From Here to Eternity (1953)

This is the scene--the one everyone remembers--the one that advertises the movie.

But the scene was so brief, and honestly, it didn't live up to the hype, in my book.  But, sex sells, so there you have it.

From Here to Eternity is a film about army life in Hawaii just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  It was based upon a very controversial novel by James Jones.  It was controversial because of the alarming homosexual content and use of expletives.  The screenplay obviously cut out both, although there was one scene where I had questioned the sexual orientation of one character.  I also later read that Montgomery Clift was a homosexual and was tortured by his guilt (though he wasn't the character I held in question).

The setting of the story is a slow, uneventful, and a seemingly perfect and peaceful time in a Hawaiian paradise.  I say "seemingly" because it was anything but perfect and peaceful for the characters of this film.  Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is continually punished for refusing to box for his company's boxing team.  Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr) is the wife of Captain Dana Holmes (Phillip Ober), a continually and unashamed unfaithful husband.  Then there's Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra), Prewitt's "buddy-boy" (an oft used nickname in this movie--borderline annoying), who is both bothered and harassed by the stockade Sgt. Judson aka "Fatso."  Though he wasn't particularly troubled, Sgt. Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) was bored out of his mind--a slave to a desk job with no challenges in life...until he meets Cpt. Holmes' wife, Karen.  And finally, Alma 'Lorene' Burke (Donna Reed), a gentlemen's companion at the "New Congress Club," is trying to make enough money to go home and show her hometown (and specifically an ex-boyfriend who left her for someone with money and position) that she, too, can be a proper woman with rank and fortune.

I love the way this movie was filmed--until this point, I haven't really seen a film track the stories of so many different characters with such depth.  I find it difficult to point to a leading man or lady in the film because each character's story was important and not secondary to another.  Lancaster and Kerr got top billing for the film, but Clift and Reed and Sinatra had stories just as compelling.  The romantic stories were layered so that you could compare and contrast the relationships of Warden and Holmes and Prewitt and Burke.  Sinatra's story was both for comic relief and to add depth to Prewitt's story.

Many of the characters ended up in the Hawaiian paradise in hopes of a new beginning.  But, like Adam and Eve, a paradisical location doesn't ensure eternal bliss.  These tortured souls duke it out in their carnal humanity, and every single one of them comes up empty-handed.  This film is all about human frailty, struggle, desire, a lack of fulfillment, and emptiness.  They realize that they don't have control over their destinies because of the choices that others make in their lives.  The conclusion with Pearl Harbor's bombing was like nails in their coffins--two men dead, one man left fighting, one man dismissed, and two women, on a boat, questioning if fate would allow them to return.

As I pondered the title, From Here to Eternity, I struggled with the meaning.  When I put this all together in my untrained film brain, I can only surmise that both the novel and the film are trying to communicate that our perception of bliss and pursuit of it are pointless.  It is the choices we make that determine our course.  These characters would continue living their lives as they were in the pseudo-Edenic existence, but their choices made their lives a warzone even before the Japanese started bombing.  Their lives were disintegrating before war came to them--"eternity" was suddenly out of their grasps.  This is the human story:

Paradise lost.

Next up: Lawrence of Arabia (Ben Hur was next on the list, but Netflix is saying it is unavailable.  We'll pick it up whenever they get it!)