Review of From Here to Eternity (1953) by Morgan T — 06 Mar 2009

From Here to Eternity is an old-fashioned blockbuster of a movie. Set in Hawaii, 1941, at the Schofield barracks (as the opening caption informs us), the ultimate destination of this film is Pearl Harbor, but Pearl Harbor is incidental in this movie to the story of the soldiers' lives leading up to that point.

Montgomery Clift plays Pvt. Prewitt, a young "Rebel Without A Cause"/ James Dean (or "Cool Hand Luke", which this movie is reminiscent of)-type who's transferred to Sgt. Warden's (Burt Lancaster) division.

He's a multi-talented kid, and one of those talents happens to be the very coveted talent of boxing. So it's much to his great misfortune that his new home is under the command of Capt. 'Dynamite' Holmes, a slimy officer obsessed with winning another boxing trophy for his mantle.

He and the other boxers in the division make things rough indeed for the pacifist Prewitt. Meanwhile, The Captain's wife (Deborah Kerr) is trapped in a loveless marriage, and since Sgt. Warden "hates to see a good woman go to waste", the two have a steamy affair (and roll around on the beach).

George "Superman" Reeves is there to make sure the Sgt. knows he's not the first soldier she's been with, though. Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra play the friends of Prewitt, but are there mainly to be in awe of him and his greatness, it seems.

The soldiers all seem to spend their time getting blind drunk everyday (if that was the case, it's no wonder the Japanese caught us offguard!), and carousing in whorehouses. Years later, a carbon copy of this film will be made, an almost carbon-copy of it in fact, right down to main plot being a love story and the ending having a climatic battle scene.

But where 2001's "Pearl Harbor" featured computerized graphics that had all the emotional impact of one set of trans-formers fighting another set of trans-formers, From Here To Eternity's battle scenes seem real (and not just because they incorporated actual battle footage into the movie) and tense.

For a movie made in the 1950s, you'll find no evidence of Leave it to Beaver's "gosh oh golly" innocence here. This movie, though, is about love not war (even if both end in tragedy), and the men who chose war over love.