Posted on: Friday, December 19, 2003
DVD REVIEW
'Eternity' looks better than ever
By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
Some motion pictures are born great, others achieve greatness over time, but only the truly exceptional have had it both ways. Rapturously received from the moment it was released in 1953, "From Here to Eternity" remains, half a century later, a singular cinematic experience, one of the landmarks of American film.
Based on a James Jones novel so adult it was thought unfilmable at the time, the film's story of Army life in Schofield Barracks just before Pearl Harbor transferred so well to the screen — complete with the scandalous Burt Lancaster/Deborah Kerr surfside love scene — that it became Columbia's highest-grossing movie.
"Eternity" was even more successful with the motion picture academy. The film had a whopping 13 Oscar nominations, including five acting nods, and it won in eight categories, including best picture, director for Fred Zinnemann, screenplay for Daniel Tara-dash, cinematography, editing and sound.
Mindful of this legacy, Columbia has gone back to original elements and done a splendid restoration of the production's tight 118 minutes.
But its pristine look is only part of "Eternity's" overpowering cumulative impact. Equally important are the impeccable acting and a multifaceted story that places complicated people in involving, adult situations.
In its willingness to show individuals trapped by their own natures as well as by circumstance, "Eternity" was unafraid of being melancholy or even downbeat in tone. Sparely written by Taradash and directed by Zinnemann with admirable dispassion, this is one of the few Hollywood films that can be both emotional and unsentimental, a combination that is as rare today — albeit for different reasons — as it was in the 1950s.
Though "Eternity" is rife with conflict, it's especially telling that what in many ways is the heart of this film is not a struggle.
Rather it's the simple contrast between two classic styles of masculinity, competing icons of male behavior represented by Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, both at the height of their power.
Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is the soul of sensitive, individualistic virility, someone who believes "A man who doesn't go his own way, he's nothing." Prewitt's an exceptional bugler who asked to be transferred to a different unit because he felt disrespected by his superiors. A former boxer who's sworn off the ring, Prewitt gets pressured by his fight-mad new company commander to put on the gloves one more time.
Lancaster's 1st Sgt. Milton Warden, familiarly known as "Top," is the man who really runs Prewitt's new unit for his absentee captain. If Clift represents introspection, Lancaster is all physicality and action, a model of take-charge, outwardly directed virility who is as hard as he is fair.
While he has no choice but to cooperate with the captain's schemes to break Prewitt and make him box, he doesn't have to like them.
Perhaps fittingly, though both Lancaster and Clift were nominated, their votes likely canceled each other out, and the best acting Oscar went to William Holden in "Stalag 17."
Men, the movies are forever telling us, have to do what men have to do, but rarely have the different choices they have about how to do it been as feelingly illuminated as they are here.
