From Here to Eternity (1953)
Interpersonal drama abounds at a Hawaiian Army base on the days leading up to December 7th, 1941.
From Here to Eternity is a tough movie to sum up. It’s not because it’s some sprawling, four-hour epic with a dense plot.1 Instead, it’s a film bursting with three-dimensional characters, ones whose journeys all feel relevant to the plot of the movie. This is a good thing.
Maybe you don’t need to know every character or every actor, but then again, maybe you do. Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) refuses to box even though the higher-ups are pressuring him to. Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) is maintaining an affair with his captain’s wife, Karen (Deborah Kerr). Alma (Donna Reed) is a “hostess” saving money to go back to Oregon and become respectable. Prewitt’s friend, the gregarious but hot-headed Private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), picks a fight with Sergeant “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine) and pays for it with his life. All the interpersonal drama feels necessary and urgent because the performances are so good.2 And then, if you like your climaxes with explosions, the movie ends with the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The movie also leaves you pondering big questions. Prewitt goes AWOL after avenging Maggio’s death, but after the Pearl Harbor bombing, he wants to report back to his squad. His paramour Alma asks him:
Alma: What did the Army do for you besides treat you like dirt [and] get your friend killed? What do you want to go back for?
Prewitt [dumbly]: What do I want to go back for? I’m a soldier.
In their own ways, both Prewitt and Warden are not just duty-bound to the Army, but glean the only purpose their lives have from their service. You see Prewitt at the beginning and think he’s some generic rebel, but he’s not; instead, he’s committed to his own ideals and willing to do what it takes to stick by them while still being part of the system.3 These are characters and themes worth exploring.
Rating: 10/10, almost as good as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001)
Cast and Crew
Burt Lancaster. For my money, give me Burt. His face, his eyes, his physicality—they lead you to believe. We’ll talk about Burt again and again, but let’s hit some early highlights. He was a circus acrobat early in life until an injury moved him into acting.4 His film debut was in the 1946 noir The Killers, based off a Hemingway short story about a boxer who doesn’t resist his own murder.5 He also played Jim Thorpe6 in 1951’s Jim Thorpe - All American and a recovering alcoholic in the adaptation of the William Inge play Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). And, as we mentioned in the discussion of The Bad and the Beautiful, he’s well-known for being paired with Kirk Douglas.
Here’s a nice picture of Burt in From Here to Eternity, with some laugh-inducing foreshadowing:
We last saw Montgomery Clift in 1951’s A Place in the Sun. After that Oscar-nominated performance, he hooked up with Hitchcock to make I Confess and Vittorio De Sica7 to make Terminal Station. For From Here to Eternity, he went full Method, learning the bugle, learning to box, and spending time with James Jones (the author of the novel) to get into character. Method acting sounds exhausting, but boy does it pay off this time—Clift is great here.8
Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Donna Reed, and Deborah Kerr co-starred; Sinatra and Reed won well-deserved statues for their performances. We’ll do Sinatra and Borgnine's stories in 1955 when they’re each promoted to lead actors, and we’ll catch Kerr—oh, hey, next week! As for Donna Reed, she’s best known for the wholesome sitcom “The Donna Reed Show” (1958-1966) and playing Mary in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).
As for director Fred Zinnemann…well, he’s never been mentioned on Jeopardy, somehow. Is this just an oversight? He was nominated for Best Director seven times, tied with David Lean and Woody Allen and just one back from Billy Freakin’ Wilder. He directed both High Noon AND From Here to Eternity! Isn’t this guy just a straight-up legend? He’ll have more works coming up in this column, so let’s just say expectations are sky-high for when we see him in 1957.
The Trivia
Sgt. Warden is said to have seen action in Shanghai, so let’s talk about U.S intervention there. In 1927, the Marines were sent to Shanghai to protect American interests during civil unrest.9 The wedge of communism had led to a split in the Kuomintang (KMT) government, with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nanjing-based government opposed by Wang Jingwei’s communist-tolerant also-government in Wuhan. The CCP then independently captured Shanghai and demanded the return of the Shanghai International Settlement to Chinese control.
(Wait, you want to know what the Shanghai International Settlement was? Well, it was created when the American and British enclaves were merged in 1863. Wait, you want to know why China had ceded parts of Shanghai to the Americans and the British—and then to France and, uh, many, many other nations? Well, it started with the Anglo-Chinese Opium War and the 1842 Treaty of Nanking10, which ended the Canton System and opened up ports to English traders.11 China ended up being coerced, either through the threat of war or through actual war, into more and more “unequal treaties” that provided concessions to other Western powers. Eighty-five years of colonialism, two sentences, done.)
