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A few days ago, I asked the Facebook world to tell me which AFI movie to watch: A Clockwork Orange, Network, or From Here to Eternity. Besides some not-so-relevant responses, none of my friends told me to watch From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinneman 1953). I should have taken that as my first clue.
The film centers on a few soldiers in an outfit stationed in Hawaii just before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. The soldiers’ lives consist of meeting girls at a gentlemen’s club, getting drunk, and defending themselves against mistreatment. In particular, the film follows one Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) as he joins the outfit as a recruit for the boxing team — except he refuses to fight because of a sparring session where he blinds one of his friends. He suffers constant torment from his fellow soldiers as they try to bully him onto the fighting team, but he stays strong and accepts that he rarely gets any time off. And that time off is important because he wants to go see his sweetheart Alma “Lorene” Burke (Donna Reed).
Sgt. Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) also comes into play a lot as he falls in love with his captain’s wife, Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr). He faces a major decision thanks to the affair: apply and train to become an officer in order to marry Karen or remain a sergeant, where he thinks he belongs.
A lack of character development and a very back-and-forth, unfocused plot makes this film difficult to focus on and finish. It actually took me three days to finally finish it (please remember that I had just watched the double-in-length Gone with the Wind in one sitting). It was boring and kept losing my attention. It would have helped had the characters been given more back story.
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We get a little about Prewitt — his parents, I think, were gone, and he turns to the army to find a place in the world for himself. He was a good fighter, but after seeing the destructive effects of it, refuses to continue it. Instead he plays the bugle, and he excels at that as well. He falls in love, but it only really seems like a superficial love based on his initial attraction to one of the girls paid to entertain him.
Generally speaking, I really like films about World War II, and I particularly enjoy films about U.S. life just before the attacks on Pearl Harbor, but this film did so in such a mediocre fashion. Sure, they touch on the idea that the U.S. could be entering war at any moment, but I’m positive that it was a bigger topic, especially in the armed forces, than how they depict it.
And I realize that this film was made in the 1950s, so ideas on how to depict violence and gore was completely different, but the way the attack is portrayed in the film is, well, weak. The audience sees only one man gunned down during the attack on the base, and after that, even though all the soldiers are running around an open field, every time they get up from taking cover, there are still just as many men that get up as there were hitting the ground. Again, the film was made in the 1950s, so everyone was probably wary of portraying the U.S. as weak, but this made the attack look like a pathetic attempt on the parts of amateur Japanese.
It’s no wonder to me why this film was bumped from the AFI Top 100 list in 2007.
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