FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

From Here to Eternity won the Best Picture Oscar in 1954. It is the most recent in my ongoing quest to see all the Best Picture winners by the end of the year. This movie is a romance film, set against the backdrop of a Hawaiian military base in the weeks leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

At its core, the story follows servicemen Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster), new arrival Private Pruett (Montgomery Clift), and the base’s all-around nice guy Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra). Watching this movie through a lens of the 1950s one can easily see why it was given so many accolades. The movie pulls the band-aid off of the sanitized and manufactured Ozzie and Harriett way of portraying American life and the American military. Warden has an affair with his commanding officer’s wife Karen (Deborah Kerr); Pruett and Maggio often visit the Congress Gentleman’s Club, a house of ill repute; Maggio is subjected to ethnic discrimination; Pruett is indefensibly bullied by commanding officers; and there is an immense amount of time that all three men are overly inebriated.

The affair portrayed by Lancaster and Kerr was often uneven and awkward. While they have some chemistry together, they are almost always portrayed as going from an intensity of zero to one hundred in mere seconds. Their relationship seemed incredibly rushed and forced. I was much more drawn in by Pruitt’s falling in love and eventual relationship with the Gentleman’s Club “hostess” (prostitute) Lorene. Donna Reed excels as she inhabits the role of Lorene, a character completely contrary to the type of all-American woman with which Reed is most associated. In a wonderful bit of editing, the first beach hookup between Warden and Karen is juxtaposed with the first gentlemen’s club hookup between Pruett and Lorene. As the music crescendos and the waves crash over the first couple, cut to couple number two as Pruett enjoys a cigarette while Lorene is seen putting her earrings back on. By today’s standards, it is incredibly chaste, but the sentiment of what was taking place is fully conveyed.

The two relationships are based entirely on immediate need and as soon as circumstances change and introspection begins, the relationships begin to crumble. Happiness and fairness are not guaranteed to anyone. This movie lays bare the efforts that people will still go to in order to at least try and obtain those outcomes, messy and complicated as it may be to do so. The character of Lorene tells Pruitt that she couldn’t commit to a serviceman because she was going to have a proper husband with a proper job and live a proper life. She holds to the much-manufactured image of things that the movie itself works to unveil. As she heads back to the mainland at the movie’s finale, one hopes that she might obtain her dream, yet one can’t help but to admit it’s doubtful she ever did.

I’m not sure this film holds up as well as some other older films I’ve recently seen, but I’m convinced it was certainly worthy of the Best Picture Oscar it received, along with 7 other Oscar wins including Best Director (Fred Zinnermann) Best Supporting Actress (Reed) and Best Supporting Actor (Sinatra).