Fred Zinnemann’s version of James Jones’s novel is remembered for a kiss in the surf and is really about a barracks full of bullies. Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra are the reason to watch; the melodrama around them creaks, but it holds.
From Here to Eternity is set in the months before Pearl Harbor, in a peacetime army with nothing to do but drill, drink and torment one another. Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) arrives at Schofield Barracks and refuses to box for his new captain. Captain Holmes (Philip Ober) wants a trophy and lets his sergeants apply what they call the treatment: extra duty and full-pack runs. First Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) keeps the company running while its commander is elsewhere, and finds the commander’s wife (Deborah Kerr) is elsewhere too. Daniel Taradash’s screenplay cuts James Jones’s long, angry novel to 118 minutes.
It is a fine film remembered for the wrong thing. Everyone remembers two people kissing as a wave breaks over them; that shot is in it, and it is short. What the film is about is a man who will not do what he is told, and an institution with all day to make him. We would recommend it to almost anyone, with the warning that the love stories are the weakest part.
Clift plays Prewitt as someone who has decided in advance to absorb whatever is coming. Burnett Guffey shoots the drill ground in a flat white glare so that the punishment looks like weather. When Sergeant Galovitch (John Dennis) stands over him on the parade square, we were angry on Prewitt’s behalf and, a moment later, angry at him, because a word would end it and he will not say the word. Clift carries that double feeling without a raised voice.
Frank Sinatra is the surprise. Maggio is small, loud and loyal, and Sinatra plays him as if he has never been near a microphone. Ernest Borgnine’s Judson runs the stockade and plays piano in the club, and the night Maggio objects to his playing we did not move. Borgnine does not shout. He smiles, picks up a bottle, and the men around him go quiet. It is the most frightening scene in the film and not a shot is fired in it.
Lancaster and Kerr get the beach. He is all shoulders and certainty; she had spent years playing well-bred women, and Zinnemann puts her in a bathing costume and lets her be bitter and bored. Jean Louis dresses her plainly, so that when she does dress up we notice. The kiss is fine. The conversation after it, on the sand, when she tells him what her marriage has been, is better, and Kerr does more with a cigarette than most actors do with a monologue. Donna Reed has the harder job as Lorene, because Taradash has made her respectable enough for the censors and the character has lost her point.
George Duning’s score does not trust the actors. It swells under nearly every quiet exchange. William Lyon’s editing is another matter: the film moves through a great deal of story without hurrying, and when the attack finally comes, Lyon cuts between men in undershirts running across the yard and aircraft crossing the sky with a speed the rest of the film has been saving up. Zinnemann stages it from the ground, among men who have been polishing boots for two hours and now cannot find the ammunition.
Zinnemann had made High Noon the year before, a film with one idea and one clock. This is a more crowded picture, with four love affairs and a barracks full of grudges, and it is less clean for it. Some of the melodrama has dated: people announce their feelings in complete sentences. The bullying has not dated at all.
Watch it for the barracks and tolerate the beach. The PG certificate is right; nothing is shown that a child could not see, and almost everything that matters happens on a man’s face while someone else is shouting at him.
