Smyth - From Here to Eternity

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From Here to Eternity

J. E. Smyth

J. E. Smyth 2015

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Front cover design: Eda Akaltun

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Images from From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), Columbia Pictures Corporation; Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 1977), Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

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ISBN 9781844578146

Contents

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Ned Comstock, Jenny Romero and Barbara Hall for locating archival material, and to Jenna Steventon, Lucinda Knight, Chantal Latchford and Sophia Contento for expert editing and support. My continuing gratitude to Tim Zinnemann for his tolerance and dry humour, and to Alvin Sargent and Stanley for being there. My love to Zoe and Zachary, who side with Maggio every time, and who already know the freedoms and frustrations of exile.

From Here to Eternity

Something like Eternity happens only once in a long, long time.

Buddy Adler, 1954

It took James Jones 858 pages to tell From Here to Eternitys story of the US army in the last months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the film is as lean and powerful as its star Burt Lancasters body. Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn wanted the adaptation of the cumbersome bestselling novel to run under two hours, and it does so with almost military precision. From the first shot, soldiers move into line, forming their companies while George Dunings musical score covers the opening titles. These are men who fit into the spaces of their platoons and companies as neatly as any wartime combat film fit the Hollywood studio production line. But though any individuality or differences among the men disappear as they begin to drill in the neat courtyards of Schofield Barracks, Hollywood had never produced a film like From Here to Eternity.

It was and is a standalone original, much like its two protagonists, First Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift).

The film charts the lives of five lonely and disillusioned people living in the last prewar days of Pearl Harbor under the shadow of Americas pacific military empire. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt has just transferred from the Bugle Corps to the infantry at Schofield Barracks, Oahu, Hawaii. Stubborn, principled, loyal and a disciplined and capable soldier, hes doomed in the nepotistic peacetime US army. His new topkick, Sergeant Milton Warden, is initially wary and disapproving of the outsider, but grows to like him, even as company commander Captain Dana Holmes (Philip Ober) pushes Prewitt to the edge with a brutal and unrelenting hazing campaign designed to force him to box on the regimental team. Warden, disgusted with his superior officer and bored with army routine, has an affair with Holmess wife Karen (Deborah Kerr). Trapped in a loveless marriage and known up and down the base for her string of affairs with enlisted men, she ends up falling in love with Warden. Meanwhile, Prewitt takes up with a prostitute called Lorene (Donna Reed) who works at the New Congress Club in downtown Honolulu. His friend Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra) is even more outspoken than Prewitt and ends up being sent to the stockade where he is beaten to the point of death by Sergeant Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Prewitt later kills Judson outside the New Congress Club and goes AWOL, but tries to return to his unit shortly after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Hes shot by his own men. A few days later, Karen and Lorene sail for the states, but Warden remains at Pearl Harbor, poised for a heroic war career.

Part war picture, part romantic melodrama, part historical period piece, part social realist film, From Here to Eternity fit into no neat genre. Made at the end of the studio system in the chaotic media age of television, 3D, CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound, it nonetheless was shot in spare black-and-white and in the standard aspect ratio and, as critic Archer Winsten first argued, does not need the enhancements of new cinematic technology.