FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 17

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

(Columbia) C ton f to us with a reputation for sex and sadism comparable with A Streetcar Named Desire, the James Jones story of U.S. army life before Pearl Harbour turns out to have rather more sadism than sex-of the kind, that is, which filmgoers are likely to find "exciting." Some of the milder forms of sadism, it’s true, seemed slightly to amuse the audience the night I saw the film, but there was no doubt about their feelings after the first few reels. By the time Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) was ready to engage one of his tormentors in a vicious slugging match they were right there beside him getting a vicarious taste of blood, and some were clearly disappointed when Prew’s fight to the death with the brutal "stockade" sergeant took place out of sight-a much more effective piece of cinema. I’m sure, on the other hand, there were few broken blood vessels over

the much-publicised love scene in the surf-but then the big bait in a trailer often turns out that way when seen in its context. The sadists in From Here to Eternity are a group of non-commissioned officers happily carrying out the orders of their com-

pany Gesture Tan eee er Ee Captain Holmes, to give Prewitt, a former boxer, "the treatment" because he won’t join the company boxing team. The other people who matter are Alma (Donna Reed), with whom Prew falls in love at a "club" which soldiers attend for the company of girls; a friend, Private Maggio (Frank Sinatra); and Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) and the captain’s wife, Karen (Deborah Kerr), who have a love affair. All these parts are put across well, and there is some acting of surprising "intensity from Miss Kerr, who smoulders unceasingly as a disappointed wife hungry for love, and Mr. Sinatra, as a wild young Italian who carries off the best fs several drinking scenes before he becomes a victim of brutality in the "stockade." ‘ This is a film about the worst aspects of army life, and I think the story would have been truer to itself if it hadn’t tried to suggest that in the end justice is done and the villains punished. The other thing that troubled me was the Pearl Harbour sequence which I thought too long for its part in the story-I was impatient to get back to the people that the film was really about. Apart from that Fred Zinnemann has selected and arranged his material with the great skill we expect of him. Prewitt and Warden are interesting studies of men who love the armyPrewitt in a way that allows it to crucify him because with unquenchable spirit he is determined to go his own way. Warden is less easy to understand; and neither is as interesting as the two women, each seeking in a man’s world something she may never find-Alma

looking for a "proper" man_ because "when you're proper you're safe;" and Karen looking for. love-the kind that Warden is willing for a time to give her -in countless brief affairs. In a firstclass script by Daniel Taradash no lines are more effective and economical than some they are given to say.