From Here to Eternity

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (PG)

D: Fred Zinnemann

Columbia (Buddy Adler)

USA 🇺🇸 1953

118 mins

Drama/War

W: Daniel Taradash [based on the novel by James Jones]

DP: Burnett Guffey

Ed: William Lyon

Mus: George Duning

PD: Cary Odell

Cos: Jean Louis

Burt Lancaster (Sgt. Warden), Deborah Kerr (Karen Holmes), Montgomery Clift (Robert E. Lee Prewitt), Frank Sinatra (Pvt. Angelo Maggio), Donna Reed (Alma Lorene), Ernest Borgnine (Sgt. 'Fatso' Judson), Philip Ober (Capt. Dana Holmes), Jack Warden (Cpl. Buckley)

Glossy Hollywood romance set in an army barracks in the build up to the Pearl Harbor bombing.

Apparently the movie is very diluted from James Joyce's source novel, with the foul language, violence and sex removed for something a little more soap opera-esque, but the movie still works incredibly well without resorting to turning the air blue.

Montgomery Clift is a new recruit transferred to the Hawaiian barracks, unfairly treated because he refuses to participate in the company boxing team. He does however, strike a friendship with wisecracking Italian Private Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra) and falls in love with 'nightclub hostess' Alma (Donna Reed).

Meanwhile, senior officer Burt Lancaster begins an affair with his superior officers wife (Deborah Kerr) and they deliver one of the most iconic movie kisses of all time (the infamous beach scene).

Although quite wishy-washy in parts, the movie comes alive in scenes with Clift & Sinatra.

It's your archetypal Hollywood melodrama with routine flagwaving, but I fully understand why it's deemed a classic.

To think that Michael Bay tried to emulate this with 2001's Pearl Harbor (qv) is quite laughable.

10/10