"FROM HERE TO ETERNITY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 5

"FROM HERE TO ETERNITY"

Sir,-Critics are born to disagree. May I outline a few differences of opinion occasioned by reading the Listener review of the film From Here to Eternity? Prejudices apart, Frank Sinatra as Private Maggio nearly steals the show, A very live piece of "natural" acting which no directing could destroy. No one has died better in pictures for years. Deborah Kerr, now the conventional glamour-faced Hollywood doll, is far less adequate. Neither in the kitchen scene nor in the beach scene does she achieve that tension that the script demanded the acting should supply. Lancaster? On the contrary, quite easy to understand if the filmgoer has been in the army. An adequate portrayal of a type every soldier knows. The story? Sadism (it appeals to the masses) is overdone. A "Rock College"

sergeant getting away (apparently for years) with brutal personal assault; an ambitious company commander absenting himself from duties while his top sergeant does éverything in his name; a "lone wolf" subjected to unlimited persecution, and refusing to appeal over his superiors’ heads because it would afford them too much satisfaction (satisfaction to an ambitious company commander.) -all these in one drama strain too heave ify one’s credulity. Why, in the end, is justice done and villainy punished? Because previous over-emphasis demands compensation. Result-an army, I would guess, as unlike the American army as Hollywood is unlike America. Fair, yes. But no finer than fair.

A. B.

GORDON

(Wellington).