Overlooked Movies: From Here to Eternity

Overlooked?  A movie that won best picture and whose director also got an Oscar?  A movie with two Oscar-winning performances and a couple of other nominees?  I think so, in the same way that James Jones, the author of the novel it's based on is pretty much forgotten today.  Jones was really big in the '50s, though, and so were movies based on his novels.  Especially this one.  Probably anybody around me age remembers seeing From Here to Eternity in the theater and remembers especially the beach scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, one of the most famous and most parodied movie scenes of the era.

There's a lot more to the movie than that, though.  Montgomery Clift is Prewitt, who falls for a prostitute (Donna Reed). Ernest Borgnine is vicious bully who has it in for Maggio (Frank Sinatra, who won an Oscar).  Prewitt's a boxer who refuses to box for reasons of his own, though his commanding officer schemes to get him back in the ring.  All this happens in the days just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurs near the end of the film.

Like Some Came Running, this movie tells you a lot about the attitudes of the 1950s.  In some ways, it's almost a quintessential movie of its era.  If you haven't seen it, give it a shot.  For us old folks, it's a shot of nostalgia that's hard to beat.  For the whippersnappers, it's a time capsule that brings the '50s to life (even if it's set in the '40s).