Best Picture Winner: 1953

From Here to Eternity (1953)

A few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) arrives at his new station in Hawaii and immediately runs into problems. His captain (Philip Ober) wants him to box but Prewitt refuses, making him an object of harassment for the rest of the boxing team. Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), the second in command, doesn’t seem to care for “Prew” and his lone wolf attitude. Prew does find a friend in the happy-go-lucky Private Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra). When Maggio takes Prew with him to a social club, Prew meets and falls for Lorene (Donna Reed). Meanwhile, Warden starts an affair with the captain’s wife Karen (Deborah Kerr).

From Here to Eternity is an unexpectedly powerful film, unexpectedly because, on paper, the plot sounds like a traditional soap opera. But because of the strong cast, and because the film explores such various themes such as individualism versus group (Prew doesn’t want to box even though it may lead the company to victory, Warden resists becoming an officer), bigotry (Maggio encounters prejudice from the sergeant in charge of the stockade), and class discrimination (Lorene is saving money so she can return home and marry someone “proper”), the film becomes much more than simply a few soldiers and their love lives. And because we the audience know that the attack is coming, we are aware that the days of certain characters may be numbered. When the attack does come, it’s as compelling a sequence as in any film about the horrors of war.

The cast is exceptional. Sinatra and Reed won Oscars for their performances, while Kerr, Lancaster and Clift were nominated. Under Fred Zinnemann’s sure direction, all are utterly convincing in their roles, none are caricatures. The now classic scene of Lancaster and Kerr on the beach (as the waves sweep in and “consume” the lovers) remains one of the best visualizations of passion in the cinema. This moment will be hauntingly paralleled later when the Japanese bombers sweep over the military base claiming the lives of several soldiers.

The film ultimately poses several troubling questions once we know certain characters’ fates. Did Prew make the right decision, or should he have given in to Holmes’ request? What was Lorene’s motivation for the story she tells Karen on the boat, or was she repeating something Warden told her? From Here to Eternity is one of those rare films where we’d like to know how the characters’ lives turned out: did Karen and Lorene find happiness back in the States, what was Warden’s role in World War II and did he survive? Some movies leave our senses as soon as the film is over. From Here to Eternity leaves us wanting to know more.