From Here to Eternity (1953)

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1953, From Here to Eternity depicts the lives of Army soldiers in Hawaii in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This is an interesting examination of the roles of masculinity in the military, and I found Montgomery Clift's story as Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt to be particularly fascinating. Certainly, the scene on the beach with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love has gotten much of the attention over the years--and perhaps rightly so, given how erotic it remains even now--but Clift's Prewitt is a man who refuses to follow everyone's expectations of what a soldier should or must be. He's a model of individualism and nonconformity, if it's not too much of an oxymoron to say that.

The film begins with Prewitt showing up to his new army base after being demoted and transferred from another unit. Almost immediately, he fails to fit in. Despite a reputation as a gifted boxer, he refuses to participate in the base's team, and the other soldiers set out to make him miserable until he relents and joins them. He's also a bugler, far more talented than any other who's had the position at the base. When he plays "Taps" in honor of one of his friends, it brings tears to all of the men in the company (whether they allow themselves to show the tears or not). And he falls in love with a "hostess" at a local club, a woman who has obviously taken the job for the money and who starts out with a intensely pragmatic sense of who and what she is. Of course, in 1953, the filmmakers had to make her a hostess, but any adult watching the movies knows that she's a prostitute. Yet Prewitt still loves her because he sees past all of the stereotypes associated with such women. Given all those narrative details, how could Clift not be the focus of the movie? How could he not command our attention?

Lancaster and Kerr's storyline is much more conventional. He's a sergeant who reports directly to her husband, the captain of the unit. Her husband, as you might expect, is frequently absent, leaving her alone and lonely, emotions she has felt before at other bases where her husband has been stationed. (Yes, that means she too has a reputation.) Lancaster slowly makes her fall in love with him just as he falls in love with her, and the chemistry between him and Kerr is strong. The scene where he shows up at her home in a rainstorm is almost as sexually charged as that moment on the beach that people are more familiar with. Throughout their scenes together, you can sense how much their characters yearn for each other's company, and you also sense the strain that the secrecy of their relationship has on them both. Both Lancaster and Kerr are good--they always were--and he's particularly adept at showing us a man who's figured out how to work the system of the army to his advantage.

Still, I'd rather watch Clift. His very presence in the movie calls into question what it means to be a man. He's capable of feats of strength, certainly, yet he also shows genuine affection and even tenderness for both his lover Alma (played by Donna Reed) and his friend Maggio (played by Frank Sinatra). That mixture of intelligence and sensitivity is what makes Clift such a compelling actor to watch. When he stares down the brute who's been abusing Maggio, you sense just how much strength is coiled in that body of his. And the endurance that he shows while undergoing "the treatment" by his fellow soldiers, his willingness to allow them to continue to abuse him, shows how much more of a man he is. It's a intriguing study of masculinity, as were many of the films that he appeared in. His performance alone is worth the time to watch From Here to Eternity.