From Here to Eternity (1953)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

“I love the Army,” says Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a private assigned to Schofield Army Base in Hawaii. The year is 1941, in the fall. The girl he’s seeing, Alma, doesn’t understand this love. We find it hard to understand, too. “It sure doesn’t love you,” she says. But he replies with words that are wise beyond his capacity to express his feelings. “Just because you love something,” he says, “it doesn’t mean it’s got to love you back.” For Prewitt is a young man on the edge of a sanctity that has no name but that of the ultimate sacrifice. The Army, we may say, is for Prewitt a pearl — for which he will give his life.

Our Film of the Week, From Here to Eternity, is not, as some people say with a hint of scorn, a “soap opera” that takes place at Pearl Harbor right before and then during the Japanese surprise attack. Let me first describe the cast of characters. The company captain, Dana Holmes (played to “perfection” by Philip Ober, if you can call by that name a mingled brew of cowardice, hard-heartedness, irresponsibility, and immorality) is married to a woman, Karen (Deborah Kerr; playing against type) who is a hundred times the human being that he is. She has also taken to drink, and she is, unfortunately, on the prowl. Holmes’ subordinate who has to do his dirty work for him and who loathes every bit of it, Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), picks up Karen one night while she is tottering alone on the street, and they fall into, or rather pitch themselves into, a passionate romance. Karen pleads with Warden to apply for promotion to the rank of an officer; then she will divorce her husband and marry him. She does not want to be married to a man directly in harm’s way.

Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) shows up, a former boxer who has given up the sport after blinding his sparring partner, but he will not say why he refuses to enter Holmes’ boxing competition. Holmes is nothing if not vindictive — but of course he forces the sergeant to apply the punishment. The one fellow soldier who takes Prewitt’s part is a skinny Italian guy, Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in what I think is his finest part), but Maggio earns the hatred of a sadistic sergeant, Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine; we love him in Marty, but he sure could play the heavy, too, as he also does in Bad Day at Black Rock). Prewitt, meanwhile, falls in love with a girl, Alma (Donna Reed), and their relationship too is not on the clear side of what is good and right. Alma has tricked herself up as “Lorene,” working the beat so as to make enough money to go back to Oregon and marry a “proper” man, by which she means a man rich enough to be respected.

All this, as the terrible day looms. We know it is coming. We cannot help but interpret all that these characters do, in the light of what we know and what they do not know. They are indeed erring about the edge of a precipice. The distance from here to eternity is no greater than the movement of a hand; perhaps Robert E. Lee Prewitt’s hand as he plays Taps on his bugle, alone in a field, and the attack hasn’t even happened yet; no longer than the beat of a heart, perhaps Sergeant Warden’s heart as he must decide whether or not to remain a sergeant and thus give up the romantic love of his life.

There are no saints in this film. Yet that, I think, makes it all the more powerful, because we must witness the actions of sinners, the confused, the lonely, the weak, the proud, the cruel, all verging upon the day of judgment that draws near. It is, in my opinion, one of the most relentlessly honest and unsparing films that Hollywood ever made. It does not celebrate the sin it presents for us to behold, but it does urge us to come to a right understanding of the people caught in the nets of sin. If you want somebody to direct a film in which the main character must stand alone, misunderstood by almost everyone, even betrayed by those he has served, Fred Zinnemann is your man: see A Man for All Seasons. Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed won Oscars for their roles, as did Zinnemann also for direction, and the film took the award for Best Picture. Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster were nominees. Deborah Kerr is one of the four in my ranking of greatest Hollywood actresses who never won an Oscar, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why not: Kerr, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and Maureen O’Hara. Both she and Reed were cast against type, and the results are magnificent.

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