Unrated, 1 hr. 58 min. Directed By: Fred Zinnemann.
Release Date: Aug 5, 1953. DVD Release Date: Oct 23, 2001.
Every so often, I stumble across a
movie that I fall in to, usually head first.
Invariably, I love these movies completely. From
Here to Eternity was one of those movies.
I hadn’t seen this before, but I certainly knew a thing or two about the
movie. For sure, I knew about the beach
make out scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Back in October, I wrote about the film urban
legend that Frank Sinatra used influence with the Mob in order to get his part
in the movie (and the false nature of that urban legend)… so I had a vague
understanding of what was going to happen, although a few things caught me by
surprise.
It’s a hard thing to balance
multiple love stories, tales of hazing and oppression, a raging psychopath, and
a description of the day to day life of a WWII soldier, and re-enact one of the
pinnacle moments in American history and make it entertaining, but Zinnemann
and his crew did a masterful job. The
cast is, quite simply, pretty amazing, and makes me long for the day (not for
the first time) that our movie stars were selected because of their talent as
much as for their appearance. The story
was well constructed and I’m sure when this was released in ’53, that there was
still a lot of cultural bad feeling. I’m
sure this had the same impact a movie about the lives of people who went to
work at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 would have if it were released
today.
I haven’t said this yet about one of
my classics, but I’m considering buying From
Here to Eternity and
adding it to my collection. It really is
that good. While I liked the stories
that edge us up to the events that took place at Pearl Harbor on that fateful
day in December, the movie really peaked my interest after the bombing. Pearl Harbor represented the death of
American innocence and brought about decades of increasingly violent knee jerk
reactions to events on the international arena.
I thought the atmosphere of panic and fear was remarkably accurate, just
as I found their portrayal of military life, although my stint in the military
was in a different service and almost 50 years later, very little changed. It made this movie an emotional experience and
brought back a lot of memories of my own military career, good and bad times
both, because there seemed so many comparisons to make.
There is one little
tiny thing that threw me, and that’s the lie that Donna Reed told about Pruitt
at the end of the movie. What was up
with that?
Quite simply, this
was an amazing movie experience, and one I’m ashamed I put off for so
long. If you haven’t seen the movie yet,
you owe it to yourself to check it out and see what all the fuss was
about. Even if you don’t like “war”
movies, there’s something for everyone to relate to in From Here to Eternity.
