Fred Zinnemann (1953)
The Pearl Harbor attack may be the film’s most obvious qualification for ‘epic’ status and it’s very well done. But what’s so impressive about From Here to Eternity is that it fuses – in the physical scale of the action and the relationships between the people in the story – momentous and intimate elements. It’s this combination that makes it a film that’s outstanding both because it’s first rate and because it’s unusual – an epic without bombast. The James Jones book was 861 pages in the first hardback edition; Daniel Taradash’s admirable compression of the novel brings the film in just short of two hours. The screenplay is expertly structured. There may be the odd moment where the dialogue is too explicit; there are many more instances of writing that’s impressively concise and, because the lines are eloquent and in character, compellingly believable. When Private Robert E Lee Prewitt tells Alma Burke (professional name, in the club where she works as a hostess, ‘Lorene’) that he loves the army and she retorts that it doesn’t love him, Prewitt’s response is that, ‘A man loves a thing, that don’t mean it’s got to love him back’. (This is a very rich line. Alma is in love with Prewitt and he loves her as much as, with the army to love too, he can.) The conversations between Prewitt and his fellow soldier Angelo Maggio are consistently strong – blending casual and meaningful remarks, revealing character without being obviously expository. The closing exchange between Alma and the army wife Karen Holmes on board the ship taking them away from Hawaii is similarly excellent in what it shows and what it keeps hidden. In all these sequences, the acting – under Fred Zinnemann’s acute, sensitive direction – is perfectly judged and has great tensile strength.
From Here to Eternity is superlatively and imaginatively cast. Frank Sinatra’s performance as Maggio is justly famous – his desperate verve and humour transform what could have been a mawkish role and make the quietness of Maggio’s death affecting. As Alma, Donna Reed is so ordinarily attractive that she’s very real; it’s a remarkably empathic piece of acting, without a trace of condescension to the character. There aren’t that many people in the story yet Zinnemann creates what feels like a large canvass because the characterisations, even in the minor roles, are so ample (thanks to the likes of Jack Warden, in one of his first screen appearances). Even Ernest Borgnine, who plays the brutishly sadistic staff sergeant Judson, works well here. As the furiously disappointed wife of the army captain (Philip Ober), Deborah Kerr is cast against type: no one on the Oahu army base believes in the semblance of ladylikeness that Karen Holmes presents to the world. Kerr’s bitter emotionality is powerful – she suggests a hysteria that’s controlled only because Karen has become so jaded. In the prologue to her affair with Milt Warden, her husband’s first sergeant, Karen stands in her kitchen, dismissing and desiring Warden in the same look, the same breath: the tension is electric. Except for parts of the long dialogue with Richard Burton in Night of the Iguana, this is by far the best acting I’ve seen from Deborah Kerr. Her playing usually has a stop-start quality – she conveys one feeling then starts on another; in this film, she’s in an emotional groove.
Burt Lancaster looks the part as Warden and is persuasive in expressing his divided feelings. What Lancaster registers through his face has much more resonance, however, than what he conveys when he speaks – his readings are often witty but you can hear him thinking them out. His movements too occasionally seem too defined (the circus gymnast coming out?). A surging sea breaking over rocks was a familiar enough Hollywood indicator of sexual congress in the days of the Hays Code. So the famous scene in which Warden and Karen go for a midnight swim and make love on the beach and the waves still come crashing in is almost comically tautologous – but not quite, because Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are so convincingly, in her case desperately, greedy for each other.
Although he knew the music would be dubbed, Montgomery Clift learned to play the bugle for the role of Prewitt so that his movements would be accurate. The way that he relates to the instrument is so privately impassioned that you believe completely that he’s producing the sound too. Without jettisoning his famous sensitivity, Clift is physically convincing as a fighting man – a wiry soldier and a highly-rated army boxer. He’s wonderful in the sequence in which Prewitt tells how a punch he threw accidentally left another man – a friend – blinded. (It’s his refusal to go back in the ring that causes Prewitt to be victimised by Captain Holmes, who sees the success of the regimental boxing team as the next step to further promotion.) Clift does an amazing job of conveying a man of strong will but limited intelligence (‘a hardhead’ as Prewitt is called by more than one of his colleagues – an epithet that’s made to seem very right by the boniness of Clift’s skull). As Prewitt plays taps for the dead Maggio he’s not the only one in tears; Clift’s gesture, as he silently hands the bugle back at the end of the tribute, is beautifully expressive. When he hears about the Japanese attack, Prewitt, who’s gone AWOL after killing Judson in revenge for Maggio’s death, tries to return to the army base under cover of darkness but is shot dead by a sentry.
It’s a fine and daring bit of direction on Zinnemann’s part that he makes Prewitt’s death and the immediate aftermath anti-climactic: Warden praises Prewitt (‘He loved the army more than any soldier I ever knew’) but in death Prewitt quickly becomes anonymous – that is until the piercing exchange between Alma and Karen on the departing ship. The two women have never met before; Alma has no reason to think Karen knows who she’s talking about as she embroiders the memory of Prewitt. Karen does know, though. These are the final lines of the film:
‘Alma: He was awarded the Silver Star. They sent it to his mother. She wrote me she wanted me to have it.
Karen: That’s very fine of her.
Alma: They’re very fine people. Southern people … He was named after a general. Robert E Lee … Prewitt.
Karen: Who?
Alma: Robert E Lee Prewitt. Isn’t that a silly old name?’
Prewitt, the man who wants to give his life to the army but is determined to be his own man, is a major character in American film drama. Montgomery Clift’s interpretation of Prewitt turns him into a great one – the equal of Brando’s Terry Malloy in the following year’s On the Waterfront.
Fred Zinnemann is one of my favourite directors not least because of what he does with types of film I don’t normally like – with the western in High Noon, with a war film here. I love things like the opening sequence when Prewitt arrives at the Oaha base to which he’s been transferred: there are very few people about and every creak of the doors and squeak of the floors registers – the sequence imparts the tang of arriving in unfamiliar surroundings, the way that first impression will soon be swallowed up in others but will never leave you. (The sound is marvellous throughout – from this first scene to the noise of the soldiers’ breakfast things in the moments leading up to the climactic Japanese raid.) The switchblade fight between Prewitt and Judson in a dark street is brilliantly staged. Both figures disappear from view before the wounded Prewitt emerges into a street light and the camera moves to show the corpse of Judson. Throughout this sequence, in which Prewitt’s life changes irrevocably, the same music is playing from the nearby club. Zinnemann lets you pick up things that matter without drawing attention to them – Karen’s photograph that sits implacably on her husband’s desk, the calendar on the wall behind that shows 6 December. As the ship disembarks, the women throw leis into the water, Karen telling Alma that if they go to shore the person who threw them will return to Hawaii; if they float out to sea, you’ll never return. This final image is very strong: the leis don’t look to be heading for shore (emotionally you know they can’t be) but their movement on the waves is tantalising.
The film deserved its Oscars for cinematography (Burnett Guffey), editing (William A Lyon) and sound (John P Livadary) as much as the major prizes it won (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Sinatra), Supporting Actress (Reed) and Adapted Screenplay). The score (by George Duning and Morris Stoloff) and the song ‘Re-enlistment Blues’ (which James Jones wrote with Fred Karger and Robert Wells) also play their part in making From Here to Eternity one of the most richly satisfying of all Hollywood dramas.
30 September 2010