So the communists captured Shanghai. How does that story end? Well, Chiang commenced to purge communists and radicals as part of what’s now called the “Shanghai Massacre” and the longer-running “White Terror.” Wang fled to Europe and the Wuhan government collapsed12, leaving Chiang in sole control of the KMT. The purge led to a clear break in the alliance between the CCP and the KMT, an end to the Soviet Union’s alliance with the Nationalists, the creation of the Red Army, and the start of the Chinese Civil War.
Chinese history is wild, y’all.13
Odds and Ends
Sgt. Warden mentions Judson and Maggio’s value is lower than that of “two Camp Fire girls”; Camp Fire Girls of America (now co-ed and just called Camp Fire) was the initial sister organization to the Boy Scouts…Warden calls for BARs during the Japanese attack; BAR stands for Browning Automatic Rifle, the machine gun of choice for U.S. infantry units for fifty years…Maggio whistles “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” one of big band bandleader and trombonist Glenn Miller’s biggest hits…Prewitt says he played “Taps” at Arlington on Armistice Day; Armistice Day, now celebrated as Veterans Day, initially commemorated the signing of the armistice between the Allies and Germany, marking the end of WWI…George Reeves, who played Superman in the TV series “Adventures of Superman,” goes uncredited in the film…Warden scolds Karen, saying she’s acting like “Lady Astor’s horse”; this phrase means to be ostentatious or pretentious and refers to financier William Waldorf Astor’s wife Caroline14...James Jones also wrote “Some Came Running,” turned into a film in 1958, and “The Thin Red Line,” turned into a film in 1964 and again in 1998.
Oh, and the awesome movie title? It comes from the Rudyard Kipling poem “Gentlemen-Rankers,” about soldiers who had “lost [their] way” and were “damned from here to eternity.” Very cool.
Though the James Jones book it’s based on is over 800 pages and was once considered unfilmable.
Five of those actors—Clift, Lancaster, Kerr, Reed, and Sinatra—received Oscar nods for their work in this film. Clift and Lancaster were head-to-head in the Best Actor category, though they lost to William Holden in Stalag 17.
Another good Prewitt line: “A man should be what he can do.”
He’d use those circus acrobat skills later by playing a circus acrobat in the 1956 circus acrobat film Trapeze.
The Killers was the breakout for Ava Gardner. Gardner was a big star, but today she’s best known for her three marriages: to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra.
Jim Thorpe won gold in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and has a case for being the greatest American athlete ever.
Trivia often gives short shrift to foreign directors. The lone film from Vittorio De Sica that you typically need to know is The Bicycle Thief (1948).
Apparently Clift got so deep into his character that he couldn’t get out of it. Even after the movie wrapped, he’d show up at bars drunk in an aloha shirt with a bugle.
“Civil unrest,” as it usually is, is a euphemism. A lot of people die in these paragraphs.
Nanking is now known as Nanjing. Many Chinese place names changed as the Chinese government adopted the pinyin system of Romanization for Mandarin Chinese in the mid-20th century, which led to more accurate English representations of Chinese names. Other examples of this are “Beijing” for “Peking” and “Chongqing” for “Chungking” (though it’s not the case for “Guangzhou” for “Canton”).
The Canton System controlled trade with the West by routing it all through Canton (now Guangzhou). The Treaty of Nanking got rid of that requirement and, for good measure, gave Hong Kong to the British. This was the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation.”
Wang later became the collaborationist head of state in the Chinese territory conquered by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War; think of him like Vidkun Quisling in Norway or Philippe Pétain in France.
“Wait,” you might be asking, “you said the Marines. Wasn’t Sgt. Warden in the Army?” Sigh. Army troops were deployed to China to supplement the Marines in 1932. Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria led to both pro- and anti-Japanese demonstrations in the Shanghai International Settlement. Violence ensued, so military troops from Japan, China, and the Western powers all descended upon Shanghai.
Fun [sic] fact about the 1931 invasion of Manchuria: it led to the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, which Puyi, the last emperor of China (he had been overthrown in 1912), ruled over.
Heads up, that Lady Astor is different from Nancy, Lady Astor, the first woman to serve in the House of Commons.