From Here to Eternity

If you've never seen From Here to Eternity (1953), you've probably at least seen that image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr pawing at each other on the beach (either the real thing or a parody of it). Their torrid love affair isn't really the most interesting thing about the film, however, and at times the movie seems to forget about that romance altogether. From Here to Eternity is essentially an army soap opera, set in Hawaii in 1941. I'm sure you can guess what major historical event the movie is leading up to. Until the big showdown at Pearl Harbor, Eternity--which was adapted from the James Jones novel by Daniel Taradash and directed by Fred Zinneman--is about two soldiers and their struggle against the machinery of the army and civilization: Lancaster plays a sergeant who's trying to move up in the military world by doing what's expected of him (and pulling the strings by proxy when he can). The trouble for him begins when he starts sleeping with the corruptible captain's wife. She's played with pouty sumptuousness by Deborah Kerr. Montgomery Clift is the other soldier, the loner-cum-rebel Robert E. Lee Prewitt, whose claims to fame in the army are his top notch bugle and boxing skills. (He shows off his bugle talents in an amusing scene in a night club, and then later when he plays "Taps" to try and tug at our patriotic heart-strings.)

Fortunately, there's no actual boxing in this movie, or I might have turned it off. But there are a few fight scenes, all of them involving Montgomery Clift, who seems too small to actually defeat any of the gorillas he's up against. Despite all the scuffles, Prewitt refuses to participate in any organized fighting, much to the chagrin of his superior, who proceeds to make his life a living hell. Prewitt befriends an amiable private played by Frank Sinatra and falls in love with a girl (Donna Reed) he meets at a gentleman's club. Even though Montgomery Clift's performance is striking, it's never completely clear why someone so fiercely independent as his character would want to join the army in the first place. One can accept Lancaster's rule-following sergeant much more easily.

Eternity juggles more stories than it seems able to, but the finale is exciting and the film still holds up: the actors are all generally interesting, and the presumably steamy aspects of the Jones novel seem to at least have gotten through here via dialogue (and that famous beach make-out scene), even if it's pretty tame by today's standards. The supporting cast includes Philip Ober (as the disreputable captain), Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Warden.

Red River

400th review

It's somewhat mystifying to me that so many people have found something to love in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), a Western about power and immortality and cattle. It's not a terrible movie, but it's also not a particularly captivating one either. John Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, a rancher who has the land and the cattle, but not the money. After ten years of slaving away in the Texas desert, he decides to move his 9000-head herd 1000 miles to Missouri, where there's a purported cattle market waiting to be sated. He takes his adoptive son Matt (Montgomery Clift) and a team of men that includes the reliably and amusingly grumbling, bitchy Walter Brennan and the suspicious-looking John Ireland along with him.

It's entirely too repetitive, full of scenes of the cattle that apparently cost a bundle (and led to the budget's astronomical increase). However, the performances are good, and somewhat bolster what I would call a lackluster Western. John Wayne is extremely interesting when he's conflicted, and he's extremely conflicted in Red River, especially when he becomes blinded by his power and suspicious of his progeny, the always interesting Montgomery Clift, who then takes over as the group's new leader. Clift always seems to have more going on in his head than is available to us on the screen, which is perhaps what makes him such a fascinating if sometimes aloof performer to watch. And it's never a completely lost cause when you get to see Monty Clift bitch-slap somebody.

There's also a surprising amount of sexually suggestive dialogue. The film's gay subtext has been discussed in detail ad nauseum, and it's certainly not for nothing that people reference this film when they talk about how Hollywood screenwriters and filmmakers cleverly got around the stuffy conservatism of the Production Code. But when it comes to Howard Hawks movies, I'm still in love with The Big Sleep, and when it comes to Hawks westerns, Rio Bravo. Red River seems overrated. It lumbers along for over an hour with little to hold one's interest (except for a well-staged and exciting scene involving an Indian attack and another involving the aforementioned stampede). But watching cows march from Point A to Point B for over two hours gets dull after a while, and the problems between the men are only partly arresting.

With Joanne Dru (an admittedly arresting Howard Hawks heroine if ever there was one), Harry Carey, Hank Worden, and Paul Fix.

Suddenly, Last Summer

How could you not love a movie like Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)? It's a delightfully over-the-top Southern family drama from the mind of Tennessee Williams, in which Elizabeth Taylor plays a troubled woman whose dotty millionaire aunt (Katharine Hepburn) wants a prominent surgeon (Montgomery Clift) to perform a lobotomy on her. (Tennessee Williams's sister Rose was lobotomized and it was naturally a tragic moment in the life of the playwright, one which he fixates on in Suddenly, Last Summer.)

Aunt Violet (Hepburn) wants to put certain memories of her niece's to rest, particularly those about Violet's late son Sebastian, an eccentric poet with whom his mother had a bizarre, unhealthy, emotionally incestuous relationship. Sebastian's sexuality is the great big not-so-secret here: he used his mother and his cousin to procure young men for him. The film is of course somewhat coy about this, but only enough to avoid the moralistic but naturally insipid eyes of the Production Code that expurgated all of the Tennessee Williams adaptions at the time. (In Violet's house, we see lots of statues and portraits of muscly nude men in the background. And yet she was in complete denial!)

It's a satisfying bit of glossy trash that pushes all the right buttons, and once again proves how wonderful Taylor was at being campy but sympathetic. And of course, Hepburn flits around like an addle-headed butterfly, spouting her self-deceived monologues about her son as though we're supposed to believe she's the sane one. (But she is the one with the money, and she lures Clift's boss with a million-dollar-check, provided he can deliver the unpleasant surgical procedure.) Montgomery Clift gives a wooden performance, but he's not given much of a character here. His surgeon is just a device used to bring out the madness in the film's stronger characters. There's also cannibalism, and family quibbling, and a wonderful example of Hollywood's obsession with insane asylums. Madness never seemed so glamorous then with the raven-haired Elizabeth Taylor. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With Mercedes McCambridge, Albert Dekker, and Gary Raymond. 114 min. ★★★