From Here to Eternity

1953's "From Here to Eternity" directed by Fred Zinnemann.
Starring Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, and Deborah Kerr.

Winner of an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Sinatra), Best Supporting Actress (Reed), Best Director (Zinnemann), Best Adapted Screenplay (Daniel Taradash), Best Film Editing (William Lyon), Best Sound Mixing (John P. Livadary), Best Cinematography (Burnett Guffey).
Also nominated for Best Actors (Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift), Best Actress (Kerr), Best Music Score (George Duning and Morris Stoloff), and Best Costume Design (Jean Louis).

“FHTE” won 8 Oscars that year, including Best Picture. Featuring some heavyweight stars of yesteryear, it takes place just before WWII, in a military outpost on Pearl Harbour, where a private (Clift) transfers to a sergeant's outfit (Lancaster). Clift, who has boxing experience, is paradoxically a military man but also a man of individual character, refuses to box for the company boxing squad, which sets him up for coercion by Lancaster's supervisor. The attempts to force Clift into "playing ball" attract the sympathies of a wacky private, Sinatra, and the 2 strike up a friendship. Lancaster himself has his own power struggles going on, as he eyes his superior's wife (Reed) as a pleasant but dangerous diversion from the regimented grind of the army life. Their subsequent relationship offers the historically iconic shot of the 2 of them writhing together in the surf along the beach. As the gang engages in their respective melodramas, it all comes to a head when Japan decides to start America’s involvement in WWII.

“FHTE” may not even be the best film of 1953 (I would go for “Tokyo Story”), but it is fun watching the principled characters struggle with societal demands, particularly Clift, whom I quite liked in his performance. More interestingly, Sinatra is easily the largest head scratcher of the cast, winning an Oscar for essentially acting loud and drunk. However, rumour has it is that Sinatra's mob connections were able to secure him the part after the studio initially nixed his involvement. The motivations for the studio changing their minds allegedly involved the sequence of events that inspired the Godfather's "waking up next to my horse's head in bed" sequence (like I said, a real head scratcher). Regardless, it's interesting comparing a war movie of the 50's with one of this millennium, as the optimism and patriotism towards fighting another nation that used to be prevalent have largely been replaced with suspicion at best and cynicism at worst- a welcome trend in our more connected but mutually assured destruction threatened times of today.

  
4/5

Trailer: Click Here.