From Here to Eternity

I really enjoyed this film. Frank Sinatra walked away with the Oscar, but I thought Montgomery Clift's performance was the standout. I know they weren't competing against one another, but if any actor were to win an Oscar I would have preferred Clift. Lancaster and Kerr gave the other great performances. I liked the interaction between Clift's and Lancaster's characters, particularly in the scene when Lancaster is telling Clift he could avoid fatigue duties 'if he were smart'. Clift replies 'Yeah, but I ain't smart', and Lancaster says 'I know, I know but if you were...' I thought the best parts of this film came from the great acting of Kerr, Lancaster and Clift. It may suffer from being called a classic, making people's expectations high, but I thought it was very enjoyable.

Fred Zinnemann's epic about the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, featuring excellent performances from young Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed, a knockout role for Sinatra, and that roll in the surf for Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. From Here to Eternity is a potboiler which wears its heart on its sleeve. Would it have been the same with Joan Crawford instead of Kerr? Hard to say. I think the heart of the film is Clift, who gives perhaps his career best as ex-boxer Prewitt, the sensitive bugle player fighting his demons. Lancaster is a close second, a hard-boiled officer with no time for love. One of the best of the 50s, and well worth watching.

"From Here To Eternity" takes place right before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus, it's really not a war movie. Actually its more of a soap opera with Burt Lancaster putting the make on Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra having a fight with Ernest Borgnine and Montgomery Clift having a tryst with Donna Reed, which brings me to the element of the movie that I really liked: Donna Reed's character. In the movie Donna Reed plays a prostitute who wants to earn enough money to go home, but by the end of the movie circumstances have transformed her from cynical prostitute to fiancé and bereaved victim who has lost her man, and for whom things would never be the same. To me, this is what a good movie is all about - powerful and compelling character development within the context of a story that is credible and makes sense.

... from what we feed on these days and perhaps only of relevance as an artefact of the time it was released and the period it reflects, the way we behave and interact in the real world has changed unrecognisably since. It does, however, deliver us some top drawer performances from some genuinely talented performers, most of them to go on to much bigger and better things. All in all, a solid 1950s era film set in the prior decade before the outbreak of war, it uses multiple and interlinked sub plots to show us the sorrow and sadness experienced by numerous characters as a result of the choices they've made, the people they met and how they interacted.