemble story. The cast arranged to turn the James Jones novel into the film reads as a Who’s Who of early 1950s star power. Burt Lancaster as the sergeant, Deborah Kerr as Karen Holmes, Montgomery Clift as “Prew,” Donna Reed as Alma, Frank Sinatra as Angelo Maggio (with the best comic line in the film: “Only my friends get to call me a WOP!”), Philip Ober, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Warden… If they have the material to work with, they generally have the presence to make that material sing (cry, embitter, lament, scoff, or raise a sense of dread). Only Clift comes across as suboptimal as the proudly submissive GI grunt Prewitt. In other films I have seen with him (Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953; Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959; The Misfits, 1961), he seems rather nervous around his acting peers, as if he has his lines memorized but knows he’s about to be found out if he must recite them with sentiment. And that he projects such an indistinct presence even alongside the embarrassingly awkward Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits is testament to the fact his good looks were probably all that kept him in front of the camera.
But in this ensemble and with this story, even Clift can keep his Prew moving. For this we must surely thank the Austrian-born Zinnemann, who had the sophistication of an old European to keep in the acidic qualities of the novel, though the censors must have had fits about it all. Alma, who throws down the quote that starts this review, is played by Donna Reed, who was the dutiful wife of George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, dir.) and who supported her podiatrist husband through raising 2.5 kids and a dog behind a white picket fence for eight seasons of The Donna Reed Show (a podiatrist!). Yet Alma is real enough to know that the best parts of being married are the parts you share before you actually get married and the mortgage has to be paid and the lawn has to be cut. Alma is so far in the vanguard of the sexual revolution that she gives a copy of her key to her bungalow to her boyfriend, Prew, because though she will not marry a soldier, she is lonely.
But we’re in 1941, not 1971. Sargent Warden is the most worked out character: He is street wise and institutionally savvy. He doesn’t like being the real power behind the hapless (and philandering and cuckolded) Captain Dana Helms, but he’s not sure he has any ambition to become an officer. He can’t help but admire Prew’s tenacity, though it likely costs him a transfer to a better unit. He will chew out his underlings for their laziness but he will defend one of his weakest with a broken beer bottle – one of the dozens he has drunk.
These soldiers are fighting ready
Fortunately, Burt Lancaster was an actor most capable of the work out. When he unbuckles his trousers to prepare for an evening swim with Deborah Kerr’s Karen Holmes, I don’t doubt that a few teenage girls in dark theaters experienced their first flush of libidinal vitality (Dona Reed’s exchange with Prew is sultrier still, but teenagers would have no clue.). And “the kiss” hardly registers as romantic in a sentimental sense, first because censors would not allow it to last more than 15 seconds; second because what Sargent Warden is really doing is taking advantage of a married woman who is begging to be taken advantage of (But not for reasons you might expect. I’ll leave that surprise tucked away for first-time viewers, but suffice to say that the reasons are rather surprisingly adult, taboo, and real.).
Lancaster’s brilliance (lost in most of his films after about 1970, when he seemed to be drawn toward any schlock that demanded simplistic masculinity and offered a paycheck) was his way of conveying vigorous alpha-male contempt with a hint of ‘it’s nothing personal, but it’s the situation we are in.’ In this film, Lancaster also has to be the testosterone driven sergeant seducing his superior’s wife just because he knows she’ll let him, while also having to face the unpleasant fact that he does indeed love her and might need to upend his life’s work to have her. The sergeant is a man enduring a high school crush and a mid-life crisis in the same instant, which is exactly how such things happen, and Lancaster conveys the power of his character’s privilege with the fear of what might happen if he exercises that privilege.
The film is a melodrama, which means it crams a broad gamut of emotions into a fairly small frame. Melodramas run the danger of allowing those emotions to start dripping onto the carpet, which only breaks the spell. Some melodramas spill over by asking the music to carry most of the emotional baggage, and From Here… occasionally comes close to making this mistake. Or they pile in plot twists so random that the contrivances encourage whiplash, or at least vertigo, in the audience (viz., Downton Abbey). From Here… never trips on its story lines. Indeed, perhaps the most beautiful aspect of Zinnemann’s direction is that he allows each of his characters plenty of room to express his or her vulnerability and destiny, and these destinies are satisfyingly entwined as the film flies toward its climax. Finally, he does not pull any punches from the characters for the sake of sanitizing a story about Our Boys being done in by the Japs. Even the Army is portrayed not as a haven of patriotic do-gooders but a place where bullies get promoted, honesty gets stabbed, careerists obligingly lick balls if asked, and everyone gets dangerously drunk because it’s Friday.
Of course Pearl Harbor is coming and lots of people are going to be killed and the war will last (for Our Boys) four terrible years. When it comes, the film does an amazing job of sewing real footage of the attack with filmic shots of the chaos of Camp Schofield. That the film shows American soldiers in a state of panic must have bothered censors too, but they were probably too engrossed by this point to make note of the fact that scenes had to be changed. The qualities of cinema verité add to the tragic pathos of the film precisely because we know what’s coming – like watching footage of commuters on a New York subway on September 10th 2001. Which is why the chorus usually starts a Greek tragedy by telling us what the gods have ordained for Antigone or Oedipus. We are moved by what we know but cannot change.
The surprise attack that does not surprise the audience is part of why we want to jump into a story like From Here… and grab the sergeant by the lapels and (if he doesn’t break our hands off a nanosecond later) beg him to put in that application for officer’s school and accept that a colonel’s wife occasionally in his bed won’t mean much when he’s in the Coral Sea or on Okinawa. As in the best (melo)dramas of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, we explore ambiguity and indecision brewing among young people with too much alcohol and hormones and uniforms and time, trained to do things they’d rather not do but it beats whatever alternative they thought they going to have to do.
This is no wife of a podiatrist.
Poor Alma, having tried to be Lorene, returns to being Alma and returns to the mainland after the attack with a trumped up story a bit closer to the one she was imagining for herself all along. Her fibbing is almost undone by Mrs. Holmes, also on the ship and whose own life is rapidly shrinking too. But Deborah Kerr acts more with her eyes in the last scene that most movie starts today can act in an entire film, and she lets us know exactly what she’s thinking without telling us: I know you’re not telling me the truth, but I know that I’m not going to tell my truth either. And truth is the first casualty of war. From Here To Eternity dares to point out that truth gets pretty beat up in love as well.
And so it goes... 