Movie Review: From Here to Eternity

ROUNDUP REVIEW: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

Fred Zinnemann's 1953 movie of James Jones' blockbuster pre-WWII novel, "From Here to Eternity," with its superb cast headed by Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra, is a classic of movie acting, movie writing (Daniel Taradash) and, thanks to Zinnemann's self-effacing excellence, movie directing as well. It's one major Oscar champ (winner of eight) whose stature is intact.

Set in Schofield Barracks at Pearl Harbor in the days before the sneak attack that started WWII, it's one of the best portrayals of U.S. Army life: its routines, rigidity, tensions, hypocrisies, secrets and peacetime dangers. Clift, in his best (and favorite) movie role, is the focal point as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the rebel outsider who refuses to use his superlative skills at trumpeting and boxing and becomes a camp pariah.

Lancaster is the perfect, cynical master sergeant Warden, the hip guy who has a torrid secret affair with gorgeous Karen Holmes (Kerr), frustrated wife of his corrupt captain (Philip Ober). Sinatra (in his Oscar comeback role), is Prewitt's too-feisty buddy Maggio. Donna Reed (another Oscar-winner) is Prewitt's sweet-faced prostitute girlfriend Alma, and Ernest Borgnine is Sgt. "Fatso," the smiling killer. The other Schofield soldiers, a likable bunch, include Jack Warden, Mickey Shaugnessy, Claude Akins and George ("Superman") Reeves.

The movie's single imperishable image, of course, is that seething romantic shot of Lancaster and Kerr lying in the sand and embracing as the surf rolls over them. This and the other sex-or-friendship interludes, "Eternity" implies, are the only respite from the quiet hell the rebellious or the knowing must endure: the lie that man is made for war, woman for the warrior's rest, and all the rest is folly.

This cast could hardly be bettered, and it's a great story as well: a taut, engrossing, highly perceptive scan of the fears, desires, repressions and ugliness boiling under the deceptively quiet surface of pre-war years. Our movies rarely get an American story this rich, evocative and true, and rarely realize it as well. If "Eternity" has dated at all, it's only in a good way; we can only wish our own movies were half as good or reflected American reality half as well.

- Michael Wilmington

"From Here to Eternity" (4 stars), in new 35mm print, opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.